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Sharing tractors? There’s an app for that.

by GretchenGatliff Posted on October 17, 2016

The company is reportedly focusing instead on developing software for driverless vehicles that could be used by other car companies.

The shift has led to a mass exodus at Apple’s secretive car division, Project Titan, anonymous sources tell Bloomberg News. Hundreds of people from the once-1,000-person-strong team have either been reassigned to other divisions, been let go, or quit, though some new people have also been added.

In 2008, after Apple released the iPhone, Steve Jobs talked with Tony Fadell, a senior VP at Apple, about taking on a car as the company’s next game-changer, and redesigning it from scratch. “What would a dashboard be?” Fadell said, describing one conversation. “What would seats be? How would you fuel it or power it?”

But those big dreams seem to have hit hard realities. Among other things, Apple had trouble getting suppliers to make small quantities of parts, Bloomberg reports. Ultimately, it’s very difficult for a company to get into the car manufacturing business — even an established tech behemoth. And for those of us who’d like to see more innovation in the transportation sector, that’s too bad.

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Sharing tractors? There’s an app for that.

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The Billionaire Creator of the Power Rangers Has Invested Millions in Hillary Clinton. So What Does He Want?

by ChristieAndes Posted on October 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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On August 22, a convoy of blacked-out Suburbans, flanked by police escorts, sped west along Sunset Boulevard and then headed north into the Hollywood Hills. The motorcade finally pulled up to the gated entrance of Beverly Park, an exclusive enclave that is home to an array of famous actors, rockers, and other Los Angeles A-listers. Hillary Clinton’s destination that evening was the palatial compound of Univision chairman Haim Saban, a billionaire most famous for creating the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Saban’s sprawling mansion was built in the style of a French country manor, and the meticulously tended grounds, in which he took special pride, were modeled on the gardens of Versailles.

Clinton Cash

No Democratic megadonors have opened their wallets to the Clintons like Haim and Cheryl Saban. Leaving aside the lucrative fundraisers, the Sabans have given upward of $27 million to assorted Clinton causes and campaigns.

Clinton Foundation:

$15 million

Clinton Global Initiative:

$260,000

Priorities USA:

$10.3 million

Hillary ’16:

$10,800

Hillary ’08:

$13,800

Hillary Senate campaigns:

$33,400

Hillary Victory Fund:

$1.4 million

Over a late dinner, Clinton regaled Saban, his wife, Cheryl, and 100 guests—including Disney CEO Bob Iger, DreamWorks Animation founder Jeffrey Katzenberg, and basketball legend Magic Johnson—with war stories from the campaign trail. “Well, the latest one they have on me is that I’m dying,” she said, referring to the elaborate conspiracy theories about her health ginned up by conservative media. “That’s a new one.” The price of admission to the Sabans’ fundraiser—their second for Clinton during the 2016 race—was $100,000 per couple. After a few hours of mingling, Clinton had raised more than $5 million—one of the most lucrative hauls of her campaign.

Saban, who is solidly built with slicked-back wavy black hair, is worth an estimated $3.5 billion, earning him the 453rd spot on Forbes‘ ranking of the world’s richest people. The 72-year-old holds dual Israeli-American citizenship, and his office—which occupies the top floor of a 26-story tower in LA’s Century City—is a testament to his divided loyalties. An Israeli flag and an American flag adorn his conference room, next to photographs of Abraham Lincoln, David Ben-Gurion, Theodor Herzl, and John F. Kennedy. A framed Golda Meir quote in the lobby (“We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us”) greets visitors. There’s also a mock version of Monopoly called Haimopoly on display. The play money bears the Power Rangers logo, and the properties on the board include some of Saban’s current and former business interests—the Paul Frank designer brand, TV network Univision, the Israeli telecommunications company Bezeq.

Saban has the self-made mogul’s way of both downplaying and reminding you of his clout. In one breath he’ll name-drop “Angela” (German Chancellor Angela Merkel) or “Bibi” (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu); in the next he’ll describe himself as a mere “former cartoon schlepper” or “just a guy.”

But there is one subject on which Saban does not hold back: his relationship with Bill and Hillary Clinton. No single political patron has done more for the Clintons over the span of their careers. In the past 20 years, Saban and his wife have donated $2.4 million to the Clintons’ various campaigns and at least $15 million to the Clinton Foundation, where Cheryl Saban serves as a board member. Haim Saban prides himself on his top-giver status: “If I’m not No. 1, I’m going to cut my balls off,” he once remarked on the eve of a Hillary fundraiser. The Sabans have given more than $10 million to Priorities USA, making them among the largest funders of the pro-Hillary super-PAC. In the lead-up to the 2016 presidential campaign, he vowed to spend “whatever it takes” to elect her.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) was the featured speaker at the 2003 dedication of the Saban Research Institute in Hollywood, California. She joined Cheryl and Haim Saban, who made a $40 million contribution to support and stimulate pediatric medical research at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. The donation is believed to be the largest single gift of its kind to a children’s hospital in North America. Bob Riha Jr./WireImage/Getty

The ties go beyond money. The Clintons have flown on the Sabans’ private jet, stayed at their LA home, and vacationed at their Acapulco estate. The two families watched the 2004 election results together at the Clintons’ home, and Bill Clinton gave the final toast at one of Cheryl Saban’s birthday parties. Haim Saban is chummy enough with Hillary that he felt comfortable telling her that she sounded too shrill on the stump. “Why are you shouting all the time?” he says he told her. “It’s drilling a hole in my head.” Clinton campaign emails released by WikiLeaks in October contain dozens of messages to, from, and referencing Saban. And they show that he has no qualms about pressing Clinton and her aides on her position toward Israel. “She needs to differentiate herself from Obama on Israel,” he wrote in June 2015 to Clinton’s top aides. “It can easily be done w/o criticizing the President, and this so that she can recapture the 11% lost between 2012 and 1992,” he added, referring to the drop in Jewish support at the ballot box.

Like any political benefactor, Saban has an agenda. Unlike many, however, he is startlingly transparent about what he wants and how he intends to get it. “I’m a one-issue guy, and my issue is Israel,” he has said. A supporter of the late Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli Labor Party leader and pro-peace prime minister, Saban has drifted rightward in recent years. “In general, he’s taking a harder line,” says former US Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk. Saban says he still believes in a two-state solution, but his all-consuming concern is defending Israel and fortifying its relationship with the United States. “For me,” he said several years ago, “bringing the American president closer to the people of Israel is a life goal.”

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One year at the Saban Forum, an annual conference featuring top officials and public figures from the United States and Israel (with the odd Arab leader), the mogul outlined his three-pronged approach for influencing American politics: fund political campaigns, bankroll think tanks, and control the media. In addition to the Saban Forum, he funded a Brookings Institution research center focused on US-Israeli relations. He has tried for years to buy media outlets in the United States and Israel; it wasn’t a profit he was after, per se, but “a return with influence,” as he once told a journalist.

When it comes to the Clintons, Saban has already seen a healthy return on his investment, in the form of access to top US and foreign officials; he’s also received timely help from them with his global business dealings. But the election of Hillary Clinton would give Saban more juice than ever before—and there is no question he would bring that clout to bear on his top issue, Israel, and on rebuilding US-Israeli relations after the low points of the last eight years and the public schism between President Barack Obama and Netanyahu.

For Clinton, her relationship with Saban gives her a back channel to Israeli leaders and a proxy who is beloved in Israel. (“Our rich uncle,” an Israeli TV host once called Saban.) But it also comes with complications. In contrast to Clinton’s call for the rich to pay their fair share in taxes, Saban routes his business ventures through the Cayman Islands and other tax shelters; his tax avoidance practices were once scrutinized by a Senate committee. His hardline tone on the Middle East—defending Israel at all costs, calling for tighter screening of Muslim immigrants (a comment he later walked back), and saying of Iranian fundamentalists that he would “bomb the living daylights out of those sons of bitches”—is out of sync with many Democratic voters. Last year, he even teamed up on pro-Israel causes with Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson, who says the Palestinians are “an invented people.”

“When it comes to Israel, we’re absolutely on the same page,” Saban told Israel’s Channel 2 in June 2015 with Adelson at his side. “Our interest is to take care of Israel’s interest in the United States. Period. Over and out.”

Hollywood power brokers tend to come in three varieties: the company men and women who ascend the corporate ladder until they reach the C-suite; the heirs to movie- or music-making dynasties like Casey Wasserman, the grandson of the late MCA chief and Democratic donor Lew Wasserman; and the scrappy comers who—through ruthlessness, grit, or a combination—claw their way to an empire.

Saban is in the third category. He was born in Egypt in 1944. His father worked in a toy shop and his mother was a seamstress. Animosity toward Jews in the run-up to the Suez War in 1956 forced the Saban family—like many Jewish Egyptian refugees—to resettle in Israel, where they found an apartment in a rough neighborhood in Tel Aviv, sharing a communal bathroom “with a hooker and her pimp,” Saban likes to say.

As a teenager, Saban enlisted with the Israel Defense Forces and served during the Six-Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973. While in the IDF, Saban discovered a knack for concert promoting and was on his way to earning a small fortune when the Yom Kippur War broke out. He nearly went bankrupt after fronting hundreds of thousands of dollars to bring 40 Japanese harpists to Israel—only for their concerts to be canceled at the war’s onset.

Saban moved to Paris and carved out an obscure yet lucrative line of work. When popular American shows of the era such as Starsky and Hutch or Dallas were broadcast overseas, the foreign networks needed new title songs and credits music. With his partner, an Israeli composer and musician named Shuki Levy, Saban offered to create theme music and provide it to TV networks for free. The catch: Saban and Levy would keep the rights to the music, which they later packaged into hit singles and albums. Within seven years, Saban’s company had 15 gold and platinum records and $10 million in annual revenue.

By 1983, Saban’s ambitions had outgrown music copyrighting. He moved to LA to pitch TV shows of his own, driving from meeting to meeting in a white convertible Rolls-Royce Corniche with the vanity plate “RSKTKR.” He scored modest hits with NBC’s Kidd Video, an MTV-style show aimed at young children, and the Samurai Pizza Cats, but his big breakthrough came in 1993. On an earlier trip to Japan, Saban had stumbled upon Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger, a TV show that featured a team of karate-fighting superheroes in brightly colored spandex suits. He bought the US rights and sought to Americanize the show. After eight years of getting laughed out of pitch meetings, he finally convinced an executive at Fox Children’s Network to buy what came to be known as the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.

The show was an instant hit, and it established Saban’s reputation as a canny businessman. He had extracted such favorable terms on the sales and licensing of the show’s wildly popular toys that he effectively rewrote the rules of the merchandising business. He also became known for his hard-nosed approach to business, with the Screen Actors Guild briefly ordering its members not to work for him because of his company’s alleged “economic exploitation of children”—many of the shows Saban produced used child actors—and failure to pay adequate wages and health benefits. Saban fiercely denied the charges, and the two sides resolved the dispute with an apology from the SAG and a new union agreement for Saban’s actors.

It was around this time that Saban first met Bill Clinton, whose administration had taken on violence in kids’ TV shows and movies. Vice President Al Gore—whose wife, Tipper, was leading the crusade against obscenities in music—held up Saban’s Power Rangers as an example of what was wrong, criticizing the show for “too many hai-ya’s.”

In the fall of 1995, at the invitation of a New York investment banker, Saban attended one of Clinton’s now-infamous White House kaffeeklatsches—informal meetings with potential donors intended to raise money for his 1996 reelection bid. “You want to have breakfast with the president?” the banker asked Saban. “Why would he want to have breakfast with me?” Saban replied. “So you can be a trustee,” the investor said. (“Trustee” was the Clinton White House’s moniker for a major donor.) Saban and other TV executives eventually succeeded in heading off a government ratings system; standards were created by the industry’s lobbying group instead.

Saban was smitten by Clinton, and he showed it by writing checks totaling $240,000 to the Democratic National Committee, which ran Clinton’s reelection fund. Saban’s success in Hollywood—the Wall Street Journal described him as “the Walt Disney of the 1990s”—mirrored his ascent in Democratic politics. In 1998, Saban hosted a crucial fundraiser that raised $1.5 million for the DNC. The event not only helped to fuel the party’s shock success in the midterms, with an incumbent president’s party gaining seats for the first time since Franklin D. Roosevelt, but also cemented Hollywood as a key source of support for Clinton. “Clinton did not have a large, prosperous home base; he’s from Hope, Arkansas,” says Donna Bojarsky, an LA-based Democratic consultant. “When he came out here, LA became his home base as a fundraising city.”

Saban stood by Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, defending him in the media and maxing out to Clinton’s legal defense fund. Clinton returned the favor with tickets to state dinners, overnight stays in the Lincoln Bedroom, and an appointment to the President’s Export Council, which offers advice on international trade policy. Their bond continued well after Clinton left office. Saban even assisted Clinton in building his presidential library, via a $10 million unsecured loan to the Clinton Foundation on which he later forgave the interest.

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Yet it appears to be Saban who got the most out of his relationship with the president. In 2001, he cut a deal to sell the Fox Family Channel (with which he’d merged his entertainment company in the late ’90s) to Disney. Various international governments had to approve the sale, and the slow-moving Brazilians were jeopardizing the deal. According to a 2010 New Yorker profile of Saban, the mogul turned to Clinton for help. The former president called the Brazilian president, and the deal went through. (Saban declined to be interviewed on the record for this story and did not respond to a detailed list of questions, including about the sale of Fox Family.) Disney paid $5.3 billion in cash for Fox Family. Saban’s cut totaled $1.5 billion—at the time, the largest cash payday for a single person in Hollywood history.

Saban began looking for ways to translate his financial windfall into more political clout. In 2001, he donated $7 million to rebuild the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters on Capitol Hill—at that time, the largest donation ever recorded. He gave $5 million to Bill Clinton’s presidential foundation. He toyed with the idea of buying a major US news outlet like Newsweek or the Los Angeles Times. And he met with Martin Indyk, who had recently joined the Brookings Institution after serving as US ambassador to Israel under Clinton, to discuss funding a think tank of his own. Indyk suggested Saban start his own organization within Brookings, and together they drafted a plan to form the think tank’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy. Once again, Saban’s giving set a record: His $13 million pledge over seven years was the largest in the think tank’s history.

After the launch of the Saban Center, the billionaire began pouring more and more of his fortune into Israeli causes. He donated $10 million to support the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces and funded the construction of hospitals in Israel. He also made seven-figure gifts to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the hawkish Israeli lobbying group, and underwrote AIPAC’s twice-annual conference for student activists, now known as the Saban Leadership Seminar. As Israeli politics began to shift rightward, so did Saban. He struck a hardline stance on national security issues—the Patriot Act, he told the New York Times, was “not strong enough”—and foresaw a bleak outcome in the Israel-Palestine conflict. “I think that any resolution will have to go both on the Palestinian side and Israeli side to some form of civil war,” he said. “It’s not going to be without spilling blood.”

In 2006, Saban featured prominently in two high dramas in Washington. First, various news outlets reported that AIPAC had asked Saban to withhold campaign money from House Democrats unless then-Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi agreed to appoint Rep. Jane Harman, a California Democrat who was strongly pro-Israel, as the chair of the Intelligence Committee if Democrats regained the House. (Harman didn’t get the job; Saban donated to House Democrats the following year.) Saban was also named in a Senate subcommittee investigation that found he’d avoided paying an estimated $225 million in taxes from the sale of Fox Family through questionable accounting tactics. Saban, testifying before the Senate, cast himself as the victim of fraudulent tax advisers (they would eventually go to prison) and vowed to repay the back taxes, which he did.

One ally Saban could always count on during this period was the junior senator from New York, Hillary Clinton. Though it was 3,000 miles from her constituents, she attended the opening of the Saban Research Center at the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, funded by a $40 million gift from the Sabans. She has attended every Saban Forum starting in 2004. Saban has said he urged Clinton to run for president in 2004. Four years later, when she did enter the race, he maxed out to her campaign—and fast became one of Clinton’s largest fundraisers.

Clinton’s defeat in ’08, Saban has said, was “my greatest loss.” Wary of Barack Obama, Saban even reportedly considered backing Sen. John McCain in the general election. After Obama was elected and chose Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, Saban remained cool to the new president, criticizing him early on for visiting Cairo and Saudi Arabia but not Jerusalem.

“To say I don’t sleep easily with the current administration’s relationship to Israel would be an understatement,” he told an Israeli TV station in 2010. “They are leftists, really left leftists, so far to the left there’s not much space left between them and the wall.”

At the outset of the 2012 campaign, Saban said he had no plans to donate to Obama’s reelection. People close to him told me that he felt slighted and ignored by the Obama White House, which seemed to take pride in distancing itself from big-money supporters. But facing a tough reelection fight against Mitt Romney and the prospect of being outspent by groups created after the Citizens United decision, Obama’s aides set about bringing Saban back into the fold. Visitor logs show that he was twice invited to the White House after his critical remarks—once in December 2011 to meet with Chief of Staff William Daley, and again in June 2012 to attend a dinner at which Obama awarded then-Israeli President Shimon Peres the Presidential Medal of Freedom. “What Haim probably needed to be assured of was Obama’s understanding of the special nature of the relationship between Israel and the United States, which he surely was and is,” says David Axelrod, a former senior aide to Obama. “Once that became clear, it probably cleared the way for him to embrace the president fully.”

A few weeks after attending the dinner, Saban donated $1 million to be split among the three super-PACs dedicated to reelecting Obama and winning back majorities in the House and Senate, and he made the maximum individual contribution ($2,500) to Obama’s campaign. Saban also penned an told the interviewer, according to a translation by The Hill. “She has an opinion, a very well-defined opinion. And in any case, everything that she thinks and everything she has done and will do will always be for the good of Israel.” According to the Clinton campaign emails released by WikiLeaks, Saban’s comments didn’t go unnoticed by top Clinton aides. When Huma Abedin, Clinton’s top deputy, raised questions about the interview (“Did you guys talk to anyone in comms about this,” she emailed a Saban aide), Saban replied that his comments had been mistranslated. “The Hill needs to go the sic Hebrew lessons if they want to quote Hebrew interviews,” he wrote, noting, “All questions that I am asked about policy I simply answer ‘I don’t know’…and I just praise her experience courage persistence tenacity etc.”

That fall, Clinton endorsed the Obama administration’s accord, under which Iran will gradually wind down its nuclear capabilities in exchange for US and UN sanctions relief. Her support flew in the face of her largest benefactor—but by then Saban had seen the writing on the wall. Believing it was a fait accompli, he eventually offered his tepid support for the deal.

People who work on Middle Eastern issues told me that this episode is important to understanding how Saban operates. He knows just how far he can push before he jeopardizes his access to power. In fact, after the Iran deal was announced in July 2015, Adelson pressed Saban to spend some of the political capital he’d banked with the Clintons by leaning on Hillary to oppose it. But rather than risk his relationship with her, according to a source with knowledge of the episode, Saban pulled out of his joint initiatives with Adelson.

President Barack Obama participates in a conversation with Haim Saban at the 10th annual Saban Forum, ”Power Shifts: US-Israel Relations in a Dynamic Middle East,” on December 7, 2013, in Washington, DC. Pete Marovich/DPA/ZUMA

People who know Saban say he is fiercely competitive—especially when it comes to his role as a Clinton friend and benefactor. “The best way to get Haim Saban to give $5 million is to tell him Jeffrey Katzenberg’s giving $2.5 million,” one Democratic fundraiser told me. On May 7, 2015, just weeks after Hillary Clinton made her White House bid official, Saban organized a fundraiser for her that was considered the Hollywood debut of her campaign. When Saban learned that Katzenberg was being billed as a co-host, he flew into a rage and demanded the campaign and anyone else describing the event make clear that this was his event. “Hollywood is all about who gets top billing, whose names are on the marquee and whose names are below the line,” says a person familiar with the planning of the fundraiser. While Katzenberg’s name wasn’t dropped from the event, Saban’s aides worked the phones to ensure that the press coverage played up Saban’s leading role above all others.

Saban and the Clintons kept in close contact during the Obama years. During Hillary Clinton’s stint as secretary of state, Saban wrote to Clinton at her private email address with warm notes about get-togethers (“Tx again for today. Love u”) and passing along get-well wishes from former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert days after Clinton fainted and suffered a concussion. In 2009, Saban had also tried to hire Bill Clinton as a consultant at his private-equity firm, Saban Capital Group, but lawyers at the State Department nixed the arrangement, noting in a legal memo that Saban “is actively involved in foreign affairs issues, particularly with regards to the Middle East, which is a priority area for the secretary.” Saban’s foundation continued to give lavishly to the Clinton Foundation—$3.5 million in 2010 and again in 2011, and a $10 million pledge in 2013, the year Cheryl Saban joined the board. In May 2015, Univision paid Bill Clinton $250,000 for a 15-minute Q&A at a promotional event for the network. And after Hillary Clinton stepped down as secretary, Univision entered a partnership with the Clinton Foundation focused on early childhood development. The network’s promotional material for the Pequeños y Valiosos (Young and Valuable) initiative prominently featured Hillary Clinton in a gauzy, positive light, as did a rollout event for the partnership at a Head Start classroom in East Harlem.

The materials soon disappeared from Univision’s website, but not before questions were raised about the network’s close ties to Clinton. Saban and a group of investors had bought Univision for $11 billion in 2007 and transformed it into the dominant Spanish-language TV channel, with ratings often rivaling the established broadcast networks. While Saban has denied exerting any influence on Univision’s news coverage, the network has championed the cause of comprehensive immigration reform and warred with prominent Republican politicians including Marco Rubio and Donald Trump. It has also organized a voter registration drive with a goal of signing up 3 million Hispanic voters—a nonpartisan effort that nonetheless will help Democratic candidates. Saban, despite past remarks about using a media outlet to promote his political and foreign policy interests, says all he cares about is ratings and revenue at Univision; in 2014, he and his fellow investors tried to sell the network for more than $20 billion with no luck. Now, it appears Saban may have designs on taking the company public in the near future.

The WikiLeaks emails pointed to an even stronger connection between Saban, Univision, and the Clinton campaign than previously known. In March 2015, a month before Clinton launched her campaign, Tina Flournoy, an aide to Bill Clinton, wrote to soon-to-be Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta that Univision had proposed—via Saban—a joint speech with Bill Clinton and George W. Bush to be hosted by Univision anchor Jorge Ramos. (The event never came off.) In July 2015, Saban and his staff contacted multiple campaign aides about what he saw as Clinton’s lackluster response to Donald Trump’s toxic rhetoric on Hispanic immigration. “Haim thinks we are under reacting to Trump/Hispanics,” Podesta wrote to several colleagues. “Thinks we can get something by standing up for Latinos or attacking R’s for not condemning.” Abedin, the top Clinton lieutenant, chimed in: “Haim hit all of us. Called me yesterday afternoon with same message. I told him she had said something but he says he’s only heard her talk about immigration. And if Haim is raising it, it means he’s hearing it from his Univision colleagues.” Everyone on the email agreed that Clinton should more forcefully call out Trump in an upcoming speech before the National Council of La Raza, which she subsequently did. “It was appalling to hear Donald Trump describe immigrants as drug dealers, racists and criminals,” she said. “I have just one word for Donald Trump: Basta! Enough!”

On June 29, 2015, the month after hosting the Hollywood rollout of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, the Sabans donated $2 million to her super-PAC Priorities USA Action. Three days later, Clinton sent what could be perceived as a thank-you note to Saban; she issued an unusual public letter addressed to the billionaire in which she announced her opposition to the growing Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement targeting Israel.

That Clinton came out in opposition to BDS surprised no one, but choosing to do so in the form of an obsequious letter to her biggest donor stunned Middle East watchers. “I know you can agree that we need to make countering BDS a priority,” the letter reads. At the bottom is a handwritten note from Clinton herself: “Look forward to working with you on this—Hillary.”

“If she wanted to take a position against BDS, just issue a press release,” says James Zogby, the president of the Arab American Institute who advised Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign. “But sending a letter to Haim Saban and then making it public? It’s boneheaded, and it’s brazen.” (A campaign spokesman declined to comment about the Saban letter, but said Clinton and Saban have “a deep respect for each other.”)

Internal emails show how the Clinton campaign and Saban worked together to strategically leak the BDS letter in order to allay any concerns among Jewish supporters about Clinton’s support for Israel in anticipation of her backing the Iran deal. “Let’s def give (the letter) to someone,” campaign manager Robby Mook wrote to senior campaign aides. “I see zero downside to a story. Then we can circulate around right away (hopefully) in advance of Iran.” Another Clinton staffer, Christina Reynolds, replied, “If Haim’s going to give it to the Jewish media, I think that solves our problem. Once they write, we can make sure it gets picked up by some of our beat guys.” Three days later, Saban released Clinton’s BDS letter and an accompanying statement of his own through a New York-based PR agency that specializes in Jewish affairs.

By August 2016, the Sabans had poured an additional $8 million into Clinton’s super-PAC, bringing their total investment to $10 million. Saban had given another $1.4 million to the joint fundraising committee supporting Clinton’s campaign and the national Democratic Party.

When asked to consider Saban’s influence on a Clinton administration, think tank wonks, former diplomats, and other analysts in the United States and Israel predict that a President Clinton would begin to quietly shore up the US relationship with Israel—and end her predecessor’s habit of publicly chiding Israeli hardliners such as Netanyahu—and they can foresee Saban playing an unofficial role in those efforts. And if Clinton took a position in conflict with Saban’s beliefs? People who work on pro-Israel issues with Saban say they would expect him to put up a fight, as he did on the Iran deal, but they would be shocked to see him rebuke his longtime friend and ally. “He is a one-issue guy, but the issue isn’t Israel,” one prominent right-of-center activist told me. “It’s Hillary.”

Saban helps Hillary, and Hillary helps Saban. If he once again attempts to sell Univision or seeks to take the company public, a friendship with the president of the United States can only help should hurdles to the transaction arise. Similarly, Saban’s sterling reputation in Israel and deep connections with its political leaders could pave the way for warmer relations with the Israeli governing coalition, if not a renewed peace process. Now that would be a return with influence—for Haim Saban and for Hillary Clinton.

This article was reported in partnership with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.

Photos used in the above illustration: Haim Saban and Hillary Clinton: Bob Riha Jr./WireImage/Getty; Bill Clinton: Ron Sachs/CNP/ZUMA

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The Billionaire Creator of the Power Rangers Has Invested Millions in Hillary Clinton. So What Does He Want?

Posted in alo, Anchor, Anker, Citizen, Everyone, FF, GE, LG, Mop, ONA, PUR, Sterling, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Billionaire Creator of the Power Rangers Has Invested Millions in Hillary Clinton. So What Does He Want?

How Trump’s Casino Bankruptcies Screwed His Workers 0ut of Millions in Retirement Savings

by ErickWenz2009 Posted on October 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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When pressed about the multiple bankruptcies at his Atlantic City casinos, Donald Trump routinely says the episodes highlight his business acumen. He made out well, he claims, at the expense only of his greedy Wall Street financiers. “These lenders aren’t babies,” he said during a Republican primary debate last fall. “These are total killers. These are not the nice, sweet little people that you think, okay?”

Yet among those who suffered as a result of Trump’s bankruptcies were his own casino employees, who collectively lost millions of dollars in retirement savings when the company’s value plummeted.

Trump’s company encouraged its employees to invest their retirement savings in company stock, according to a class-action lawsuit filed by employees against Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts following its 2004 bankruptcy. Then, when the stock price was near its nadir as bankruptcy loomed, the company forced the employees to sell their stock at a huge loss. More than 400 employees lost a total of more than $2 million from their retirement accounts, the lawsuit states.

The lawsuit was ultimately dismissed when a judge found no illegal actions on the part of Trump’s company. But the conflict shows how Trump’s exploitation of bankruptcy laws for his personal gain did end up hurting his employees.

“I didn’t realize he was as stupid as he is,” says a former casino worker at Trump Plaza who asked not to be named. “Honestly. I thought, way back when, the guy was way brighter than we were. He was running the company and we were working for him. We thought he was brilliant. When we invested in it, we thought, how could this stock go so low?”

Trump has never had to declare personal bankruptcy, but the company he set up to operate his Atlantic City casinos went through numerous corporate restructurings to reduce its debt load. As the New York Times recounted last year, Trump used his company as a means of transferring his personal debt load onto shareholders, issuing rounds of junk bonds to build up cash that would erase his own debts. “Even as his companies did poorly, Mr. Trump did well,” the Times wrote. “He put up little of his own money, shifted personal debts to the casinos and collected millions of dollars in salary, bonuses and other payments. The burden of his failures fell on investors and others who had bet on his business acumen.”

Starting in 1996, workers at Trump’s casinos were allowed to invest their 401(k) savings directly into Trump stock. (It was the only individual stock offered; the other options were mutual funds.) But that same year, THCR sold $1.1 billion in junk bonds to offset some of Trump’s personal debt and buy two more ill-fated casino properties in Atlantic City. As the company floundered in the years leading up to its second bankruptcy in 2004, the stock price plummeted. According to the class-action complaint, “Between 1996 and August, 2004, employees were encouraged to invest in THCR shares as the price fell from $30/share to $2/share.”

By the end of 1997, employees had used more than $2 million in retirement funds to purchase 218,394 shares. The number of shares in employees’ retirement accounts rose steadily even as the price dropped. By late 2003, the pool of employee retirement accounts held 1.1 million shares of Trump stock.

But Trump’s casinos were in near-fatal trouble. On August 10, 2004, the New York Stock Exchange removed the company from its listings as THCR announced a plan to restructure the company’s debt and enter bankruptcy. Shares had been valued at $1.85 the previous day, but tanked to $0.36 in over-the-counter trades after the de-listing.

The committee that managed the Trump employee retirement accounts—with which Trump had no personal involvement—made the decision at that time to prevent workers from buying additional shares in the company because it had become an overly risky investment. “This prevented Plan participants from using an ‘averaging down’ strategy of buying additional shares at the current much lower price, to recoup some of their losses,” the class-action complaint alleged. Employees could still sell shares, but with the $0.10-per-share transaction fee the company charged whenever an employee liquidated stock from his or her retirement account, there was little incentive to do so.

The company’s initial bankruptcy plan fell through a month later, but in late October 2004 a new restructuring plan was approved. With the company soon slated to enter bankruptcy, the retirement fund committee voted on October 25 that any remaining shares of THCR held in the retirement accounts would be sold in bulk by Merrill Lynch on November 15 and sent a letter to workers at the casinos on October 28 informing them of the plan.

As the class-action lawsuit noted, that announcement didn’t help the share price. “Announcing a planned sale of a huge block of stock in a letter to thousands of employees meant that market participants would learn of the forced sale, and adjust their trading strategies to take advantage of the anticipated increase in supply of THCR shares,” the complaint stated. “This would have the unfortunate effect of depressing the stock immediately before the sale of Plan stock.” Employees rushed to dump their stock before the forced sale, with 117,966 shares from the retirement plan unloaded in the two weeks between the announcement and the date of the forced sale.

More than 400 employees still held Trump stock when the forced sale arrived. The stock had been trading at $0.80 on the day of the announcement but had dropped by more than a quarter, to an average of $0.57, when the employees were forced to sell their 924,698 shares the next month. For an employee who’d put $1,000 into her retirement account in 1997 when shares averaged $9.65 apiece, those savings had now withered to just $59.

Less than a week after the forced sale, the company filed for bankruptcy. The markets seemed to approve of the restructuring plan. Three weeks after the forced sale, the share price was up to $2.04. None of the employees were able to profit from that gain.

Five longtime Trump employees—four from the Trump Plaza and one from Trump Marina—filed the lawsuit against the company the next year. They each held between 8,300 and 21,110 shares at the time the forced sale was announced. The lawsuit alleged that the committee in charge of the retirement plan had breached its fiduciary duty by mandating the complete liquidation of employee-held stock when its value was at a low, resulting in more than $2.3 million in losses for employees.

In the end, a federal judge in New Jersey dismissed the class-action lawsuit. “At its core,” the judge wrote, “Plaintiffs’ assertion that Defendants breached their fiduciary duties amounts to nothing more than a claim based on perfect hindsight.” The Trump executives on the retirement fund committee couldn’t necessarily know that the restructuring would boost share prices, the judge found, given the “tenuous” position of the company at the time. Still, the ruling didn’t dispute the extent of the losses suffered by employees.

Trump himself fared well through the bankruptcy. He kept a $2 million annual salary after the company emerged from bankruptcy and took in more than $44 million in compensation over the course of the 14 years he served as chairman of THCR.

“I don’t think it’s a failure,” he said of the bankruptcy in 2004. “It’s a success.”

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How Trump’s Casino Bankruptcies Screwed His Workers 0ut of Millions in Retirement Savings

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The Disappearing Spoon – Sam Kean

by Myrna Posted on October 16, 2016

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

The Disappearing Spoon
And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements
Sam Kean

Genre: Science & Nature

Price: $2.99

Publish Date: July 12, 2010

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Seller: Hachette Digital, Inc.


From New York Times bestselling author Sam Kean comes incredible stories of science, history, finance, mythology, the arts, medicine, and more, as told by the Periodic Table. Why did Gandhi hate iodine (I, 53)? How did radium (Ra, 88) nearly ruin Marie Curie’s reputation? And why is gallium (Ga, 31) the go-to element for laboratory pranksters?* The Periodic Table is a crowning scientific achievement, but it’s also a treasure trove of adventure, betrayal, and obsession. These fascinating tales follow every element on the table as they play out their parts in human history, and in the lives of the (frequently) mad scientists who discovered them. THE DISAPPEARING SPOON masterfully fuses science with the classic lore of invention, investigation, and discovery–from the Big Bang through the end of time. *Though solid at room temperature, gallium is a moldable metal that melts at 84 degrees Fahrenheit. A classic science prank is to mold gallium spoons, serve them with tea, and watch guests recoil as their utensils disappear.

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The Disappearing Spoon – Sam Kean

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Ask a Science Teacher – Larry Scheckel

by Myrna Posted on October 16, 2016

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

Ask a Science Teacher
250 Answers to Questions You’ve Always Had About How Everyday Stuff Really Works
Larry Scheckel

Genre: Science & Nature

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: December 17, 2013

Publisher: The Experiment

Seller: Workman Publishing Co., Inc.


Fun and fascinating science is everywhere, and it’s a cinch to learn—just ask a science teacher! We’ve all grown so used to living in a world filled with wonders that we sometimes forget to wonder about them: What creates the wind? Do fish sleep? Why do we blink? These are common phenomena, but it’s a rare person who really knows the answers—do you? All too often, the explanations remain shrouded in mystery—or behind a haze of technical language. For those of us who should have raised our hands in science class but didn’t, Larry Scheckel comes to the rescue. An award-winning science teacher and longtime columnist for his local newspaper, Scheckel is a master explainer with a trove of knowledge. Just ask the students and devoted readers who have spent years trying to stump him! In Ask a Science Teacher , Scheckel collects 250 of his favorite Q&amp;As. Like the best teachers, he writes so that kids can understand, but he doesn’t water things down— he’ll satisfy even the most inquisitive minds. Topics include: •The Human Body •Earth Science •Astronomy •Chemistry Physics •Technology •Zoology •Music&#xa0;and conundrums that don’t fit into any category With refreshingly uncomplicated explanations, Ask a Science Teacher is sure to resolve the everyday mysteries you’ve always wondered about. You’ll learn how planes really fly, why the Earth is round, how microwaves heat food, and much more—before you know it, all your friends will be asking you!

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Ask a Science Teacher – Larry Scheckel

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When Bruce Springsteen Helped Destroy the Berlin Wall

by meibartley Posted on October 16, 2016

Mother Jones

The fall of the Berlin Wall has been attributed to lots of things, from Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms and Ronald Reagan’s famous plea to the ineptitude of the Politiburo and the collective courage of the East German protesters. But there’s little doubt that David Bowie and Bruce Springsteen did their own small part.

When Bowie died this past January, the German Foreign Office noted as much in a memorial tweet: “Good-bye, David Bowie. You are now among #Heroes. Thank you for helping to bring down the #wall.” For Springsteen’s role, you can read the 2013 book Rocking the Wall: Bruce Springsteen—The Berlin Concert That Changed the World. But Springsteen’s recent memoir, Born to Run, offers his full account of that epic concert for the first time.

Many Americans are surprised to learn that our rock stars were even allowed to play in East Germany while the wall, constructed in 1961, remained in place. But Communist Party leaders, noting the tremendous buildup of anger and tension among their young people during the Gorbachev “glasnost” era, decided to provide a safety valve of sorts by allowing major rock concerts starting in 1987. Tens of thousands of East German kids were already flocking to the wall to listen as Bowie and others played just on the other side—and there had been clashes between the music-starved youth and East German police.

Bowie’s June 1987 performance was remarkable on several levels. The stage was set up in West Berlin, very close to the wall, with the old Reichstag building as a backdrop. Unlike most Western performers, he had a fitting song for the occasion: “Heroes,” written a few years earlier and purportedly inspired by Bowie’s time living in Berlin. The line about standing by the wall while “the guns shot above our heads” may refer to dramatic attempts by East Germans to escape the East—which happens to be the subject of my new book, The Tunnels: Escapes Under the Berlin Wall and the Historic Films the JFK White House Tried to Kill. (You can watch Bowie’s performance that day on YouTube.) And here, from a 2003 interview, is how he described it:

It was one of the most emotional performances I’ve ever done. I was in tears…And there were thousands on the other side that had come close to the wall. So it was like a double concert where the wall was the division. And we would hear them cheering and singing along from the other side. God, even now I get choked up. When we did “Heroes” it really felt anthemic, almost like a prayer. However well we do it these days, it’s almost like walking through it compared to that night, because it meant so much more. That’s the town where it was written, and that’s the particular situation that it was written about.

By then, Bob Dylan had been invited by a youth arm of the Communist Party to play in Treptower Park in the East on September 17, 1987, along with touring mates Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Roger McGuinn. Protests were building against the regime and the wall, and East German officials hoped to defuse tensions with a few signs of openness.

Naturally, the Stasi (East Germany’s notorious secret police) were on top of it. Their six-page preview was filed at their headquarters under “Robert Zimmerman, No. HA XX 17578.” It mainly covered logistics and security—no secret bugging of Dylan, apparently—and the dispersal of 81,000 tickets, with at least one-third going to party officials and their pals. The Stasi didn’t seem too worried that Dylan, then in a down period in his career, would prove to be a rabble-rouser, as he was merely “an old master of rock” with no particular “resonance” with the youth of the day. The crowd, they predicted, would be mostly middle-aged and older. Dylan would act in a “disciplined” way and not cause undo “emotions.”

In the end, the gig played out pretty much as the Stasi had anticipated. By most accounts, Dylan—whose lyrical work just earned him the 2016 Nobel Prize for literature—gave a rather lackluster performance (his norm for the time), consisting of a couple of Christian tunes mixed in with hits like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Rainy Day Women” and “Like a Rolling Stone.” He reportedly did not speak a single word from the stage.

This was not the case with Springsteen, who arrived in East Berlin 10 months later to play his biggest concert ever. More than 200,000 showed up, twice what Dylan had attracted. Springsteen opened, pointedly, with “Badlands,” but the indisputable highlight was his cover of “Chimes of Freedom,” a Dylan tune that Dylan himself had overlooked. The show, which in typical Springsteen style lasted nearly four hours, was beamed to millions of East Germans via state television. Many middle-aged Germans I interviewed for my book fondly recalled attending the performance or watching it on TV. “It was a nail in the coffin for East Germany,” one fan told the Guardian years later.

In Born to Run, Springsteen recounts a previous visit to East Berlin with bandmate Steve Van Zandt. “You could feel the boot,” he recalls. The wall, in Springsteen’s view, seemed almost “pornographic.” The experience helped shock the then-apolitical Van Zandt into decades of activism. “The power of the wall that split the world in two, its blunt, ugly, mesmerizing realness, couldn’t be underestimated,” Springsteen writes. “It was an offense to humanity.”

When Springsteen returned to East Berlin for his epic 1988 show, as I note in my own book, he unhappily discovered that the state was billing it as a “concert for the Sandinistas,” the pro-Communist Nicaraguans. So he delivered an impassioned speech. His German was grade-school level, but he got the point across: “I’m not here for any government. I’ve come to play rock and roll for you in the hope that one day all the barriers will be torn down.” East German officials backstage had somehow learned about Bruce’s original statement, which included the explosive word “walls,” and Springsteen’s manager, Jon Landau, had convinced him at the last minute to change it to “barriers.” But after finishing his statement, Springsteen quickly launched into “Chimes of Freedom,” which includes the key reference: “while the walls were tightening.”

The next day, he and the band “partied” at the East Berlin consulate, Springsteen writes, before heading back to the West to play a show for a mere 17,000 people—which “felt a lot less dramatic than what we’d just experienced.” Referring to the “stakes” of rock and roll, he writes, “The higher they’re pushed, the deeper and more thrilling the moment becomes. In East Germany in 1988, the center of the table was loaded down with a winner-take-all bounty that would explode into the liberating destruction of the Berlin Wall by the people.”

German historian Gerd Dietrich would later tell Rocking the Wall author Erik Kirschbaum, “Springsteen’s concert and speech certainly contributed in a large sense to the events leading up to the fall of the wall. It made people more eager for more and more change,” he said. “Springsteen aroused a greater interest in the West. It showed people how locked up they really were.”

As Springsteen himself would later put it, “Once in a while you play a place, you play a show that ends up staying inside of you, living with you for the rest of your life. East Berlin in 1988 was certainly one of them.”

Greg Mitchell is the author of The Tunnels: Escapes Under the Berlin Wall and the Historic Films the JFK White House Tried to Kill.

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When Bruce Springsteen Helped Destroy the Berlin Wall

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Even More Proof That Gun Laws Work

by MonroeW02xi Posted on October 12, 2016

Mother Jones

The rates of gun violence in the 10 states with the weakest gun laws are more than 3 times higher than those in the 10 states with the strongest gun laws. That’s one of the major findings of a new report from the Center for American Progress (CAP) that analyzes 10 indicators of firearm violence—including suicide, murder, fatal gun accidents, and mass shootings—in all 50 states and finds a “strong” correlation between gun violence and weak gun laws.

The states with the highest levels of gun violence include Louisiana, Alaska, Mississippi, West Virginia, and Alabama, which also have some of the weakest gun laws in the nation, according to CAP. States with relatively strict gun laws, such as Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, experience significantly lower levels of gun violence. While the report does not assess the impact of specific laws, it does note previous examples of how specific laws have affected gun crime. For example, when Connecticut implemented laws requiring a permit to purchase a gun and mandated background checks, gun-related homicides dropped 40 percent. In contrast, when Missouri eliminated the same requirements, its gun homicide rate increased by 25 percent.

Center for American Progress

“If you have good gun laws, the people in your state will in fact be safer, and if you have bad gun laws, people in your state—and people in other states—will be at risk,” Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy said in a press call about the study. “In many of the cases where violence plays out in Connecticut, we discover that the gun was purchased in a state that had loopholes that we don’t have in our own state.” Since the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, Connecticut has mandated background checks for all gun sales, required safer gun storage, limited the types of guns that can be sold, and required that all guns in the state be licensed. “In the two completed years that have been analyzed since we passed our updated gun laws, Connecticut has seen the sharpest drop in violent crime of any of the 50 states,” Malloy, a Democrat, said.

Meanwhile, “Florida has taken the exact opposite approach to dealing with gun violence,” said Mayor Andrew Gillum of Tallahassee, Florida. In the same call with reporters, Gillum noted that in response to an attempted mass shooting at a Florida University in 2015, the state legislature introduced a proposal to allow concealed carry on college campuses. He added that the legislature and governor “have taken affirmative steps to prevent local governments like mine from trying to take action” to address gun violence.

Under Florida law, local governments cannot regulate the use of weapons. “In my very own city, we have a gun law that says you can’t fire off weapons in city parks where kids play and our families picnic,” Gillum explained. In response, Tallahassee was sued by pro-gun groups including the Second Amendment Foundation and the National Rifle Association, as well as the state’s attorney general. “It’s extremely frustrating to try to work to keep our communities safe in a state when the legislature is actively working against you, and is beholden unfortunately to the powerful gun lobby,” Gillum said.

The new study builds on a growing body of research that has reached the same conclusion: Stricter gun laws are linked to lower rates of gun violence. The NRA has long rejected these findings. Speaking to the New York Times about the new report and those with similar findings that came before it, an NRA spokeswoman claimed that the research “cherry picked” evidence. As a counterpoint, she cited the work of the controversial researcher John Lott, whose widely discredited theory is summed up in the title of his best-known book: More Guns, Less Crime.

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Even More Proof That Gun Laws Work

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We fact-checked what Trump and Clinton said about energy at the debate

by gjrrkjujp Posted on October 10, 2016

Donald Trump told a few lies about energy during the debate Sunday night, while Hillary Clinton reiterated her warm feelings for natural gas.

In the last substantive question of the town hall–style debate, an audience member asked how the candidates’ energy policies would “meet our energy needs while at the same time remaining environmentally friendly and minimizing job loss for fossil power plant workers?”

Trump

Trump went first, cramming an impressive number of false and nonsensical statements into his two-minute answer. (On the upside, he demonstrated that he now knows what EPA stands for, correctly referring to it as the Environmental Protection Agency instead of “Department of Environmental.”) Here are the highlights:

• Trump: “[E]nergy is under siege by the Obama administration. … We are killing, absolutely killing, our energy business in this country.”

In fact: Total U.S. energy production has increased for the last six years in a row. The oil and gas sector has been booming during the Obama presidency, as have the solar and wind industries. Coal companies have been struggling — but that is largely not the fault of President Obama, just as the oil boom is largely not something he can take credit for.

• Trump: “I will bring our energy companies back. … They will make money. They will pay off our national debt. They will pay off our tremendous budget deficits.”

In fact: There is no remotely credible economic analysis to suggest that Trump’s proposals for expanded domestic fossil fuel extraction would generate enough additional tax revenue to close the budget deficit, much less pay off the existing national debt. It’s particularly implausible when you consider Trump’s massive tax-cut plans that would make both the deficit and debt considerably larger.

• Trump: “I’m all for alternative forms of energy, including wind, including solar, etc.”

In fact: Trump’s energy plan offers nothing to increase solar or wind energy production, but instead focuses on boosting fossil fuels.

• Trump: “There is a thing called clean coal.”

In fact: The hope that coal plants’ carbon emissions can be drastically reduced — either through technology that captures and sequesters the emissions or that converts coal to synthetic gas — burns eternal for the coal industry’s cheerleaders. But no one has actually significantly cut emissions at an economically viable coal plant. The promises of “clean coal” projects have not been fulfilled.

• Trump: “Foreign companies are now coming in and buying so many of our different plants, and then rejiggering the plant so they can take care of their oil.”

In fact: What is Trump trying to say with this gibberish? We have no idea.

Clinton

Clinton’s answer was, as one would expect, more cautious and tempered. She said, among other things, that she supports “moving toward more clean, renewable energy as quickly as we can, because I think we can be the 21st century clean-energy superpower and create millions of new jobs and businesses.” And her climate and energy plan would indeed promote renewable power.

But she also made some dubious statements herself:

• Clinton: “We are … producing a lot of natural gas, which serves as a bridge to more renewable fuels, and I think that’s an important transition.”

In fact: This comment surely set many climate activists’ teeth on edge — and not for the first time, as Clinton has been saying similar things for years. Many activists strongly disagree that natural gas should be part of a plan to shift to renewables and fight climate change. Multiple studies have indicated that natural gas is no better for the climate than coal when you consider the high rates of methane leakage in natural gas production and transport. 350.org, the aggressive anti–fossil fuel group, swiftly issued a statement criticizing that comment while praising the rest of Clinton’s response.

• Clinton: “[W]e are now, for the first time ever, energy independent. We are not dependent upon the Middle East. But the Middle East still controls a lot of the prices.”

In fact: Clinton was pandering to voter ignorance with her claim that the U.S. has become “energy independent.” Though U.S. oil production is up and oil imports are down, the country is still a net importer of crude oil and petroleum products. And as Clinton herself acknowledged, global oil prices are set by global supply and demand, so we will not be disentangled from the Middle East until we stop using so much oil, regardless of where it is drilled.

Climate?

Clinton, unlike Trump, did say that her energy plan includes “fighting climate change, because I think that’s a serious problem.” That was the entirety of either candidate’s nod to the “environmentally friendly” portion of the question.

Political discussion of energy still revolves mainly around how to produce more of it rather than how to produce it without burning up the planet.

Election Guide ★ 2016Making America Green AgainOur experts weigh in on the real issues at stake in this election

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We fact-checked what Trump and Clinton said about energy at the debate

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Exclusive: Central Park Five Members Blast Trump for Insisting They’re Guilty

by CarinIzd030521 Posted on October 7, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

After Donald Trump reaffirmed his long-held belief this week that the men known as the Central Park Five were guilty in an infamous, decades-old rape case, two members of the since-exonerated group blasted Trump in interviews with Mother Jones, calling him a “stunt artist” and saying “he’s gotten worse” since his involvement in their 1990 conviction.

“You have a person who’s supposed to be a very intelligent business man, and what I’m sure he would do if he was trying to purchase a property is do his due diligence,” Yusef Salaam told me Friday, noting that Trump continued to ignore the facts of the Central Park Five case. “For somebody to still stand on the side of injustice like Donald Trump is, that becomes a very scary place to be.”

In a statement to CNN this week, Trump said he still believed the Central Park Five were guilty. “They admitted they were guilty,” he told CNN’s Miguel Marquez. “The police doing the original investigation say they were guilty. The fact that the case was settled with so much evidence against them is outrageous. And the woman, so badly injured, will never be the same.”

In 1989, five black and Latino teenagers were convicted of brutally attacking a young white jogger in New York City’s Central Park. The crime, which came at the height of the crack epidemic and skyrocketing crime rates, enflamed racial tension in the city. About two weeks after the incident, Trump published a full-page ad in four major New York newspapers calling for the teens to be brought to justice—and suggesting that they should face the death penalty. But in 2002, all five men—who spent between 6 and 13 years in prison—were exonerated based on DNA evidence and a confession from the actual perpetrator, whose DNA was shown to match evidence at the scene.

Mother Jones talked to two members of the Central Park Five—Salaam and Korey Wise—about Trump’s role in their case, their thoughts on his presidential candidacy, and his latest comments about their case. Not surprisingly, neither is happy to see one of their main antagonists on the national stage day in and day out. Nor is a third member of the group, Raymond Santana, who skewered Trump on Twitter:

Salaam, who was 15 when he was jailed for the assault, said he believes Trump played a crucial role in the media campaign against him.

“Trump was one of the fire starters—really the main fire starter—because his name held a lot more weight,” he said. His ad facilitated “the conviction that was going to happen in the public arena prior to us even getting into the courthouse.”

Wise told me he only learned about Trump’s ad after watching a documentary on his case several years ago. After seeing it, he understood why the case had become so incredibly charged. “I said, ‘Wow! Wow! Wow!'” Wise said. “This is where a great deal of the energy that was directed at me in terms of physical threats” came from.

“The ad was talking about and goes specifically into fears that the public was having at that particular time,” Salaam told me. “He’s talking about how ‘we’ve had to give up our leisurely stroll in the playground, and we can’t ride our bikes, or we can’t walk around in the streets because now we’re hostages, ruled by the laws of the streets.'” Trump has revisited those themes in his presidential campaign, often citing gun violence in cities like Chicago as indicative of a breakdown in “law and order,” which he insists he can restore.

Salaam also suggested that Trump was a hypocrite for attacking Hillary Clinton over her “superpredator” remarks in the first presidential debate. “She well within her right could have said, ‘Well you took out a full-page ad calling for the execution—the lynching, the death—of young black and Latino men—and you have never apologized.'”

More than 25 years later, Trump hasn’t changed, Salaam said. “As a matter of fact, he’s gotten worse,” he said. “He believes in everything he’s put out there—the racial vision he’s created.”

For his part, Wise said he doesn’t think about what a Trump presidency would mean because he doesn’t take him seriously: “He’s a stunt artist…He follows publicity.”

But Salaam had a bleaker assessment of what the country would look like with Trump as commander in chief: “If he becomes president, what is that going to mean for the people who are losing their lives in the street? This ‘law and order’ is going to be a very, very scary thing for us as a people.”

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Exclusive: Central Park Five Members Blast Trump for Insisting They’re Guilty

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We Have Effective Treatment for Hepatitis C. So Why Don’t States Give It to 100,000 Inmates?

by IsabellaS44 Posted on October 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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Less than 1 percent of inmates with hepatitis C are receiving treatment in state prisons, according to a new study by prison officials, doctors, and researchers. It’s largely because prisons can’t afford the drugs they need to fight the dangerous liver disease that spreads through blood and bodily fluids.

Hepatitis C kills more Americans than any other infectious disease, including HIV and tuberculosis; about 17 percent of the prison population in America is suffering from it, compared with 1 percent of the general population. New treatments have been developed but are extremely expensive, so over the last two years, inmates in Tennessee, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania have sued for access to the drugs.

The study, published in Health Affairs, comes on the heels of those lawsuits. It was conducted by researchers at Yale University in collaboration with the Association of State Correctional Administrators, which includes the heads of corrections agencies in every state as well as the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Researchers collected data from 41 states about hepatitis C infections and treatment in prisons. They found that more than 106,000 inmates in state prisons had the disease as of January 2015, and of those, only about 950, or less than 0.9 percent were being treated.

Prison officials who helped conduct the study have blamed the high cost of treatment. In 2013, new drugs were released that have proved very effective, curing the infection in 90 percent of cases in a few months. (Previous treatment options cured roughly half of cases, took much longer, and resulted in debilitating side effects.) But the cost of the new drugs can be prohibitive: A 12-week course of medication can range from $54,600 to $94,500, depending on the particular drug.

Some government agencies can get discounts. The federal prison system receives 24 percent off, while the Department of Veterans Affairs may have a discount of 50 percent, the researchers found. But state prisons aren’t so lucky. Many of them get a discount of less than 10 percent, and one state gets no discount at all. As a result, state prison officials say they must make tough choices about whom to treat.

Treating hepatitis C patients “requires resources and discounts we don’t have,” A.T. Wall, director of the Rhode Island Department of Corrections and a co-author of the study, said in a statement. “What we desperately need are less costly drugs and more funding.”

Corrections departments in 16 states reported spending at least 10 percent of their total budget for drugs on hepatitis C medication. But states could actually save money in the long run if they invest in treatment right away, the researchers noted. When left untreated, patients with hepatitis C may need a liver transplant, which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and they can spread the infection to others. To get the drugs for less money, the researchers encouraged state prisons to partner with qualified health centers that can receive discounts through a federal program.

Thomas Castelli, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union who is representing inmates in Tennessee, said in a statement, “Incarcerating people under conditions that erode their health, safety and human dignity amounts to cruel and unusual punishment, which not only has devastating long-term effects for those individuals, but which undermines the purported purpose of a rehabilitative criminal justice system.”

Health Affairs

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We Have Effective Treatment for Hepatitis C. So Why Don’t States Give It to 100,000 Inmates?

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