Video: Kevin McCarthy condemns Marjorie Taylor Greene’s comparison of Covid-19 mask mandates to the Holocaust!

 

Dear Commons Community,

House Republican Kevin McCarthy yesterday condemned Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s comparison of Covid-19 mask mandates to the Holocaust.  It is about time that someone in the Republican Party’s leadership showed an ounce of guts in calling out this poor excuse of a congresswoman for her despicable remarks.   However, the fact that it took five days for the Republicans to denounce her is telling and an egregious failure to rein in its ultra right-wing.  The video above is of NBC’s Garrett Haake reporting from Capitol Hill.

Someone should ask Donald Trump of his opinion of Greene’s remarks.

Tony

New grand jury seated in New York for next stage of Trump investigation!

Manhattan D.A. Convenes Trump Grand Jury according to Washington Post report

Dear Commons Community,

The criminal investigation into Donald Trump and the Trump organization heated up yesterday as it was announced that New York prosecutors convened a special grand jury to consider evidence in the case. The development signals that the Manhattan district attorney’s office was moving toward seeking charges as a result of its two-year investigation, which included a lengthy legal battle to obtain Trump’s tax records.  As reported by The Washington Post and the Associated Press.

“Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. is conducting a wide-ranging investigation into a variety of matters such as hush-money payments paid to women on Trump’s behalf, property valuations and employee compensation.

The Democratic prosecutor has been using an investigative grand jury through the course of his probe to issue subpoenas and obtain documents. That panel kept working while other grand juries and court activities were shut down because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The investigation includes scrutiny of Trump’s relationship with his lenders; a land donation he made to qualify for an income tax deduction; and tax write-offs his company claimed on millions of dollars in consulting fees it paid.

The new grand jury could eventually be asked to consider returning indictments. While working on that case, it also will be hearing other matters. The Post reported that the grand jury will meet three days a week for six months.

Trump contends the investigation is a “witch hunt.”

“This is purely political, and an affront to the almost 75 million voters who supported me in the Presidential Election, and it’s being driven by highly partisan Democrat prosecutors,” Trump said in a statement.

Vance’s office declined to comment.

The new grand jury is the latest sign of increasing momentum in the criminal investigation into the Republican ex-president and his company, the Trump Organization.

Attorney General Letitia James said last week that she assigned two lawyers to work with Vance’s office on the probe after her civil investigation into Trump evolved into a criminal matter.

James, a Democrat, said her office also is continuing its civil investigation into Trump. She did not say what prompted her office to expand its investigation into a criminal probe.

In recent months, Vance hired former mafia prosecutor Mark Pomerantz to help run the investigation and has been interviewing witnesses, including Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen.

Vance declined to run for reelection and will leave office at the end of the year, meaning the Trump case is likely to pass to his successor in some form. An election next month is all but certain to determine who that will be.

Trump said in a statement last week that he’s being “unfairly attacked and abused by a corrupt political system.” He contends the investigations are part of a Democratic plot to silence his voters and block him from running for president again.

In February, the U.S. Supreme Court buoyed Vance’s investigation by clearing the way for the prosecutor to enforce a subpoena on Trump’s accounting firm and obtain eight years of tax returns and related documents for the former president, the Trump Organization and other Trump entities.

The documents are protected by grand jury secrecy rules and are not expected to be made public.

Vance’s investigation has appeared to focus in recent weeks on Trump’s longtime finance chief, Allen Weisselberg. His former daughter-in-law, Jen Weisselberg, is cooperating with both inquiries.

She’s given investigators reams of tax records and other documents as they look into whether some Trump employees were given off-the-books compensation, such as apartments or school tuition.

Allen Weisselberg was subpoenaed in James’ civil investigation and testified twice last year. His lawyer declined to comment when asked Tuesday if he had been subpoenaed to testify before the new grand jury.

A message seeking comment was left with Jen Weisselberg’s lawyer.”

Assuming that indictments follow, Trump and his attorneys will do everything possible to stall the case from coming to trial.  Allen Weisselberg will be the key witness in any deliberations.

Tony

Katherine Fleming Op-Ed:  How to build a Post-COVID U?

Katherine E. Fleming - Provost at New York University | The Org

Katerine Fleming

Dear Commons Community,

Katherine Fleming, the provost at New York University had an op-ed in yesterday’s New York Daily News, entitled, How to Build a Post-COVID U(niveristy).   She raises a number of important considerations including environmental concerns for the academy to take a look at what the post-pandemic normal will be.  She states:  “For those of us in higher education, the pandemic has forced us to reexamine what constitutes an effective research and learning environment. It should also force us to consider how, like Switzerland, higher education can lead in making a commitment to a dramatically reduced carbon footprint and in rethinking workplace norms for the long haul.”

Her entire op-ed is below and contains important commentary on what our colleges and universities can do in the coming months and years.

Tony

——————————————————-

The New York Daily News

How to build a Post-COVID U?

Katherine Fleming

May 24, 2021

Two years ago, I attended a conference that seemed pretty aggressive at the time in its commitment to sustainable practices. It was in Switzerland, a country that has pledged to become carbon neutral by 2050, and the commitment was visible everywhere. I remember many fellow American attendees commenting on the all-vegetarian menu, the reasonable portions, and the complete absence of anything disposable. Of course, most of us had flown — some great distances — to attend this conference, burning much fossil fuel in our wake.

But the event itself was striking in its adherence to environmental practices, visible in its every feature. Conference IDs were crafted of recycled cardboard and doubled as a weekend pass for all local public transportation. No one was handing out brochures. The lights in meeting rooms were dimmed when they weren’t in use. We ate off of non-disposable plates and drank water served from refillable glass pitchers. The thought of instituting practices like these at my own university seemed implausible and daunting. Back home it had taken me a full year and a virtual civil war in the office to banish disposable coffee pods.

Now, as we embark on 2021, the world is a very different place. The COVID-19 pandemic has brutally demonstrated that mass, rapid behavior change is possible. It has shown us that individuals and teams can often be as productive working and communicating digitally from remote locations as they can be gathered in the same physical office. That we can easily survive meetings without an endless supply of bad bagels, cookies and sandwich wraps to tide us over. That we don’t need to rely on disposable swag to get our “brand” across — in fact, we’d probably prefer that our brand not be associated with disposable swag at all.

For those of us in higher education, the pandemic has forced us to reexamine what constitutes an effective research and learning environment. It should also force us to consider how, like Switzerland, higher education can lead in making a commitment to a dramatically reduced carbon footprint and in rethinking workplace norms for the long haul.

Does every university employee require their own dedicated office space in a building located (in my institution’s case) in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the world? Do we all automatically require land-line phones at our desks, or would some of us be quite content to use our cell phones alone? And while I know researchers can benefit greatly from meeting up in person to present and discuss their findings, might there be other ways effectively to communicate knowledge as well?

In terms of teaching, it’s been made clear to me that both educators and students yearn to resume in-person classes, at least most of the time, but that the extent to which they need to be welded into seats or at lecterns differs depending on the course and the educator. Perhaps it’s time to look beyond the dichotomous “in-person” and “online” course categorizations and give students and educators the freedom to learn and teach more effectively and with greater accessibility.

These questions aren’t new, and my institution is far from alone in reconsidering them in the wake of pandemic. COVID-19 has been a nightmare for higher education, as it has for so many sectors. But it has forced radical change and proven that change doesn’t always take time. And when it comes to preserving the environment and reversing damage, we don’t have the luxury of time. If we can change our practices to evade a pandemic, surely we can change them to evade environmental ruination.

During COVID, NYU’s building operations have reduced carbon dioxide emissions by 6,400 metric tons. Air travel restrictions we put in place have saved 20,000 metric tons. Everyone is clamoring to “get back to normal.” But “normal” as it was may ultimately be no less deadly than is COVID-19.

The changes we made came about because we had no choice. But in reality, even absent COVID-19, we have no choice. We need to deliberately strategize about what we want our institutional lives to look like once we “get back to normal.” Higher education, one of the sectors most dramatically upended by the pandemic, must now take a lead in redefining what normal is, and capitalize on the disruption of the past year to drive change long-term. We need to provide our employees with greater flexibility in composing their work schedules, and to radically rethink our use of space and other resources.

COVID-19 has taken a lot away from our lives, but it has also forced us to make some changes that were long overdue. Those of us who seize this momentum can be part of a great realignment of the entire higher education sector. Those who ignore it will only be deferring an inevitable reckoning.

Video: NYC Mayor Bill DeBlasio Declares that All NYC public school classes will be completely in-person in September!   

Dear Commons Community,

Mayor Bill de Blasio yesterday declared that all New York City public school students will attend in-person classes in the fall after more than a year of fully or partly online attendance (see video above).

His announcement ended weeks of speculation about a possible virtual option for families who are still wary of sending their children back to the public schools — more than a year after the city’s one million students first shifted to remote learning as the coronavirus pandemic descended.

“New York City public schools — one million kids — will be back in their classroom in September, all in-person, no remote,” de Blasio said.  As reported by The New York Daily News and NBC News.

“The new details were a relief to many families and educators who have been craving the full return of in-person classes — and allow school administrators to begin planning for next fall in earnest after months of hazy details.

“I think today’s announcement was a big step in the right direction in terms of what principals have been waiting for to get started,” said Mark Cannizzaro, the head of the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators, the union representing city principals.

But the move also opens up thorny questions about how the roughly 60% of city families who are currently still remote will feel about returning their kids to school buildings in the fall — and what will happen if they refuse.

“If people want their kids to go to school, let them, but they can’t say no remote option, because some of us think differently,” said Davida LoSavio, the mother of a tenth-grader at the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan.

“Some of us are high risk, that vaccine is not a cure-all,” LoSavio said, noting that both she and her daughter have asthma, and neither feels comfortable yet taking the vaccine.

A recent survey found that about 65% of remote families were comfortable with the idea of sending their kids back to school buildings this fall, while 20% were on the fence and 15% said they’re unlikely to return their kids to in-person learning.

City officials say they’ll answer that skepticism with a blitz of events meant to build trust with skeptical families.

Schools chancellor Meisha Porter is in the midst of a series of town halls in each borough, and officials said schools will host “open houses” for remote families starting in June.

“We can’t live in the grip of COVID for the rest of our lives,” de Blasio said. “There’s four months between now and September. We’re going to keep showing the data, we’re going to keep showing people the health and safety measures, we’re going to invite people to come in.”

De Blasio had previously signaled that a remote option might be available, but on Monday he said that rapid drops in COVID-19 levels as vaccinations increased changed his thinking.

“It’s May, the data has been unbelievably clear, vaccination has worked ahead of schedule,” he said. “It’s a whole new day. It’s just a whole new reality and we’re ready.”

COVID numbers in the city have reached their lowest levels in months as the mayor pushes to get the city fully reopened by June. Just 0.16% of the students and teachers tested in city schools over the past week were positive for COVID-19.

Roughly 60% of city adults are at least partially vaccinated, and officials said “at least” half of city teachers are inoculated. Twenty-thousand 12-15 year-olds, out of roughly 500,000 overall, have gotten a shot since eligibility opened earlier this month. Officials have said they will not mandate the vaccine for DOE students or staff next year.

While city officials project confidence that they can persuade reluctant families to return to school buildings by September, some worried parents are adamant they won’t — and already thinking about backup plans if the in-person requirement stands.

Gwendolyn Livingstone, the mother of a fourth and eighth-grader at P.S./I.S. 178 in Brownsville, Brooklyn, said she will look into homeschooling her kids or try to find a charter school that offers a remote option if there’s no virtual school through the DOE.

The city’s largest charter school network, Success Academy, which has stayed fully remote since last March, will offer a virtual option to families through the first marking period of next school year.

“I don’t care what they [the DOE] try to do, that’s not going to make me comfortable,” Livingstone said about in-person school. “I think they should keep it as an option to the kids that don’t want to be inside of a building.”

City schools will continue requiring masks for students and staff in the fall. Asymptomatic testing will continue if health guidelines recommend it and the “situation room” that tracked positive cases and shut down schools and classrooms will stay in operation, though officials haven’t yet specified whether classrooms will still shutter if a positive case is identified.

The roughly 28% of city teachers who got medical accommodations to work remotely this year because of elevated COVID-19 risk will not get those accommodations in the fall.

City teachers union president Michael Mulgrew appeared to back the new plan, calling remote learning “no substitute for in-person instruction.”

“Educators want their students physically in front of them,” he added, but cautioned that for “a small number of students with extreme medical challenges…a remote option may still be necessary.”

City schools are currently keeping elementary-schoolers 3 feet apart in classrooms while middle and high school students maintain 6 feet of distance. Officials said they predict the Centers for Disease Control will loosen distancing guidelines for schools by the fall but say they can accommodate all students with 3 feet of distance even if some schools need to use “alternative space.”

“We would make that adjustment,” de Blasio said.

I think it a good move to re-open the schools but to require in-person classes of every child may produce some problems. There is a substantial number of parents who are leery of sending their children back to in-person instruction for medical, fear of vaccination, and other reasons.

Tony

 

Video: Ex-Defense Secretary Robert Gates Rips Distorted GOP for Playing a ‘Dangerous’ Political Game!

Robert Gates Interview on Face the Nation – His comments about the GOP come at about the 31 minute mark.

Dear Commons Community,

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who served in various capacities under five Republican presidents, said yesterday that the GOP is unrecognizable today and playing a “very dangerous” political game.

And that gives him “serious concerns about the future,” he revealed on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

Gates slammed Republican lawmakers’ complaints that the presidential election was rigged as nothing more than “political gaming rather than a real conviction that the election was stolen.” How that “manifests itself in the next election I think is going to be a challenge,” he told host John Dickerson. “It’s very dangerous.”

“I’ve … worked for eight presidents; five of them were Republicans,” he said. “I don’t think any of them would recognize the Republican Party today … the values and the principles that the Republican Party stood for under those five presidents are hard to find these days.” 

He called Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) “courageous” for standing up against her fellow Republicans’ baseless claims of a rigged election. “She’s a person of real integrity,” Gates said. “Internal politics on the Hill is another matter.”

Gates was defense secretary for both George W. Bush and Barack Obama. He was CIA director under George H.W. Bush, CIA deputy director for Ronald Reagan, and served on the National Security Council under Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon.

Gates said he is concerned about the conflicts over the election results and the Capitol riot. But he also fears the “racism that we see in our society” and the political “paralysis” gripping the nation making it impossible to evolve. It’s time to “actually get some things done in Washington that we hadn’t been able to get done for a long time,” Gates said. 

“We’re a flawed country, we’ve always had flaws,” he conceded. “But we’re unique in that we’re the only country that actually talks about those flaws and actually works to try and fix them. We are an aspirational country, and we’ve kind of lost that message, it seems to me,” Gates added.

Gates also addressed the current conflict between the Israeli government and the Palestinians. Despite Donald Trump’s repeated boast that his administration had achieved peace in the Middle East, Gates said he believes there’s “very little prospect of a peace between” the Israelis and the Palestinians at this point.

He said President Joe Biden’s low-key approach to the current conflict instead of being “front and center” was “probably not a bad thing.”

Gates added: “When the United States is out in front, it automatically creates lots of antibodies in a lot of different places. But if the U.S. is playing a constructive role behind the scenes, often it can be much more effective.”

Though Gates has criticized Biden in the past, he said he’s “encouraged” by how he’s handling the presidency.

We need more GOPers like Gates to speak their mind!

Tony

Democrat Val Demings Weighing a Run for Senate Against Marco Rubio!

Val Demings stresses police experience, personal history with racism as  vice presidential credentials - Orlando Sentinel

Val Demings

Dear Commons Community,

Democratic Congresswoman Val Demings of Florida plans to run for the U.S. Senate in a bid to unseat Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who is up for reelection in 2022, according to  Politico and NBC News.

Demings tweeted that she was “humbled at the encouraging messages” she’s received about her potential run but stopped short of announcing her campaign.

“I know the stakes are too high for Republicans to stand in the way of getting things done for Floridians, which is why I’m seriously considering a run for the Senate,” she continued. “Stay tuned.”

Demings, 64, had been weighing whether to enter the state’s gubernatorial race, but ultimately decided she could be most effective in the Senate, Politico reported, citing Democrats who are familiar with her thinking.

The congresswoman told MSNBC last month that she was “seriously considering” jumping into a race but wouldn’t say whether she was seeking the governorship or a seat in the Senate.

“I have received calls and texts and messages from people all over the state asking me to run because they feel that they are not represented and their voices are not heard,” Demings said at the time. “And I believe that every Floridian deserves to have representation regardless of the color of their skin, where they live, how much money they have in the bank, their sexual orientation or their religion.”

Democrats have been angling for a way to win over Rubio’s seat, but have struggled to find someone they think could take on the two-term senator.

Demings was first elected to the House in 2016 to represent Florida’s 10th Congressional District, which includes a large portion of Orlando. She was previously the city’s chief of police ― the first Black woman to hold that position. She gained national attention last year for her role in then-President Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial, in which she served on the House panel that charged him with misconduct.

It should be quite an election in Florida!

Good luck Ms. Demings! 

Tony

Anna Broadway:  Americans, It’s Time to Get Comfortable With Platonic Touch!

Dear Commons Community,

Anna Broadway, an author who is writing a book about the experience of being single in countries around the world, during which she spent more than a year traveling, conducting interviews and observing how people interact with each other, has a guest essay in today’s New York Times suggesting that as we come out of the isolation of the pandemic, we need “the many forms of nonsexual contact that once permeated daily life. Returning to normal offers not just a chance to resume hugs and handshakes, but also to ask if we should engage in more forms of touch with our friends and colleagues.”  Here is an excerpt.

“As I learned from 17 months of travel abroad before the pandemic, America has a narrow approach to touch. (I’d witnessed the difference on previous travel abroad, but a trip of this duration allowed me to also experience the difference firsthand.) As adults, our opportunities to touch each other are generally limited to a handshake when we meet someone for the first time, a quick hug greeting of a friend, and all the forms of touch two people in a romantic relationship exchange.

In other countries, touch is far freer. I interviewed Christian singles around the world, talking to more than 300 people in nearly 40 countries — all but a handful in person. In several of those places, I saw public touch between same-sex pairs that has almost no corollary in the United States.

In Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, this looked like two middle-aged men in suits holding arms as they hailed a cab. Men holding hands in India is common. In Seoul, South Korea, I saw students holding hands with their friends to show affection.

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Less often did I observe platonic touch between the sexes during my travels, but three different men in Tanzania held my hand, all in the context of crossing a busy street or otherwise helping ensure my safety. Each time, I reacted first as an American, whereby most adult touch implies sexual attraction, rather than care or solidarity. But as it continued to happen, my perception changed and gratitude bloomed. I might have spent more than a year as a stranger and outsider in the countries I visited, but each kind touch showed I was never really alone.

At times, I even felt more connected abroad than at home. As an unmarried 42-year-old, my touch deficit started well before the pandemic. For most of adulthood, I’ve lived far from family and even though I almost always had roommates, we rarely hugged.

Why should so many relationships yield deep intellectual and emotional bonds that we so rarely express in touch? Depending on when you think life begins, we spend nearly the first 10 months of life tethered to another human being — and every heartbeat depends on that tie. Even after birth, infants do best when they maintain near-constant touch with other humans. If early life depends on such connections, why do we find them so dispensable later?

And how do we exchange more caring touch in a world still recovering from a pandemic spread largely through contact with others?

Shortly before the pandemic started, I ended my travels with a move to Alaska to write. Though the local “hunker down” soon hampered my ability to build community, I’ve learned that I don’t need legions of people to feel connected. During my time on the road, I stayed with dozens of couples and families who made me feel at home in their city. So when I settled in Anchorage, I sought similar housing, eventually ending up with a young family of five who also valued living in community. Between living with them, finding a few walk buddies and maintaining one friendship in which we never stopped hugging, I feel pretty content most weeks. Having fewer relationships allows me to invest more deeply and consistently in others, while limiting the possible spread of infection.

Touch within my relationships varies with each person’s comfort level. Almost from our first meeting, my youngest housemate (now nearly 3) took a liking to me and has become one of the most physically affectionate people in my life. Her mother and I hug mostly when we sense the other needs comfort. When vaccination brought up her fear of needles, we got both our shots together so she could hold my hand for the jab.

Returning to — and expanding — touch may feel weird at first. And we’ll need to be sure to ask each other, “Are you OK with this?” To find the right balance, we could learn from both the youngest and the oldest around us. One of my favorite parts about living with young children is how freely they can show delight when a loved one arrives. When you’re not even family, it feels amazing to see a child light up at your presence.

With adults, that might look like a greeting I got at pickleball recently, from a semiretired friend whom I’d not seen in several months. “I’m vaccinated!” he cried. “Are you vaccinated?” As soon as I nodded, he grabbed me for a bear hug and kissed my neck (before doing so a second time later, he asked if I was OK with the hug).

As this pandemic has painfully shown us, none of us lives and breathes apart from others. With masks, we’ve rightly sought to limit our bodies’ potential to harm. But post-pandemic, we need to recover our bodies’ capacity to comfort, help and heal each other.”

While I don’t know if we are read for it, I like what Ms. Broadway is saying!

Tony

CNN Cuts Ties with Conservative Contributor Rick Santorum over Native American Comments!

Rick Santorum
Dear Commons Community,

CNN is parting ways with contributor Rick Santorum, the former Republican Senator and presidential candidate who came under fire for remarks he made in April about Native American culture.

Speaking to an audience last month at an event organized by Young America’s Foundation, Santorum suggested Native American people had little influence on U.S. culture. “We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here,” he told a gathering of students. “I mean, yes, we have Native Americans, but candidly, there isn’t much Native American culture in American culture.”

The comments drew criticism from groups like the National Congress of American Indians. Santorum didn’t help matters when he appeared on CNN’s “Cuomo Prime Time” and declined to apologize for the remarks or how they were interpreted, simply telling the anchor they were taken out of context. CNN confirmed a previous report in The Huffington Post revealing that the politician and the network were cutting ties. Santorum was first named a CNN contributor in 2017.  As reported by Variety

“He is the latest in a parade of conservative commentators and analysts to run aground at CNN. Under Jeff Zucker, president of CNN Worldwide, the WarnerMedia-backed news outlet has relied heavily on the use of segments featuring Republicans and supporters of the former Trump administration, who often serve to provide balance for analysis and commentary that strives to play in the center but sometimes tilts left of it.

But these analysts and contributors often draw outsize scrutiny via their behavior when they are not appearing on the network. CNN in September cut ties with Trump adviser Jason Miller after he came under legal scrutiny in September of 2018. One month earlier, CNN suspended Paris Dennard, a strong defender of Trump decisions, after The Washington Post reported Dennard had been fired from a job at Arizona State University for what the paper called “inappropriate incidents” involving two women there. Ed Martin, a former Missouri Republican Party chairman who also hosts a radio show, offered outspoken pro-Trump commentary on CNN for several months before parting ways after describing some African-American members of a CNN panel in which he was included as “black racists.” And of course, CNN cut ties with one of its most polarizing and well-known Trump backers, Jeffrey Lord, after he used the phrase “Sieg heil!” on Twitter.

Earlier this week, CNN cut ties with a freelance contributor, Adeel Raja, after it was determined he had posted several tweets that expressed anti-Semitic remarks.

Executives at CNN were not pleased with Santorum’s recent primetime appearance on the Cuomo program, according to a person familiar with the matter. Rather than put the debate to rest, these executives felt, Santorum exacerbated the issue, making the prospect of booking him for appearances a difficult one for anchors and producers. With the contributor unlikely to make appearances in the near future, CNN decided to cut ties. Earlier this month, CNN anchor Don Lemon seemed to capture the mood of employees at the network when he chastised Cuomo on air for having Santorum appear. “I cannot believe the first words out of his mouth weren’t ‘I’m sorry, I said something ignorant, I need to learn about the history of this country.’ No contrition!” said Lemon.

Santorum has enjoyed a key role with CNN over the last several years. He is often featured as part of a panel of Washington analysts that can include Van Jones and Gloria Borger. Santorum is typically called upon to explain thinking on Republican policy moves and the goings-on of the Trump White House.

The controversy around Santorum is one of a number of imbroglios the network is juggling. CNN has declined to discipline Chris Cuomo, its most-watched anchor, after a Washington Post report revealed he had aided his brother, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, and staff as they grappled with scrutiny around allegations by various women of unwanted behavior. And CNN recently acknowledged that the Department of Justice under President Trump clandestinely obtained records of emails and phone calls from 2017 of Barbara Starr, the network’s longtime Pentagon correspondent.”

Things are getting messy in CNN land!

Tony

Michelle Goldberg:  Was Mother Teresa a Cult Leader!

Mother Teresa - IMDb

Dear Commons Community,

Michelle Goldberg has a column this morning questioning the saintliness of Mother Teresa. Entitled, Was Mother Teresa a Cult Leader? the column is sure to rankled many in the Catholic Church especially since Ms. Goldberg is such a respected journalist. 

Below is the entire piece.

It is disturbing to say the least.

Tony

 ——————————————————————————-

The New York Times

Was Mother Teresa a Cult Leader?

May 21, 2021

By Michelle Goldberg

Opinion Columnist

During the Trump years, there was a small boom in documentaries about cults. At least two TV series and a podcast were made about Nxivm, an organization that was half multilevel marketing scheme, half sex abuse cabal. “Wild Wild Country,” a six-part series about Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh’s compound in Oregon, was released on Netflix. Heaven’s Gate was the subject of a four-part series on HBO Max and a 10-part podcast. Indeed, there have been so many recent podcasts about cults that sites like Oprah Daily have published listicles about the best ones.

In many ways the compelling new podcast “The Turning: The Sisters Who Left,” which debuted on Tuesday, unfolds like one of these shows. It opens with a woman, Mary Johnson, hoping to escape the religious order in which she lives. “We always went out two by two. We were never allowed just to walk out and do something,” she explains. “So I wouldn’t have been able to go, you know, more than five or six paces before somebody ran up to me and said, ‘Where are you going?’”

Johnson sees an opportunity in escorting another woman to the hospital, where there’s a room full of old clothes that patients have left behind. She makes a plan to shed her religious uniform for civilian garb and flee, though she doesn’t go through with it.

It is what she wants to flee that makes “The Turning” so fascinating. Johnson spent 20 years in Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity before leaving through official channels in 1997. “The Turning” portrays the order of the sainted nun — Mother Teresa was canonized in 2016 — as a hive of psychological abuse and coercion. It raises the question of whether the difference between a strict monastic community and a cult lies simply in the social acceptability of the operative faith.

“The Missionaries of Charity, very much, in so many ways, carried the characteristics of those groups that we easily recognize as cults,” Johnson told me. “But because it comes out of the Catholic Church and is so strongly identified with the Catholic Church, which on the whole is a religion and not a cult, people tend immediately to assume that ‘cult’ doesn’t apply here.”

“The Turning” is far from the first work of journalism to question Mother Teresa’s hallowed reputation. Christopher Hitchens excoriated her as “a demagogue, an obscurantist and a servant of earthly powers,” in his 1995 book “The Missionary Position.” (Along with the writer and filmmaker Tariq Ali, Hitchens collaborated on a short documentary about Mother Teresa titled “Hell’s Angel.”) A Calcutta-born physician named Aroup Chatterjee made a second career lambasting the cruelty and filth in the homes for the poor that Mother Teresa ran in his city.

They and other critics argued that Mother Teresa fetishized suffering rather than sought to alleviate it. Chatterjee described children tied to beds in a Missionaries of Charity orphanage and patients in its Home for the Dying given nothing but aspirin for their pain. “He and others said that Mother Teresa took her adherence to frugality and simplicity in her work to extremes, allowing practices like the reuse of hypodermic needles and tolerating primitive facilities that required patients to defecate in front of one another,” The New York Times reported. (Hygiene practices reportedly improved after Mother Teresa’s death, and Chatterjee told The Times that the reuse of needles was eliminated.)

What makes “The Turning” unique is its focus on the internal life of the Missionaries of Charity. The former sisters describe an obsession with chastity so intense that any physical human contact or friendship was prohibited; according to Johnson, Mother Teresa even told them not to touch the babies they cared for more than necessary. They were expected to flog themselves regularly — a practice called “the discipline” — and were allowed to leave to visit their families only once every 10 years.

A former Missionaries of Charity nun named Colette Livermore recalled being denied permission to visit her brother in the hospital, even though he was thought to be dying. “I wanted to go home, but you see, I had no money, and my hair was completely shaved — not that that would have stopped me. I didn’t have any regular clothes,” she said. “It’s just strange how completely cut off you are from your family.” Speaking of her experience, she used the term “brainwashing.”

“I didn’t bring up the word ‘cult,’” Erika Lantz, the podcast’s host, told me. “Some of the former sisters did.” This doesn’t mean their views of Mother Teresa or the Missionaries of the Charity are universally negative. Their feelings about the woman they once glorified and the movement they gave years of their lives to are complex, and the podcast is more melancholy than bitter.

“I still have a great deal of affection for the women who are there, as well as the women who have left, some obviously more than others,” Johnson told me. “But the group as a whole, it just makes me really, really, really sad to see how far they’ve strayed from Mother Teresa’s initial impulse.” Mother Teresa famously used to say, “Let’s do something beautiful for God.” That, said Johnson, “was kind of the spirit of the initial thing. And it got so twisted over the years.”

Not all these stories are new; Johnson and Livermore have written memoirs. But we have a new context for them. There is the surge of interest in cults, likely driven by the fact that for four years America was run by a sociopathic con man with a dark magnetism who enveloped a huge part of the country in a dangerous alternative reality. And there’s a broader drive in American culture to expose iniquitous power relations and re-evaluate revered historical figures. Viewed through a contemporary, secular lens, a community built around a charismatic founder and dedicated to the lionization of suffering and the annihilation of female selfhood doesn’t seem blessed and ethereal. It seems sinister.

One sister quotes Mother Teresa saying, “Love, to be real, has to hurt.” If you heard the same words from any other guru, you’d know where the story was going.

 

Bill Gates:  Image in Trouble!

Bill Gates Net Worth | Celebrity Net Worth

Dear Commons Community,

For decades, Bill Gates traveled the globe as near-royalty, knighted by Queen Elizabeth and draped in medals by President Barack Obama. And for the last year, the Microsoft founder has reinvented himself as one of America’s clearest, most humane voices on the Covid-19 pandemic.

Bill Gates is now mired in deep scandal.  The aura that he built over the past decades may be permanently shattered.  As reported by Vox Recode.

The divorce of Gates and his wife, Melinda, was announced earlier this month but has devolved into a tabloid melodrama featuring secret boardroom investigations, hushed affairs, and the likes of Jeffrey Epstein. Gates was pummeled in a trio of stories last weekend weekend that detailed his alleged indiscretions, each of which began to shatter the image that he has cultivated.

Ever since stepping back from Microsoft, Gates has grown to epitomize what might be considered the “Good Billionaire”: a civic-minded, awkward geek who showed how capitalism’s winnings can be marshaled to make the world a better place through philanthropy. No donor was more important in the world than Bill Gates, who, along with his wife, had grown to symbolize something in short supply in corporate America: role models.

And the polling reflected that: 55 percent of Americans told Recode in a survey this year that they had a positive opinion of him; only 35 percent felt the opposite.

But Gates’s world has now come crashing down with incredible speed.

To recap: Gates has apologized and been dogged for over a year by his connections to Epstein, the convicted sex offender who eventually killed himself in federal custody. But Gates is now accused of having vastly underplayed his ties to the ignominious criminal, according to one report. A second report shows a pattern of Gates acting unprofessionally around women he worked with — and handling a sexual harassment allegation against his money manager in a way that upset Melinda. And in the perhaps most damaging revelation, Gates now admits that he had an affair with an employee at Microsoft back in 2000, which triggered an investigation by the tech giant’s board of directors in 2019, a third report says.

Gates’s team denies many of these allegations. But they are sure to capture some mindshare with the American public, piercing the reputation that Gates has worked so long to cultivate. And there’s little reason to think that the last shoe has dropped in a record-setting divorce proceeding that is trending toward ugly.

Will people look at Bill Gates with the same fondness ever again?

What two weeks ago was merely a marriage that had sadly petered out has spiraled into something nastier. Gates will be shrouded in questions for the foreseeable future about his romantic life — to say nothing about the uncomfortable pecuniary and legal questions about the future of his fortune.

People do recover from scandal, especially in this news and political environment. Gates will surely have his own side of the story to tell, and the Gates Foundation will still exist, giving him wide influence over the next few decades. But more than other philanthropists, much of Gates’s soft power came from his seemingly unimpeachable public profile, which will now be more than a little tarred by the worst kind of attention.

Even if this is relegated to a rough news cycle or two in the long sweep of history, the short-term consequences are profound given where we are in that history. Gates should be at the forefront of the humanitarian crisis in India, for instance, speaking out about the massive death tolls. (He’s instead drawn controversy for his support of vaccine patent protections.) Now he is on the defensive, and any next interviewer will understandably want to ask at least in part about his private life, depleting the power of his commentary on public health.

This should be a validating moment for Bill Gates, as much as the last year has been. Instead, he will likely be silent, legalistic, and, more broadly, on his back foot.”

Tony

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