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Please Tell Us Why These Movie Stars Are Paid Less Than Men

by DollieBrigstock Posted on December 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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In early December, Emmy Rossum became the latest actress to demand the appropriate pay for her work. Rossum, who plays the feisty Fiona Gallagher on the hit Showtime series Shameless, asked for greater compensation than her co-star, William Macy, who has more experience but less screen time on the show. Variety reported that the studio offered Rossum pay equal to Macy’s, but that her team asked for more in order to compensate for her previous seven seasons of lower earnings.

Hollywood’s wage gap can’t compare with the wage gap affecting everyone else, particularly the working class and, to an even greater degree, women of color. But these movie stars show that no woman, regardless of her status, is completely exempt from gender-based disparity in pay. A report released by Forbes earlier this year reviewing Hollywood salaries found that the nation’s top actresses collectively are paid less than half of what their male counterparts earn. Top-earning actress Jennifer Lawrence was paid $46 million from June 2015 to June 2016. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, America’s top-earning actor, was paid $64.5 million. Melissa McCarthy, the runner-up for the top female earner, earned $33 million, compared with Jackie Chan’s $61 million.

Some leading ladies have spoken out about the wage gap and how they handle it. Here’s what they have to say:

Felicity Jones: The female lead for the latest installment in the Star Wars universe negotiated a seven-figure salary for her role in Rogue One. Diego Luna and Ben Mendelsohn, the male leads in the blockbuster, earned six figures. “I want to be paid fairly for the work I’m doing,” Jones said in an interview with Glamour. “That’s what every single woman around the world wants.”

Robin Wright: During an event called “Insight Dialogues,” billed as a series of conversations with thought leaders and activists hosted by the Rockefeller Foundation in New York, Wright said she had recently demanded pay equal to that of co-star Kevin Spacey on the Netflix political drama House of Cards. “I was looking at statistics and Claire Underwood’s character was more popular than Frank’s for a period of time,” Wright said. “So I capitalized on that moment. I was like, ‘You better pay me or I’m going to go public,’ and they did.”

Michelle Rodriguez: The Fast and Furious actress told TMZ she gets paid less than her colleagues. “It’s like, ‘Oh damn. Darn my luck. I wish I was born somewhere else or maybe some other way,'” she said. “That’s the world we live in, it’s a patriarchal society.”

Jennifer Lawrence: In an essay for Lenny Letter, Lawrence wrote about her frustration with the wage gap and, not surprisingly, the 26-year-old Hunger Games star did not mince words. “When the Sony hack happened and I found out how much less I was being paid than the lucky people with dicks, I didn’t get mad at Sony,” she wrote. “I got mad at myself. I failed as a negotiator because I gave up early.” Lawrence went on to describe how women have been socialized to not seem “difficult,” and how any hint of such behavior will garner negative responses from male colleagues. As of 2016, Lawrence is the world’s highest-paid actress.

Sharon Stone: Last year, the actress and producer told People that after her 1992 performance in Basic Instinct, she could not get the pay she knew she deserved. “I remember sitting in my kitchen with my manager and just crying and saying I’m not going to work until I get paid,” she said. “I still got paid so much less than any men.” She observed that eliminating the earning disparities has to start with “regular pay, not just for movie stars, but regular pay for regular women in the regular job.”

Rooney Mara: Perhaps best known for her jarring performance as the lead in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Mara told the Guardian about her own experience with the wage gap. “I’ve been in films where I’ve found out my male co-star got paid double what I got paid, and it’s just a reality of the time that we live in,” she said. “To me, it’s frustrating but, at the same time, I’m just grateful to be getting paid at all for what I do.”

Patricia Arquette: The Boyhood actress made headlines last year when she used her acceptance speech for Best Supporting Actress to speak out against the wage gap. She told Mother Jones that her fight goes far beyond Hollywood—Arquette has gone to the halls of Congress to lobby for the Equal Pay Act. “I don’t want the wage gap to be viewed as this myopic problem, because it’s not,” she said. “It’s in 98 percent of all businesses, and it’s easy for people to dismiss the conversation when they think it’s around white women entertainers. But this is about all women in America.”

Viola Davis: In an interview with Mashable, Viola Davis, who recently won an Emmy for her role on in How to Get Away With Murder, said the wage gap sends the wrong message to young women. “What are you telling your daughter when she grows up?” Davis asked. “‘You’ve got to understand that you’re a girl. You have a vagina, so that’s not as valuable.'” But the barriers are much harder to surmount for women of color. “The struggle for us as women of color is just to be seen the same as our white female counterparts.”

Rose McGowan: Last year, McGowan, best known for her roles in Charmed and Grindhouse, hijacked a bipartisan political gala in DC to take a stand against unequal pay. “And I would say to you: One, get out of my body; two, equal pay for women; three, integrate,” she shouted before storming out. She had not been invited to speak at the event. McGowan had been fired by her agent months earlier after her very public criticism of a casting call for an Adam Sandler film that called for actresses to wear pushup bras.

Gillian Anderson: Twice Anderson was offered less pay than her co-star David Duchoveny on The X-Files—first when the show aired in the ’90s, and again when they revived their roles for a new season in 2015. The second time, Anderson objected and reportedly won out in the end. The two actors were paid the same for the reboot.

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Please Tell Us Why These Movie Stars Are Paid Less Than Men

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Vladimir Putin Is a Happy Camper These Days

by FrankieKpg Posted on December 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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In his annual press conference, Vladimir Putin took a victory lap:

“Democrats are losing on every front and looking for people to blame everywhere,” Putin said in answer to a Russian TV host, one of 1,400 journalists accredited to the marathon session. “They need to learn to lose with dignity.”

….“Trump understood the mood of the people and kept going until the end, when nobody believed in him,” Putin said, adding with a grin. “Except for you and me.”

Putin has repeatedly denied involvement despite the accusations coming from the White House, and the Kremlin has repeatedly questioned the evidence for the U.S. claims. On Friday he borrowed from Trump’s dismissal of the accusations, remarking “maybe it was someone lying on the couch who did it.”

“And it’s not important who did the hacking, it’s important that the information that was revealed was true, that is important,” Putin said, referring to the emails that showed that party leaders had favored Hillary Clinton.

That last line is almost word-for-word what Republican apologists say. As near as I can tell, Putin is basically just admitting that Russia was behind the hacks and then smirking about it. He must be having a good old time these days. I wonder how Republicans are going to feel about this when Putin decides it’s time to get rid of Trump and help the other side?

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Vladimir Putin Is a Happy Camper These Days

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America’s Biggest Labor Group Has a Fascinating Relationship With Trump’s New Anti-China Staffer

by Tangela9738 Posted on December 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday, President-elect Donald Trump appointed economics professor and outspoken China critic Peter Navarro to a new White House position that will oversee trade and industrial policy. Navarro, a Trump campaign adviser, advocates a more adversarial approach to China, including a controversial 40-plus percent tariff on Chinese imports. He’s also the author of numerous books about what he sees as China’s existential threat to global order, including The Coming China Wars (one of Trump’s favorite China books.)

Navarro’s appointment was met with something akin to optimism by the country’s biggest labor organization. In a statement to Mother Jones Thursday, AFL-CIO spokesman Josh Goldstein said Navarro “has raised some important critiques of American trade policy and we look forward to working with him to translate that into real policies that benefit America’s workers.”

The 12.5 million-member federation of labor unions opposed Trump during the campaign, painting him as a fraud. “Look at what he does, not what he says,” warned AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka in June, labeling Trump the “king” of outsourced labor. “When you give working-class people the facts, I think Trump falls apart,” Trumka said in a March interview with the Washington Post. “He’s a house of cards.” The AFL-CIO actively campaigned for Hillary Clinton; in its endorsement of her, the union called Trump an “unstable charlatan who made his fortune scamming” working families.

The AFL-CIO even released a YouTube video using Navarro’s own words to attack Trump:

Navarro is a University of California-Irvine a professor of economics and public policy who became an economics adviser to Trump during the campaign. In October, The New Yorker referred to him as “Trump’s muse” on trade with China and said he was poised to become “the single most powerful economic adviser in the United States” should Trump win the presidency.

Navarro’s relationship with the AFL-CIO is a bit complicated. During the campaign, he routinely claimed that union workers in states like Ohio would line up behind the Republican real estate mogul, despite opposition from top brass at the labor group. “Donald Trump is going to run the table with organized labor and with non-union labor,” he told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews in June, arguing that union leaders had contradicted themselves by supporting Clinton. “AFL-CIO opposed China’s World Trade Organization entry,” he said. “AFL-CIO opposed the South Korea trade deal. Hillary Clinton supported all those.” (He was right: According to exit polls, 54 percent of Ohio voters from union households voted for Trump. In 2012, just 37 percent voted for Mitt Romney.)

But it wasn’t long ago when the AFL-CIO leadership was very much behind Navarro’s work. In 2012, the union group sponsored several screenings of Navarro’s film Death by China in towns across Ohio. The film is a polemic documentary, narrated by Martin Sheen of The West Wing, that traces the loss of American manufacturing jobs to the rise of China. In particular, Navarro points to China’s admission to the World Trade Organization in 2001 and to what he sees as dangerous concessions that US officials have made to a dictatorial, unaccountable country waging a trade war with America.

The film casts China as a trade cheat that uses currency manipulation, illegal export subsidies, intellectual property theft, poor worker safety, and lax environmental regulations to steal American jobs.

In a way, Navarro’s film foreshadowed the 2016 contest between Clinton and Trump—especially in the Rust Belt states of the upper Midwest. His goal at the time, however, was to make trade with China the No. 1 issue for Ohio voters in the 2012 election between Romney and President Barack Obama. “My view is that whoever wins Ohio will win the presidential race,” Navarro said in August 2012. “Our objective going into Ohio is to elevate the issue of trade reform with China to the top of the checklist of presidential campaign issues.” (Navarro did not respond to a request for comment.)

The film screenings may have been aimed at union members in the Rust Belt, but Navarro’s documentary attracted another a big fan, as well. “Death by China is right on,” Trump wrote in a short blurb for the film on its website. “This important documentary depicts our problem with China with facts, figures and insight. I urge you to see it.”

Trumka, the AFL-CIO president, actually appeared in the film, as a vocal critic of US-China trade policy. “This is an economy that has been made by policy choices, policy choices that really do benefit the rich and the multinationals,” he tells viewers. “Their interests no longer coincide with the interests of this country, so we have to do what’s best for this country.” (The film also features Rep. Tim Ryan, the Ohio Democrat who recently challenged Nancy Pelosi for the House minority leader post.)

Trump’s Navarro appointment comes as tensions between the United States and China appear to be ratcheting up. Earlier this month, the Chinese Defense Ministry confirmed photos showing the country had installed military weapons, including anti-aircraft guns, on contested islands in the South China Sea, something the Obama administration regards as an act of territorial aggression. In November, China flew a nuclear-capable bomber over the South China Sea, according to Fox News. That action came after Trump spoke with Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen, breaking decades of US protocol. Last week, China seized an unmanned underwater research drone from a US Navy operation near the Philippines, prompting strong protests from Washington. (China has since given it back, though Trump suggested on Twitter that China should keep it.)

Trump’s new trade staffer seems likely to raise the stakes. Navarro calls Taiwan a “beacon of democracy” and argues that the US should “stop sacrificing friends like Taiwan to placate what is increasingly morphing from a trading partner and strategic rival into a hostile enemy.” China, for its part, is cautiously weighing its response to the appointment, at least for the moment. But something more forceful might be just over the horizon, according to a Wall Street Journal interview with Gary Hufbauer, a former Treasury official and fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “Their objective will be to parry what Trump does with targeted reprisals in areas of US vulnerability,” he said. There are a number of potential ways in which China could use its own trade policies to impede Trump’s quest to make America great again, Hudbauer argues, including placing sanctions on American farm exports or canceling big deals with Boeing.

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America’s Biggest Labor Group Has a Fascinating Relationship With Trump’s New Anti-China Staffer

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Corey Lewandowski Opens Lobbying Shop to Cash in on Trump. Here’s What He Once Said About Lobbyists.

by WilhemiLandry Posted on December 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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In February, Corey Lewandowksi, who was then Donald Trump’s campaign manager, was interviewed by Trump’s future campaign chairman (and now senior White House adviser) Stephen Bannon about the role lobbyists play in Washington. Lewandowski’s response was unambiguous and venomous. Trump’s election, he declared, would mark the end of influence-peddling by political insiders. Here’s how he put it:

This is the fundamental problem with the ruling class in Washington, DC—the party bosses, the K Street crowd, the lobbyists who control all these politicians. They will do anything to maintain their power. They will do anything. They will say anything. They will spend whatever it takes because they know that if Donald Trump becomes the nominee and ultimately the president of the United States, the days of backroom deals are over. He will only be responsible to the American people. And so what you have is a series of people who’ve made a very, very good living by controlling politicians through their donations and making sure they get the legislation done—or not done—in Washington, DC to best benefit their clients. And those days are coming to an end.

But maybe not just yet.

On Wednesday morning, Lewandowski announced that he and another former Trump campaign veteran, Barry Bennett, are opening up a lobbying and political consulting firm in the swamp their ex-boss vowed to drain.

Without a hint of irony, the first sentence of Lewandowski’s press release points out that his offices will be just one block from the White House. He didn’t note that this is also one block from K Street, the ground zero of Washington influence-peddling, or Swamp Central. The next sentence touts Lewandowski’s close relationship with Trump. As in, we’re going to cash in on my insider connection to the guy in the White House.

For Lewandowski, this is actually a return to lobbying. As Mother Jones reported in March, Lewandowski was a registered lobbyist in the mid-2000s. In fact, Lewandowski lobbied for green energy subsidies. (One of his former clients told Mother Jones that Lewandowski was helpful to the funding of a publicly owned solar project in Massachusetts.) And he did this, as he headed up the New Hampshire chapter of government-bashing Americans for Prosperity.

It’s not clear if Lewandowski will once again register as a lobbyist. The firm’s announcement describes it as a full-service government relations and political consulting firm. But even if he sticks to the “consulting” side of things, his new gig might still make Trump campaign reunions awkward. On Tuesday, Kellyanne Conway, who led the Trump campaign in its final months, lashed out at Washington culture and “political consultants” in particular.

“Draining the swamp is not just about lobbying and politicians, it’s also about consultants,” Conway told conservative radio host Laura Ingraham, adding that she viewed political consultants as a “staff infection.” By the way, Conway has long been a political consultant.

This is the fundamental problem with the ruling class in Washington, D.C. – the party bosses, the K Street crowd, the lobbyists who control all these politicians. They will do anything to maintain their power. They will do anything. They will say anything.
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Corey Lewandowski Opens Lobbying Shop to Cash in on Trump. Here’s What He Once Said About Lobbyists.

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Meet the most pro-climate appointee Trump has made yet.

by EdisonAndronicu Posted on December 20, 2016

The administration announced Tuesday that President Obama will use a provision in the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to halt new offshore drilling in parts of federally owned Arctic and Atlantic waters — forever. While previous presidents have used that act to protect parts of the ocean, this is the first time it’s been exercised to enact a permanent ban on drilling. Canada will also indefinitely ban future drilling in its Arctic territory, the country said in the joint announcement.

The announcement came four weeks shy of Obama’s White House departure. President-elect Trump, a climate change denier, has vowed to undo many of Obama’s executive orders as well as dismantle the Clean Power Plan, open more federal lands to drilling, and withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord.

But by using an existing act instead of issuing an executive order, Obama made the reversal of this drilling ban more difficult for his successor.

“We know now, more clearly than ever, that a Trump presidency will mean more fossil fuel corruption and less governmental protection for people and the planet, so decisions like these are crucial,” said Greenpeace spokesperson Travis Nichols. “President Obama should do this and more to stop any new fossil fuel infrastructure that would lock in the worst effects of climate change.”

This story has been updated. 

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Meet the most pro-climate appointee Trump has made yet.

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Donald Trump’s Mafia Approach to Governing Has Officially Started

by BlairMullah Posted on December 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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Judd Legum of ThinkProgress reports that “members of the Trump Organization” pressured the government of Kuwait to switch their annual National Day celebration from the Four Seasons to the Trump International:

In the early fall, the Kuwaiti Embassy signed a contract with the Four Seasons. But after the election, members of the Trump Organization contacted the Ambassador of Kuwait, Salem Al-Sabah, and encouraged him to move his event to Trump’s D.C. hotel, the source said.

Kuwait has now signed a contract with the Trump International Hotel, the source said, adding that a representative with the embassy described the decision as political. Invitations to the event are typically sent out in January.

Abdulaziz Alqadfan, First Secretary of the Embassy of Kuwait, told ThinkProgress last week that he couldn’t “confirm or deny” that the National Day event would be held at the Trump Hotel. Reached again Monday afternoon, Alqadfan did not offer any comment. An email sent directly to Ambassador Al-Sabah was not immediately returned.

Legum writes that his source is a person “who has direct knowledge of the arrangements between the hotels and the embassy,” and that he was able to “review documentary evidence confirming the source’s account.” I have a feeling that a lot of foreign governments are going to be getting phone calls from the Trump Organization over the next four years.

Now, Trump’s defense, if he bothers to offer one, will be that nothing happened. Someone in his company made a sales call to the Kuwaiti government, offered them a deal they couldn’t refuse, and closed the business. What’s wrong with that? But Newt Gingrich has a whole different idea about how Trump should deal with potential violations of the law:

“We’ve never seen this kind of wealth in the White House, and so traditional rules don’t work,” Gingrich said Monday during an appearance on NPR’s “The Diane Rehm Show” about the president-elect’s business interests. “We’re going to have to think up a whole new approach.”

And should someone in the Trump administration cross the line, Gingrich has a potential answer for that too.

“In the case of the president, he has a broad ability to organize the White House the way he wants to. He also has, frankly, the power of the pardon,” Gingrich said. “It’s a totally open power. He could simply say, ‘Look, I want them to be my advisers. I pardon them if anyone finds them to have behaved against the rules. Period. Technically, under the Constitution, he has that level of authority.”

Jeez, it’s too bad we didn’t have this Newt Gingrich around in the 90s. He and Bill Clinton would have gotten along a lot better if he’d had this kind of charitable attitude toward presidential ethics back then.

On a more serious note: Are you fucking kidding me? The Trump Organization is going to poach business away by “encouraging” foreign governments to see the benefits of holding their events at a Trump property? And Newt Gingrich thinks we should just go ahead and change the law to allow this kind of thing? And if nobody salutes when that gets run up the old flagpole, then Trump should just go ahead and issue pardons to anyone who gets harassed by overzealous prosecutors.

What country do I live in, anyway?

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Donald Trump’s Mafia Approach to Governing Has Officially Started

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The Electoral College Just Made it Official: Donald Trump Will Be President

by FrederickaHawes Posted on December 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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Update, 5:39 p.m. EST: Donald Trump officially secured a majority of the Electoral College votes needed to become the next president of the United States.

As the Electoral College’s 538 members gather across the country on Monday to formally cast their ballots for the next president and vice president of the United States, protesters have flocked to state capitals to urge electors to deny Donald Trump the presidency. The normally staid process has drawn an unusual amount of attention this year, as activists have mounted various efforts to challenge the Electoral College results amid alarm over Trump’s Cabinet picks and conflicts of interest, as well as revelations about Russia’s alleged role in hacking US political targets to aid Trump.

“Shame! You don’t deserve to be an American!” one protester shouted in Wisconsin, as all 10 of the state’s electors voted to officially make Trump president. “You have sold us out!”

Numerous arrests have been made, including in Pennsylvania where 12 immigration activists were cited for disorderly conduct for protesting Trump’s victory in the state.

In Minnesota, a state that Hillary Clinton won, one elector was replaced after refusing to vote for her. A Maine Democratic elector decided to cast his protest vote for Bernie Sanders instead of Clinton. In Washington, three electors voted for Colin Powell instead of Clinton; a fourth elector wrote in “Faith Spotted Eagle.”

The unprecedented effort to upend the Electoral College vote is unlikely to amount to much. As Mother Jones reported last week, it’s highly unlikely that enough electors will change their votes and abandon the party’s nominee. While President Barack Obama called the Electoral College process a “vestige” on Friday, he said voters searching for a “silver bullet” fix to American politics are probably in for a disappointment. The large absence of “faithless” electors revolting against Trump further fuels this notion.

On Sunday, Trump rebuked his opponents and the movement to reject his path to the White House.

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The Electoral College Just Made it Official: Donald Trump Will Be President

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Obama’s USDA Just Played Chicken With the Trump Transition Team

by Hadwin Partize Posted on December 17, 2016

Mother Jones

In its waning days, President Barack Obama’s US Department of Agriculture injected an extra dose of drama into President-elect Donald Trump’s chaotic transition of the ag department this week.

The USDA issued a blunt assessment of the state of the poultry industry, portraying it as dominated by a handful of chicken processors that “often wield market power” against the farmers who raise the nations’ chickens, “treating them unfairly, suppressing how much they are paid, or pitting them against each other.” The USDA has a point, as Christopher Leonard showed in his excellent 2014 book The Meat Racket (my review here): Farmers own the growing facilities and are responsible for upgrading them according to the companies’ whims, while the companies supply the chicks and the feed and dictate the price farmers are paid.

And it put substance behind the critique, rolling out long-delayed proposed rules designed to give chicken farmers “protections against the most egregious retaliatory practices” used by the big companies. The USDA has been required to release a version of these rules, known as GIPSA, since being charged to do so by the 2008 farm bill, but GOP stalwarts in the US House have been pushing back ever since, using legislative chicanery to block them. This 2015 Washington Monthly piece by Lina Khan details the Obama USDA’s tortured and—until now—failed attempts to release the rules. The farmers’ rights group RAFI has a good summary of what’s in them.

But there’s a catch—the new rules can’t go into effect until a 60-day comment period has passed. And that means it will be up to the Trump USDA to implement and enforce them—or choose not to.

And that plunges GIPSA into the dark heart of Trump’s USDA transition. For weeks, as I reported here, Team Trump has been floating Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), a moderate Democrat, as his top pick to take the USDA helm. But the motley crew of right-wing farm state pols, agribiz flacks, and donors who make up Trump’s agricultural advisory committee has been pushing back hard against Heitkamp—and the GIPSA rules will likely heighten their fervor. They could spell the end of the Heitkamp trial balloon.

According to the trade journal Agri-Pulse, Heitkamp has “consistently supported” strong GIPSA rules, and in 2014, “she opposed industry efforts to put a provision in the farm bill that would have prohibited USDA from issuing the regulations.” If Heitkamp were to get the job, Agri-Pulse reported, “she would immediately face a confrontation with livestock and poultry groups over the new contracting rules.”

Indeed, the meat industry is acting like an aggrieved rooster in response to the GIPSA rules. The National Chicken Chicken Council, a trade group for the big poultry packers, declared that the rules “threaten to upend the structure of the livestock and poultry industries, raise the price of meat/poultry and cost jobs in rural America.” These claims are nonsense. According to the USDA’s economic analysis, the GIPSA rules, once implemented, will likely trigger “price increases of approximately one-hundredth of a cent or less in retail prices for beef, pork, and poultry,” because the “increase in total industry costs triggered by the GIPSA rules is very small in relation to overall industry costs.”

Perhaps not coincidentally, the Trump team appears to be moving on from Heitkamp and is now looking at Idaho Gov. Butch Otter, Politico reports. A “74-year-old cowboy hat-wearing Republican,” as Politico puts it, Otter is likely to be friendly to meat industry interests if he takes the USDA helm. Regarding the GIPSA rules, the National Meat Institute quotes Otter like this: “Why are we trying to fix something that isn’t broken? Anybody ought to be free to sell at any price that they want to whomever they want.”

And back in 2014, Otter signed into law one of those infamous “ag gag” bills, championed by Big Ag, that make it a crime to secretly document conditions inside livestock farms. The Idaho law was so overreaching that a federal judge struck it down in 2015, declaring that its only purpose was to “limit and punish those who speak out on topics relating to the agricultural industry, striking at the heart of important First Amendment values.” While serving in the US House from 2002 to 2006, Otter was a magnet for agribusiness cash. And he’s a former executive at Simplot, the enormous potato-processing company founded by Otter’s ex-wife.

Otter sounds like a man after Trump’s heart—and that of his ag advisers.

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Obama’s USDA Just Played Chicken With the Trump Transition Team

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President Obama to Putin: "We Can Do Stuff to You"

by MelissaJrw Posted on December 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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In response to alleged Russian hacking of US political targets, President Barack Obama said during a press conference on Friday that the US government will “continue to send a message to Russia to not do this to us because we can do stuff to you.”

Obama, in his last press conference of 2016, defended his administration’s response to the hacks, saying that in the “hyperpartisan atmosphere” of the US presidential election “my primary concern was making sure that the integrity of the election process wasn’t damaged.” He told reporters that he wanted to ensure that the election proceeded without the impression that his administration was trying to tip the scales in favor of either candidate. “The truth of the matter is that everybody had the information,” he said. “It was out there, and we handled it the way we should have.”

Now that the election is over, Obama said his administration will fashion a response to the hacking that will send a message to the Russian government. He said some of this response would be public, but that part would play out “in a way they know but not everybody will.”

“At a point in time where we’ve taken certain actions that we can divulge properly, we will do so,” Obama said.

Obama also downplayed the value of an overt response: “The idea that somehow public shaming is going to be effective I think doesn’t read the thought process in Russia very well,” Obama said.

The press conference comes on the heels of numerous media reports, citing unnamed intelligence officials, detailing Russia’s alleged role in hacking US political targets, including the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. Last week, the Washington Post reported that the CIA had concluded that the Russian government had mounted the hacks in an effort to sway the election in favor of Donald Trump. The New York Times has laid out how the US government thinks the hacks played out. NBC has reported that intelligence officials believe that Vladimir Putin himself oversaw the hacking operation. Just before Obama spoke, the Post reported that the FBI now agrees with the CIA’s assessment that the Russian hacks were designed to help Trump.

Obama said the intelligence community will produce a final assessment on the hacks before he leaves office, and that he doesn’t want to get ahead of the report’s conclusions. But, when pressed, he alluded to Putin’s direct involvement.

“Not much happens in Russia without Vladimir Putin,” he said. “This is a pretty hierarchical operation. Last I checked, there’s not a lot of debate and democratic deliberation, particularly when it comes to policies directed at the United States.”

Trump has consistently downplayed the accusations against Putin and Russia, calling the CIA assessment “ridiculous,” and he has claimed the allegations of Russian political interference in the presidential election are politically driven.

At a dinner with donors on Thursday, Hillary Clinton said Putin directed the hacks “because he had a personal beef against me,” one that originated after she questioned the fairness of parliamentary elections held in Russia in 2011. “Putin publicly blamed me for the outpouring of outrage by his own people,” she said, “and that is a direct line between what he said back then and what he did in this election.” On Thursday night, Podesta published an op-ed in the Washington Post arguing that something is “deeply wrong with the FBI” and calling for an airing of as much evidence as can safely be made public about the hacks, along with a full, independent investigation into the matter.

In an interview with NPR’s Steve Inskeep on Thursday, Obama vowed to retaliate against Russia.

“I think there is no doubt that when any foreign government tries to impact the integrity of our elections, that we need to take action,” he said in the interview. “And we will at a time and place of our own choosing. Some of it may well be explicit and publicized, some of it may not be.” Obama said his administration has “been working hard to make sure that what we do is proportional, that what we do is meaningful.”

It’s unclear what form US retribution could take. Michael Daniel, a special assistant to the president and the White House cybersecurity coordinator, told Cyber Scoop on Friday that “the US government is still pulling together” a response to the hacks.

Discussing the impact of the hacks during his press conference on Friday, Obama said Russia can only weaken the United States if Americans let it happen. “The Russians can’t change us or significantly weaken us,” Obama said. “They are a smaller country, they are a weaker county, their economy doesn’t produce anything that anyone wants to buy except oil, gas, and arms, they don’t innovate. But they can impact us if we lose track of who we are, if we abandon our values.”

This is a developing story.

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President Obama to Putin: "We Can Do Stuff to You"

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How Obama Handled the Conflict-of-Interest Issue Trump Now Faces

by MartiMazure Posted on December 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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Unless something drastic changes, Donald Trump, the self-proclaimed “King of Debt,” will enter the White House on January 20 with about $713 million in debt. He carries mortgages for all his prized properties—including Trump Tower, the Doral golf course in Miami, and his swanky new Washington, DC, hotel—and this does not count another $2 billion in debt (including massive loans from the state-owned Bank of China) that finances partnerships in which he participates.

These loans create significant conflicts of interest. For instance, his biggest lender, Deutsche Bank, is in the middle of negotiations with the Justice Department over how many billions of dollars in civil penalties it should pay for its role in the 2008 financial crisis. Yet as Trump has recently tweeted, the celebrity mogul has no plans to sell his mortgaged assets. Instead, he says, he will let his adult children manage his business and deal with these properties. (Trump postponed a press conference scheduled for this week in which he was supposed to unveil the details of his plan for separating himself from his business empire.) But according to ethics experts, divestiture is the only way Trump can truly address the conflicts.

As Trump has pointed out, there is no law that requires him to sell these assets. But since the 1970s, presidents have taken steps to minimize their conflicts of interest—even if only to avoid the appearance of a conflict. One good example for Trump: President Barack Obama. In 2013, as home mortgage interest rates plummeted, Obama publicly urged Americans to take advantage of the falling rates and save themselves a bundle of money. Alas, Obama told a town hall audience in 2013, he couldn’t follow his own good advice.

“Well, not to get too personal, but our home back in Chicago—not the White House, which, as I said, that’s a rental—our home back in Chicago, my mortgage interest rate, I would probably benefit from refinancing right now, I would save some money,” Obama said. “When you’re President, you have to be a little careful about these transactions, so we haven’t refinanced.”

Be careful—by that, Obama meant he did not want to get close to a conflict of interest by negotiating a deal with any bank. And that entailed a personal sacrifice.

Obama’s mortgage, which he took out in 2005, carries a 5.62 percent interest rate—significantly higher than the current rates that are around 4 percent for a 30-year mortgage. In 2015, USA Today estimated that Obama could save almost $2,100 a month by refinancing. But though he was not prevented from taking advantage of the lower rates, he chose not to do so. He had learned his lesson. Years earlier, when he first entered office, his 5.62 percent mortgage was heavily scrutinized, with the question being whether he had received a below-market rate as an act of favoritism. A Federal Election Commission investigation determined that Obama had obtained a discounted rate but that it was legal because it was within the range offered by Obama’s bank to customers who may provide the bank with additional business.

Before entering the White House, Obama sold his stock portfolio and invested all his personal assets in Treasury notes with some smaller investments in broadly held mutual funds. Once again, he was not compelled to do this by any law—federal conflict-of-interest laws and rules do not apply to the president—but he took this step to remove any taint of possible conflict.

So far, Trump is taking a different approach. He says he has sold off his stocks—without offering any documents to confirm this. But he has not publicly addressed the conflicts posed by his massive borrowing or by his connections to his family business. His transition team now says he will hold a press conference in January to present his plan to deal with potential business conflicts. Yet he certainly has not yet met the standard followed by the man he is succeeding.

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How Obama Handled the Conflict-of-Interest Issue Trump Now Faces

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