WHAT ABOUT CUOMO?

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo

 In recent days, I have listened to and read about every stance imaginable regarding persistently increasing reports of gender-related impropriety by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. The mass media in general have been pretty ready to throw the governor under the bus, and calls for his resignation have been widespread. Even CNN, where Governor Cuomo’s brother Chris is one of the major anchors, has been highly critical and has gone out of its way—perhaps in the interest of perceived objectivity—to bring in critical outside commentators to discuss the issue. Meanwhile, the editorial board of the New York State capital’s top paper, the Hearst Corporation-owned Times-Union of Albany, which had three times backed Cuomo’s gubernatorial candidacy, last week ran an editorial entitled Resign, Mr. Cuomo. Additionally, there is a billboard campaign in New York City demanding that Cuomo “resign now.”

Nor is the media, in this case, in the position of challenging the governor’s party, since New York Democrats have pretty unanimously called on Cuomo to resign, as have US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, US congressional representative for New York Kristen Gillibrand, and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. It was only among some of my more liberal contacts on the social media and among some other friends and colleagues where I heard calls for leniency, in some cases because they felt Cuomo was too outstanding a leader for the party and the country to lose, and in others because of the “whataboutism” issue of the gutter-low bar set by former President Donald Trump who had apparently done far worse to women and been given (or paid for) a pass.

As often happens with sex scandals, this one comes saddled on the back of an actual administrative scandal—all but proven in a report from the New York State attorney general’s office—regarding a cover-up allegedly orchestrated by Cuomo’s administration to fudge the numbers on COVID-related deaths in state nursing homes by as much as fifty percent. The idea of this maneuver was to make it appear that the state government had the COVID situation in rest homes much more under control than it actually did, the excuse being that Cuomo feared Donald Trump’s team could use the real, devastatingly higher nursing home death toll against Democrats and indeed against the governor himself in the then upcoming 2020 elections. That was at a time when Cuomo was signing a deal for a book about his generally successful fight against the pandemic that had completely crippled New York City, and when there was even talk of his being an alternative to Joe Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination in light of his burgeoning superstar hero status in the war on COVID.

But focus has been almost completely deflected away from the nursing home scandal to the more titillating topic of sexual impropriety, if indeed this can be called that, since what has been described by the alleged victims, though clearly inappropriate, sounds more like gender-related abuse of power and attendant peccadilloes than any sort of sexual assault, especially when compared to accusations regarding Donald Trump’s unpunished sexist exploits.

A half dozen accusers now lead the pack against Cuomo. The first to accuse him of sexual harassment was former aide Lindsey Boylan. In a piece that she posted on the social media platform Medium, Boylan claimed that the governor had created a culture of “sexual harassment and bullying” within his administration. She claimed that this culture was “so pervasive that it is not only condoned but expected.”

Ruch, Boylan and Bennett, the first three

In the article, Boylan talks about how she learned from colleagues that the governor had developed “a crush” on her, and tells about how her boss, Cuomo’s office director Stephanie Benton, told her in an email that Cuomo thought she and his rumored former girlfriend Lisa Shields looked so much alike that they “could be sisters” but that Boylan was “the better looking sister.” From then on, Boylan said, Cuomo began referring to her as “Lisa” in front of other colleagues and she began worrying about situations in which she might be left alone with the governor.

On one such occasion, Boylan claims Cuomo called her into his office alone to show her a cigar box that Bill Clinton had given him. She found it suggestive and understood that the governor was making a pointed reference to former Clinton intern Monica Lewinsky’s claim that during repeated Oval Office sexual encounters between her and the former president, Clinton had used a cigar on her as a sex toy. Boylan also claims that at another point, Cuomo kissed her without her consent.

A second accuser, Charlotte Bennett, says that Cuomo asked her probing questions about her sex life, asked her if she had ever been “with an older man” and told her he had no problem dating women over twenty-two—Bennett was twenty-five at the time. “I understood that the governor wanted to sleep with me,” Bennett claims, “and was wondering how I was going to get out of it.”

Another accuser, Anna Ruch, didn’t work for the governor but is a former member of the Obama administration and worked on Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign. She claims that on her first meeting with Cuomo at a wedding reception in New York City, he took her face in his hands and asked if he could kiss her. She says she found his behavior so inappropriate that she was “confused and shocked and embarrassed.” Ruch says that she was so taken by surprise that she couldn’t find words to respond and simply “turned my head away.”

Still another woman, Karen Hinton, claims Cuomo was already doing this sort of thing over twenty years ago, when he was Housing and Urban Development secretary under Bill Clinton. At the time, Hinton was one of Cuomo’s top aides. She says that when they were working together in a California hotel room, Cuomo started asking her a lot of personal questions. “I was uncomfortable with the conversation,” Hinton said in a TV interview. “So I stood up to leave and he walked across from his couch and embraced me intimately. It was not just a hug. It was an intimate embrace. I pulled away. He brought me back. I pulled away again and I said, 'Look, I need some sleep, I am going.'” Hinton went on to say that, to her mind, “It was inappropriate. We both were married. I worked for him and it was too much to make it so personal and intimate.”

Another former aide, Ana Liss, says that she was made to feel like “just a skirt” in the Governor's presence. Telling her story to the Wall Street Journal, Liss says Cuomo consistently addressed her as “sweetheart”, asked if she had a boyfriend, touched her “lower back” and on one occasion took her hand and kissed it. She says she at first tried to write it off as “harmless flirtations” but that the situation grew ever more uncomfortable. So much so that it was “not appropriate, really, in any setting.”

In its editorial, the Albany Times-Union news management team said that it “had not taken lightly” its decision to withdraw support from the governor, adding that, “He has brought to fruition a host of important progressive goals. But between his manipulation of state ethics bodies, multiple allegations of sexual harassment and these latest revelations on nursing home deaths, he has lost the credibility he needs to lead this state, especially in the midst of a public health crisis.”

If we’re keeping our priorities straight, clearly the main issue here is to what extent Governor Cuomo and his team, for a question of political convenience, sought to manipulate COVID death toll figures in an attempt to keep the real gravity of state nursing home fatalities a secret from the public. Although his actions may not have directly caused any additional deaths, they did indeed skew the level of awareness regarding the effects of the pandemic. Worse still, the inevitable revelation of the attempted cover-up only served to further undermine already abysmal levels of public trust in government data regarding the worst health crisis in a century, at a time when people’s adherence to federal guidelines for bringing this plague under control couldn’t be more crucial.

The hypocrisy of all this is not lost on even mildly objective observers, since Democrats in general and Cuomo in particular have been critical of the GOP under Trump for downplaying the pandemic and for denying the gravity of the rising death toll. Cuomo’s doing the same with the New York State nursing home deaths has immediately permitted Trump supporters to weaponize the revelation. After the many years that he has spent in politics and coming as he does from a bloodline of politicians, the governor should have known that something this big could not be kept secret. Considering that, at the very least, he should have made sure that his otherwise spectacular handling of the pandemic was absolutely transparent from the outset.

Ana Liss and Karen Hinton add voices to the mix

Which brings us back to the other scandal, since what has apparently been in play in both cases is arrogance—that most authoritarian of emotions. The greatest downfall of the powerful is to believe their own hype. There is something chillingly similar, if clearly less crass, about Donald Trump’s Access Hollywood tape and the kind of behavior Cuomo’s accusers are attributing to him. Trump revealed in that now infamous tape that he truly believed that being a star gave him the right to do whatever he wanted with other people, and more particularly, with young women, even to the extent of reaching out and touching whatever part of them he wished whenever he wanted to.

Cuomo has reportedly been somewhat less obvious about this. But if what an increasing number of his female staffers are alleging is true, that idea of his rock star status is at the back of his mind. In his alleged sexual harassment of—or at least inappropriate behavior toward—young women subordinates like Lindsey Boylan, Charlotte Bennett or Ana Liss, there seems to be a tacit inference on his part that either any attractive female thirty or forty years his junior should be thrilled to receive the advances of a guy like him because he isn’t just any senior citizen, but a star politician with a whole other aura, or he is so arrogantly authoritarian that he really doesn’t care what these women think because he holds the future of their careers in his hands. In either case, the premise is sexist, elitist and contemptible, because it doesn’t, for a second, take the other person’s rights or desires or personal lives into account.

Cuomo for his part has made a half-hearted and qualified apology in which his quavering voice and damp eyes seemed to indicate sincerity. But his subsequent comments on the affair have tended to dismiss the allegations of his accusers as a misunderstanding and an exaggeration of the facts. Using the excuse, for instance—as Cuomo did about Charlotte Bennett—that her perception of his overly intimate treatment of her as sexual harassment was off base because he considered himself her “mentor” is disingenuous to say the least. It begs the question of whether a young woman in the employ of “a great man” must accept as a normal part of the “mentoring process” being subjected to probing personal questions and sexual innuendo from a male superior old enough to be her grandfather—or from any boss for that matter.

Sadly enough, however, in both the public and private sectors, this is far too often the case. And this is why the MeToo movement was formed, as a means of bringing cases of on-the-job sexual harassment and, indeed, of sexual assault to the forefront and to seek punishment for its perpetrators. The governor is no stranger to this phenomenon and was one of the first of powerful men to come out publicly in support of it. Meanwhile, however, on a personal level, Cuomo can’t seem to shake the antiquated culture of objectifying and sexually exploiting women in the workplace that has sadly been part and parcel of the era in which he was forming his impressive political career.

There is no doubt that Governor Cuomo’s political enemies in the Republican Party and indeed his rivals in the Democratic Party (such as Mayor de Blasio) are milking his current woes for every political point they can possibly gain. But there are a couple of questions that those who have angrily charged that Cuomo “is being framed”—and I confess to being one of them before I gave the matter a lot deeper thought—should be asking themselves.

The first one is this: Why, no matter how hard they tried—and you just know they did—to dig up personal dirt on former presidents Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama were their political enemies unable to do so? Answer: Because there was no “there-there”. They kept the slate clean in their private lives, and they certainly didn’t seek to intimately fraternize with or sexually exploit their female staff members, but rather, treated them with utmost respect. Bill Clinton, meanwhile, no matter how great his achievements or how beneficial to the country his presidency may have been, will always be remembered at a grassroots level as the perv-president who repeatedly had sex in the Oval Office with an intern half his age.

Cuomo, proud father of three daughters...

And the second one is this: When is “harmless flirtation” or “playful banter”, not merely harmless flirtation or playful banter? Answer: When the person initiating it is someone too powerful to challenge without the threat of damage to one’s career advancement. Worse still, when such “banter” and “flirtation” belies a perceived sexual proposition that makes the target have to ask herself: Is my career really worth challenging this and carrying it to its ultimate consequences (and maybe getting blackballed in the process) or, failing that, is it worth sleeping with the boss in hopes that he will do me no harm in the future?

No subordinate should have to ask herself (or, far less often, himself) that question. And if one does have to pose it, then there is clearly sexual impropriety in the workplace.

Finally, I have a rhetorical question for Governor Cuomo himself. He has three lovely daughters with his former wife, Kerry Kennedy, daughter of the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy. By all accounts, Cuomo and his wife did an excellent job of bringing their three girls up and all three appear talented, intelligent and well-educated. The kind of young women that could very well end up working for a powerful man like the governor himself. If that should happen, how will Cuomo feel if he learns that one or all three of them have been made to feel that their careers are in jeopardy if they don’t sleep with the boss? Perhaps he should think that over and re-think his apology.

 

THE COMPLEX LEGACY OF CARLOS MENEM

When former Argentine President Carlos Saúl Menem died on Valentine’s Day, it marked the departure of one of the most controversial figures in contemporary Argentine politics. Just after the news of his death broke, an American friend asked me on Facebook what I thought of him, since, although born in the American Midwest, I’ve lived most of my adult life in Argentina. Her question made me realize that there was no easy answer, so I said, “It’s complicated. Let me think about it.”

Menem - provincial caudillo

I’ve thought about it. It would be easy for me to say I’m no fan of Carlos Menem’s. To state that his presidency and personal life were fraught with controversy and charges of corruption and criminal behavior would be accurate. But it would also be true to say that for almost a decade he provided the common citizens of his country with a kind of on-the-street economic stability like many had never known in their lifetime. And he did so while inserting Argentina briefly back into “the concert of nations”—where it had once figured among the world’s top ten trading countries—if at tremendous future cost to the economy and to political stability. 

It would also be accurate to say that while he wrapped himself in the flag of Peronism and frequently invoked the person and political philosophy of Argentina’s mid-twentieth-century strongman General Juan Domingo Perón—who, although dead since 1974, still today casts a long and enduring shadow on Argentine politics—he turned that movement on its head. Indeed, he basically did exactly the opposite, politically and economically speaking, of everything Perón had ostensibly stood for. Instead of championing state control of the economy, nationalization of foreign assets and a position of non-alignment with the bipolar world powers of the Cold War era as Perón had done, Menem embraced the neoliberal bent of Reaganism, firmly aligned the country with the US, sent troops to be part of Coalition and UN peace-keeping forces in the Gulf and Kosovo, and introduced a wave of privatizations that stripped Argentina of practically every state enterprise that it had ever owned—an enormous state military-industrial complex that had been built over the course of the previous century and that had been expanded in the half-century from the days when Perón was in his heyday. And instead of prioritizing the Argentine worker and the labor unions that Perón had adopted as his own, he gave almost pandering priority to big business and its anti-labor whims.

Fair too, however, would be to say that what Menem most had in common with Perón was political pragmatism. Both were capable of agile shifts in party dogma in accordance with political expediency at any given time. Clearly, in the case of Perón, it was that kind of cynical pragmatism that created a pan-Argentine political movement that spanned the ideological spectrum from the far right to the far left and that fostered sometimes violent in-fighting between the two in the process of using one as a political tool only then to purge it when it had served its purpose.

The last time Perón did this was when, in 1973, he returned to power, after almost eighteen years in Spanish exile. He was able to do so thanks in large measure to armed insurgent pressure brought to bear on the then-military regime by the Montoneros neo-Peronist urban guerrilla organization and the Marxist-Leninist People’s Revolutionary Army. Once reinstalled in the presidency, Perón spurned Montonero demands for the share of political power they felt they had earned and sicked the old ultra-right-wing Peronist “Iron Guard” on them, which would soon morph into the paramilitary Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance after Perón’s death a year later—giving rise to a cycle of tit for tat left and right-wing violence that would eventually be known to historians as “The Dirty War”, and which devolved into a military coup in 1976.

Argentine strongman Juan D. Perón

Perhaps this is why, even today, analysts and historians are hard-put to define what “a real Peronist is”, since that political figure can be whatever the movement’s leadership (which is almost always the product of vicious in-fighting) wants it to be at any given moment in time. As such, Carlos Menem was a Peronist by definition as much as he was not a Peronist at all, although, in his day, he was the unquestionable leader of the movement and therefore defined the meaning of the word according to his own convenience.

The nineties were the era of Menem. He was in office from 1989 through 1999, thanks to a Constitutional reform sponsored by his administration. When he took office, there were no consecutive elections for Argentine presidents, who served a single six-year term, and could only run again after a six-year absence from power. Under the Constitutional reform, the presidential term was shortened to four years, but, as under the US Constitution, with the possibility of re-election for another four years.

It was argued at the time by opposition analysts that while the reform introduced popular and highly accepted measures, such as an anti-discrimination clause and eleven articles specifically safeguarding human rights, these had been employed as a ruse to facilitate Menem’s own reelection aspirations and to provide him with an entire decade in power. As such, it was also argued that this aspect of the new Constitutional reform shouldn’t be applicable to the president who had promoted it or who had been elected under the terms of the former Constitution. He should, then, have to leave office after his original six-year term. But Menem was at the peak of his power at the time and his camp won out.

Not content with that, Menem’s legal eagles tried to make a case for his mounting another run for the presidency in 1999, the argument being that his second term of four years had been served under the norms of a new Constitution and that this gave him the right to run for a second four-year term (a stance that became known as the “re-reelection” scheme), but his Justicialist (Peronist) Party’s loss of the 1997 mid-term elections to an opposition coalition rendered the attempt at remaining in office for a third term untenable.

Throughout his time as president and for several years beyond, he was the head of the Justicialist Party and dictated, to a large extent, its policies. Identifying himself unabashedly as a Peronist, his approach to government nevertheless became known as “Menemism”.

His religion was, first and foremost, politics. Of Syrian-Lebanese descent, Menem was brought up as a Sunni Muslim, but on entering politics converted to Catholicism. His motives for this seem clear, since the second article of the National Constitution (both the original and reformed versions) states that the official religion of the Federal Government is Roman Catholic. His first wife, Zulema Yoma, remained Islamic throughout their twenty-five-year marriage (which ended in divorce during the early part of Menem’s presidency), despite her husband’s conversion.

As I mentioned before, Menem’s claim to fame was his handling of the long recalcitrant Argentine economy. One much-heralded plan after another had failed over the years since the nineteen-sixties when Argentina had first started suffering rampant inflation and currency devaluation followed by one “reset” after another.

When I first arrived in Argentina in 1973, two currencies—new pesos (or pesos ley) and old pesos—circulated simultaneously and prices were often exhibited in both. I recall that, at the time, the cost of a newspaper or a cup of coffee was one peso ley, or a thousand old pesos. In other words, the devaluation had clipped three zeros off of the currency. More surreal still, however, was the fact that under the last Peronist administration headed by Perón himself, which took office practically on my arrival in Buenos Aires, my pay at the newspaper where I was a reporter was equivalent to under fifty dollars a month, but my wife and I could live modestly well on that.

I think the managing editor only made a little over a hundred dollars a month at that time. But it was like Monopoly money. As long as you remained on the game board in Argentina, your pesos had real-economy value. So we all moonlighted as free-lance correspondents for international publications to make some real-world money because, if not, we were basically held hostage by the Argentine economy and couldn’t afford to travel outside of the country’s borders.

Perón’s most eloquent response to criticism about this state of affairs came at a rally where he said everyone seemed to be preoccupied with the dollar-peso parity. Who cared, he asked the crowd, what the dollar-peso parity was? This was Argentina, where people earned and spent pesos. Then pointing to a laborer in the crowd, he said, “How about you, pal, when was the last time you saw a dollar?”

Martínez de Hoz (left) with dictator Jorge R. Videla

This period was followed by a new economic revamp under the military junta that replaced the Peronist government, following a coup d’état and the introduction of the “peso fuerte” with which several zeros were again knocked off of the currency. This time it was pegged to a floating exchange system created by conservative “Chicago school”, Cambridge-educated economist José Martínez de Hoz who served as the regime’s first economy minister. But that system also had disastrous results. I recall that after making the equivalent of less than six hundred dollars a year less than five years earlier, I was now making over forty thousand dollars a year working at the same newspaper, at a time when, in the US, a new Chevy Impala cost under five thousand dollars, and a good dress shirt ran eight dollars. Only problem was, in Argentina an equivalent car cost forty thousand and a similar dress shirt one hundred. This was when Argentines traveled the world, feeling flush and bringing back everything imaginable from abroad that they couldn’t afford to buy at home. Their shopaholic battle cry on these foreign purchase expeditions was “dame dos” (give me two).

With the return of democracy in 1983 and the overwhelming vote to elect Radical Party candidate Dr. Raúl Alfonsín, whose win, for the next five years, managed to push both the Peronists and the military into the background, yet another attempt was made to bring the economy to heel. Once again, several zeros were lopped off of the currency and the government even changed its name entirely, now calling it the austral. The new currency opened at an exchange parity of more than a dollar eighty per austral to which my contacts in the business section of the American Embassy rolled their eyes as if to say, “Yeah, right, like that’s gonna work.”

But Alfonsín created the economic reform in combination with an incipient opening of the economy to foreign investment and expanded foreign trade. Areas like oil and fishing that had long been very limited for foreign investors were suddenly being tendered on the international market and this seemed like a good sign to Western observers. But Alfonsín’s negotiation of the enormous foreign debt that he inherited did not go well and the economy soon went south. President Alfonsín’s legacy to Argentina was new-found observance of the sanctity of human and civil rights and the rule of law, and one of its most democratic administrations in history, which gained ethical respect for the nation in foreign diplomatic circles. But that made no real difference where the rubber met the road, once the bottom fell out of the economy.

Alfonsín and Menem - peaceful transfer

In its final days the Alfonsín government was confronted with mass supermarket lootings and Peronist-led general strikes. After meeting at the Presidential Residence at Olivos with Peronist presidential candidate Carlos Menem, then-governor of his native La Rioja Province, Alfonsín agreed to early elections, which Menem won handily against the Radical Party candidate Eduardo Angelóz. And with hyper-inflation soaring out of control, Alfonsín handed over power to Menem five months before the end of his six-year term. It was the first peaceful democratic transfer of power in Argentina since the nineteen-thirties, and marked the end of constant pendulum swings between civilian and military rule in the country.

At that time, however, I remember standing in line to take a bus and thinking that the bill I was holding in my hand to pay the fare, and from which I would get scant change in return, had been worth a thousand dollars at the outset of the Alfonsín administration. It was not clear to anyone what Menem planned to do to get the country back on track. It wasn’t even clear who he was, other than a mutton-chopped Peronist populist caudillo from a province with a population of only about three hundred-fifty thousand.

But he quickly proved himself capable of shaking things up. Pragmatic as Perón himself, Menem swiftly moved to strike a pact with the most diverse sectors of Argentine society, drawing strongly on support from the most iconic of Argentine businessmen who had long been enemies of Perón, former Montoneros guerrilla organization members, who had once kidnapped business leaders for ransom, military leaders who, after the 1976 coup had held Menem himself prisoner for several years, members of the clergy and members of a stubbornly undemocratic group of field-grade officers in the military who had threatened to overthrow Alfonsín’s government and remained a threat to his successor.

With this broad consensus, Menem struck while the iron was hot and immediately began opening up the economy to foreign investment, vastly expanded imports and foreign trade, initiated negotiations with international creditors and then tackled hyperinflation. He did this by returning to the peso (yet another new peso) which his economy minister, Harvard-educated economist Domingo Cavallo, pegged to the dollar at a constant parity of one peso equals one dollar. This parity was maintained through a policy of so-called “convertibility”, by which pesos and dollars could be transacted, paid, saved and spent interchangeably, thus taking all pressure off of the exchange rate, and off of inflation as well.

What this meant was that, for the first time in at least a quarter-century, Argentines knew what things cost, because the economy was dollarized in terms of both prices and wages. It was a tremendous relief to a population long accustomed to expecting bad surprises with every purchase and terrified of what could happen to loans, mortgages and other types of credit that they might take out for longer than a month at a time. Suddenly, credit was viable in Argentina, and the government moved to quickly “bankerize” the economy with the introduction of bank accounts in both pesos and dollars and the widespread use of credit and debit cards.

The one to one convertibility measure remained in effect for the entire time that Menem was in office and created a kind of domestic confidence in the economy that young to middle-aged Argentines had never known before. And while the unemployment rate tended to run higher than historic levels, there was new demand for highly qualified skills which even brought back Argentine professionals from abroad who had been previously lost to the “brain drain” of earlier decades.

Menem’s government financed all of this by selling off vast government business assets, reducing state employment rolls to bare-bones levels, slashing subsidies and opening the economy to private competition. Over the course of his presidency the state divested interests in oil, insurance, shipping, aviation, electric power, natural gas distribution, telecommunications, steel, tourism, real estate, postal services, health care, meat-packing and a variety of other areas of interest. Many of these divestitures ended up in the hands of foreign multinationals, some of which were also the country’s creditors.

In some cases these privatizations were highly successful, as in the case of the telecommunications system which, prior to its sale to Telefónica of Spain and Telecom of France, was one of the semi-industrialized world’s worst. Phone lines were so scarce in Buenos Aires that people were on waiting lists for literally decades to get one, and the price of an apartment or house could vary by thousands of dollars on the basis of whether or not it came with a telephone line. Ancient exchanges and connections made the phone system completely unreliable, especially for long-distance or international services, which were strictly operator-assisted. The privatization contracts included strict infrastructure and technology goals which took Argentina’s land line system from being obsolete and highly limited to being a modern, well-functioning, ever more available service. And the new cellphone technology that was introduced was state of the art and very widely distributed.

Menem - second term, a decade in power

But many if not most of the other privatizations were plagued by errors, corruption and scant responsibilities for the private investors that took them over and that, all too frequently, held ironclad concessions for decades into the future. The results of these failed transactions only started to become obvious toward the end of Menem’s decade in power and were then passed on to future administrations that have been suffering the consequences ever since.

Of Menem’s highly uneven first and second terms in office, La Nación, a major Argentine mass circulation daily, wrote in its editorial section: “The results of (his) economic policy were reflected in an anticipated entry into the globalized world that was built after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in a rapid modernization of the country's productive infrastructure, and stability, which is the basis of long-term growth. Unfortunately, Menem's reformist drive collapsed when his second administration began. His program of structural transformation for the country was interrupted and many strategic changes that were essential in order for the reforms of the previous period to produce the expected results were not executed.”

But the controversies surrounding his presidency expanded far beyond policy. For instance, he was accused during his tenure and later tried for illegal arms trafficking. This involved the clandestine sale in 1991 of Argentine-made military-grade weapons to Croatia, which, at the time, was at war with Yugoslavia, and in 1996 to Ecuador, which the year before had been involved in the brief Alta Cenepa War with its neighbor, Peru.  He was held under house arrest from June to November of 2001, on charges surrounding these arms sales but later fled with his second wife, Cecilia Bolocco, and their infant son to her native Chile. The Chilean government, through it's Supreme Court, refused requests for his extradition.

Photo-journalist José Luis Cabezas

When in 2004, Argentina’s new Peronist President Néstor Kirchner had warrants for Menem’s arrest canceled, the former president returned to the country, where he faced new charges of embezzlement and failing to declare funds that he had in a Swiss bank account. It wasn’t until 2013, under the administration of Kirchner’s widow, Cristina Fernández, that he was acquitted of those charges. He was, however, previously sentenced to seven years in prison for the arms trafficking charge, and eventually to four and a half years for embezzlement and bribery but was immune to incarceration on either sentence due to his status as a member of the Senate. 

Yabrán - the pic that killed Cabezas

Menem was also the subject of a probe into the 1995 explosion of a munitions factory in Río Tercero, Córdoba Province, which killed seven people, injured three hundred others and flattened part of the town. The explosion was suspected of being intentional as part of an attempt to cover up the illegal arms sales for which Menem was under investigation. This incident has continued to haunt him for life. Menem was scheduled to attend a trial this week in which he was to be indicted on a charge of “indirect responsibility”, but died before his court date.

A shadowy figure called Alfredo Yabrán who worked closely with Menem’s government and operated international airport warehousing, was suspected of involvement in the arms trafficking operations as well. After a news magazine photographer called José Luis Cabezas snapped a picture of the elusive businessman at a beach resort on 1997, the reporter was kidnapped, tortured and murdered, and his body incinerated in his rented car. The ensuing scandal embarrassed Menem’s administration and Yabrán was suddenly a marked man. During a police raid on his home, Yabrán subsequently died of a shotgun blast to the face. His death was ruled “suicide”.

Israeli Embassy bombing

Perhaps the broadest international coverage was garnered by accusations that Menem had covered up the conspiracy that led to two infamous terrorist attacks on Argentina’s Jewish Community. On March 17, 1992, the Israeli Embassy in downtown Buenos Aires was the target of a suicide bomb attack that demolished the building and left twenty-nine dead and two hundred forty-two injured.  Two years later, on July 18, 1994, a suicide car bomb attack destroyed the Argentine Mutual Israelite Association (AMIA) in mid-town Buenos Aires, killing eighty-five people and injuring hundreds more. Although no one has ever been brought to justice for the two incidents—the two worst terrorist attacks ever perpetrated in Argentina and among some of the worst worldwide—there has been persistent evidence of direct involvement by agents of the Iranian government. Just as persistently, Menem has been accused of involvement in the cover-up surrounding both bombings.

Decades later, during the last year of the presidency of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Federal Prosecutor Alberto Nisman leveled formal charges at Menem for the cover-up, but the case simply went away after Nisman was found dead in the bathroom of his apartment, with a gunshot wound to the head. The Kirchner government portrayed Nisman’s death as “a suicide”, but Nisman’s family and independent investigators suspected homicide.

AMIA bombing

Obviously, it was of utmost importance to the former president to remain politically relevant, less because of his leadership vocation than as a means of surviving beyond prison walls. Ever the provincial caudillo, Carlos Menem managed to hold onto his senatorial seat—and his legal immunity—for two decades, until his death earlier this month at the age of ninety, when everything he ever was or had been left the realm of the present and passed into the pages of Argentine history.

 

THE SECOND ACQUITTAL OF DONALD J. TRUMP

 

This past weekend, the Republican Party leadership and the vast majority of its politicians decided where they stood. Would they defend the party’s traditions of conservatism, American unity, law and order and liberal democracy, or would they underscore still further the party’s vertiginous downward spiral into the sordid depths of populism, personality cultism, vigilante violence and mob rule over the will of the majority and over the rule of law? In the end—and, unfortunately, surprising to no one—they chose the latter.

Earlier in the week, GOP senators (ad hoc jurors in the second impeachment trial of ex-President Donald J. Trump), like their Democratic colleagues, heard the cogent and well-researched presentation of congressional impeachment managers laying out the case against Trump on the charge of inciting insurrection against the United States of America. Their case was illustrated by all too familiar video footage of the former president’s rabble-rousing speech given on the Ellipse near the White House on January 6^th and of the frenzied mob then following Trump’s instructions to go to the Capitol, where its members proceeded to clash violently with police and to enter the building by force, vandalizing the hallowed halls of Congress and searching for narrowly evacuated members of the congressional opposition, as well as dissenting members of the GOP (including Vice-President Mike Pence) whom they were promising to lynch.

But the presentation also included a great deal of new, formerly undisclosed footage that proved graphically violent and from which a number of members of Congress turned their eyes away—some because it was too painful for them to watch, but others because they were seeking, cynically, to demonstrate that they had nothing to do with this process and considered it politics as usual in the era of Trump. It didn’t matter to them that part of what they were watching was the brutal mob-murder of Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, or the desperate bravery of Officer Eugene Goodman who, armed only with a billy club, stood off dozens of insurrectionists, making himself their target, until his colleagues could seal the Senate chamber and until he could taunt the rioters up the stairs to where police backup was waiting. It didn’t matter that they were seeing the violation of the congressional inner sanctum, the Executive-inspired terrorist raiding of another co-equal branch of government, the subversion of democracy by the followers of a president sworn to defend it. It didn’t matter that they, as members of the so-called “party of law and order” were watching how seditious thugs clubbed, mauled, abused and injured more than one hundred forty guardians of the Capitol in order to try and stop the democratic process by force and to maintain a would-be tyrant in power.

Their minds were made up before the trial ever began, despite swearing an oath to be impartial jurors, to say nothing of their standing oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United
States of America. They saw what everybody else saw. A national tragedy, unique in the two and a half century-history of the United States. But they simply didn’t care. They put party over country and personality cult over party. They were willing to let democracy and the nation lose in the tenuous hope that they themselves wouldn’t when it came time for the most radical and extreme of the former president’s base to vote in a future election.

Ignoring the evidence, which most top Republicans admitted was compelling, when it came time to stand up and be counted in defense of democracy, the rule of law and the Constitution of the United States, the GOP leadership caved. It claimed there was a technicality that kept the GOP from doing anything but voting to acquit. That technicality consisted basically of the fact that Donald Trump was no longer president and the Senate was, then, supposedly no longer competent to try him. And the GOP leadership continued to maintain this fallacious argument despite repeated statements from experts in constitutional law that it simply wasn’t true, and that there was even at least one historical precedent to prove that it wasn’t. Nor was it upheld by the House of Representatives, which is, according to the Constitution, the sole authority for setting the rules for an impeachment process. 

And then the GOP punted. They couldn’t do anything, they claimed, but there were other competent authorities who could, and they would leave the matter in the capable hands of federal and state justice. In other words, no way we’re going to grab this hot potato. We’re passing the buck to the Biden administration’s Department of Justice and to the courts of Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania and other aggrieved swing states. To the civil courts, as well, where Trump and his top surrogates are already being sued in multi-billion-dollar libel cases. And when the crap hits the fan, we can always tell Trump supporters we had nothing to do with it. It was the damned Democrats and a few unholy Republican outliers.

Many media observers were this weekend bending over backwards to pat Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on the back for giving what amounted to no more than a wink and a nod to justice. In a wriggling and convoluted speech that too many analysts found “important”, McConnell said, in so many words, that the ex-president was indeed guilty of inciting the insurrection that took place on January 6^th. Not merely because of the seditious speech that he made that day on the Ellipse, but also through his repeated and endless statements to the effect that the election had been stolen, that his voters had been robbed, that he was the legitimate president, and that if his followers didn’t “fight like hell” they “weren’t going to have a country left.” But that, as he interpreted the Constitution, he had no right to judge “a private citizen”.

McConnell even found a way to blame the House Democrats for the acquittal, saying that while they had indeed gotten a majority to vote to impeach while Trump was still president, they had failed to deliver the article of impeachment to the Senate until after he had left office. He admitted that constitutional scholars on both sides had provided cogent arguments regarding whether or not a former president could be tried by the Senate. While he praised and said he respected both, he clearly decided on the one that was most convenient for his never-ending political career. Namely, that while he laid the blame for the January 6^th attempt to overthrow the US government on one man, Donald J. Trump, his hands were tied.

McConnell’s speech was, in a week of GOP profiles in cowardice, the number one most cowardly act. Only seventeen GOP senators out of fifty would have had to do their patriotic duty and vote to convict in order to restore the integrity of American democracy. In the end, only seven did, and despite the fact that they were only doing their duty to the Constitution and democracy, those seven are being held in hero status by small-d democrats all over the country, because they will clearly be dubbed traitors by the followers of the man who has once more sidestepped Congressional authority, played the country, and bolstered the de facto power of what conservative writer George Will has so aptly described as “the Lout Caucus”.

Mitch McConnell could have changed all that. He could have voted to convict and convinced the necessary nine other Republicans to do the same. And by that single act of patriotism and honesty, he could have ensured that no other self-styled despot like Donald Trump ever took office again, and that January 6^th, 2021, was a single tragic stain on the fabric of democracy that would never happen again.

But he didn’t. He could have made all the difference in the world to American democracy and he failed to step up. And hopefully history will remember him for it.

 

GQP: THE PARTY OF Q

 

I’ve been thinking lately that GOP (Grand Old Party) has become a misnomer for the Republicans. I’m tempted to argue that there’s nothing “grand” about it anymore. Its leadership (such as it is) has relinquished any legitimate pride it once could have claimed regarding American traditions and ideals, conservatism, law and order, defense of democracy, the rule of law, and, of course, all that now obsolete nonsense about being “the Party of Lincoln”. It has embraced extremism, conspiracy theories, mob rule, oligarchic autocracy, born-again racism and personality cultism. But okay, I’ll spot them the word “grand”, because they did come in second for The Most Votes in History in the last presidential election, so....grand, like “big”. Fine.

That said, however, there’s nothing “old” about the party that exists today, either. Starting just twelve years ago, the Republican Party quit working for the country and democracy, and went into business for itself and its politicians. After Barack Obama, with a democratic congressional majority in his first four years, worked incessantly to overcome the, until then, worst economic crisis since the Great Depression—a crisis that resulted from a lack of former Republican-led government control over questionable banking, stock market and insurance industry practices—as well as creating an ongoing and developing universal health care program, reforming the financial system, securing America’s commitment to dealing with global climate change, establishing Net neutrality, rescuing the American automotive industry, kick-starting the clean energy industry, cutting veteran homelessness in half, improving worldwide nuclear security and reviving the Justice Department’s civil rights division (among other things)—he found himself faced in his second term with a Republican-led Senate, whose obstructionist-in-chief, then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, did his damnedest to block every single bill that the Executive sent to Congress, not on the basis of merit (or lack of same) but simply because it came from Obama.

And for the next four years, under the presidency of Donald Trump, McConnell has continued to obstruct nearly everything coming from the Democrat-led House. Over four hundred bills that piled up on his desk throughout the Trump era and never got a hearing in the upper house, just because they were signed by Democrats and despite the fact that many of them clearly would have improved the lives of average Americans. And he has aided and abetted the ex-president in his obsession with destroying Obama’s entire legacy of good government practices, exceptional international diplomacy and improved social justice.

So, hey, perhaps the Republicans could keep the initials GOP, after all, but just change what the “O” stands for to Grand Obstructionist Party, since the party has become so identifiably obstructionist that it has even backed—whether by commission or omission—former President Trump’s insane attempt to block and overturn by force the outcome of last November’s free and fair elections. To say nothing of also obstructing, as they did the other time he was impeached, any attempt to hold Trump responsible for his misdeeds—in this case, for trying to overthrow the United States government.

That said, there’s a case to be made for calling it the GTP—Grand Trump Party—because from 2016 on, after all politically viable candidates had been culled on the strength of The Donald’s  massive and largely inexplicable popularity (much like that of wildly popular pro-wrestling stars whose fans are fanatically loyal even though it’s obvious to everyone but them that their super-heroes are skillful but unmitigated fakes), a desperate Republican Party, whose only interest had become winning at any cost, allowed itself, at first hesitantly and later enthusiastically, to be usurped by a candidate with the ethics of a snake-oil hawker and the patriotism of a carpetbagger.

And even now, when Trump has lost his chance at a second term and made such a mess of the electoral process that the Republican leadership could have very easily taken the opportunity to cut him loose and take back their party, they have chosen to continue to vie for what’s left of his most rabidly extreme base and forsake all other considerations except offending these populist fanatics. In other words, the GOP continues to be paralyzed by their fear of Donald Trump—or better said, by their fear of further election losses in the future, over and above any patriotic consideration of the nation and its democratic traditions—which would appear ludicrous considering that the Republican Party fared far better in the November elections than Donald Trump did.

But here we are, following an insurrection in which a Capitol policeman was brutally mob-murdered and several other people died as well, when hundreds of rioters incited by the former president took Congress by storm and forced the nation’s elected representatives to huddle and hide in fear for their lives. An incident of singularly historical importance, in which Trump cultists, hundreds of them, sought to interrupt the democratic process and the official certification of the November elections, and attempted to keep Trump in power by means of a populist coup. And still, only five Republican senators out of a hundred would vote to impeach the former president, while scores of Republicans in the House continue to stubbornly support Trump’s conspiracy theories—debunked in over sixty failed court actions filed by the Trump team and in the rejection, twice, by the Supreme Court of charges regarding alleged election irregularities, as well as by virtue of certification by fifty state attorneys general and the Electoral College—regarding a “stolen election”.

So, my question is, if Trump fanatics are now identifying themselves as “Trump Republicans”, and if the Republican leadership is willing to throw everything the GOP has ever stood for out the window solely in order to hang onto that core of undemocratic personality-cultists who would be perfectly happy to overthrow American democracy in order to keep Trump in power, why not take off the fig-leaf and call the party what it has become—the Party of Trump, or GTP?

There is another choice, however, that seems to be glaring at Republican leaders from the darkest, densest depths of the violent far-right insurrectionist jungle. Here’s the thing: This past week the GOP started waffling about what to do regarding their Marjorie Taylor Greene problem. And so far, the answer has been, “nothing.” By comparison, the Republican leadership has had no problem whatsoever discussing what punishment should be meted out to Representative Liz Chaney, a highly respected traditional Republican leader and daughter of former Vice President Dick Chaney, for the “heinous crime” of following her ethics, her patriotic duty and her conscience in voting to impeach Donald Trump for inciting insurrection.

You may recall that Georgia Republican Congresswoman Greene, who was swept to office on a wave of QAnon conspiracy theories that she readily endorsed—to the glee of foaming-at-the-mouth, gun-toting, rightwing militants—was praised by Donald Trump as the future face of the Republican Party. You might also remember that she once claimed that California wildfires were being set by Jewish bankers using space lasers, and that she, a couple of years ago, reposted a white nationalist video claiming that the Holocaust was a hoax perpetrated by “Zionist supremacists” who perpetuated it to “promote immigration and miscegenation.”

More recently, Greene has done things like embracing British ultra-rightist commentator Katie Hopkins who famously described migrants as “cockroaches”, whom she wouldn’t mind seeing die. Greene’s response? “I would love to trade you for some of our white people here that have no appreciation for our country.” She further termed the results of the 2018 mid-terms as the “Islamic invasion of our government”—in reference to the election of congresswomen Rashida Talaib and Ilan Omar, the first two Muslim women ever voted into Congress.

Not content with that, she has, since the November elections and their violent aftermath, endorsed calls on Facebook for the execution of top Democrats including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. And, among her most atrocious endorsements is the one for a conspiracy theory that claims the tragic Parkland and Sandy Hook mass shootings were “hoaxes”. She even has gone as far as to harass one of the Parkland victims, David Hogg, on the street, badgering and abusing him verbally and telling him that she had a gun in her purse.  

So with Trump’s future being a lot less certain than that of an apparently ever stronger extremist wing of the conspiracy-daft far right, maybe even continuing to embrace Trump is too risky for an ever more acquiescent GOP leadership. Some of the most extreme fringe elements of the far right now believe that they were also duped by Trump. That they gave him their all, obeyed his express wishes and took over the Capitol, standing point and awaiting the declaration of martial law and the military takeover that would restore their leader to power. This, they felt they had been promised by Trump surrogates like disgraced General Mike Flynn and space-cadet attorneys Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani. In the end, they were left holding the bag.

So perhaps then, they will be seeking new heroes, someone more like them, someone like, say, Marjorie Taylor Green, who represents more than the Trump brand. She who was elected to office as the voice of Q.

Maybe, if the GOP is dubious even about giving Greene a slap on the wrist and removing her from committee duty (do we really need a conspiracy theorist who supports old anti-Semitic Nazi fabrications about the evils of Jewish businessmen, or who claims the victims of the Parkland and Sandy Hook school massacres faked it, on the Education Committee?), let alone impeaching her under Article I, Section 5, Clause 2 of the Constitution—for, among other things, inciting rebellion, disseminating false information regarding the fairness of national elections, promoting conspiracy theories designed to incite insurrection, calling for the assassination of national officials, including other members of Congress, and carrying a loaded weapon onto the floor of the House—then why not just add a curlicue to the “O” and rename the GOP the Party of Q or GQP?

That way, the ubiquitous “Q”, a symbol that’s beginning to get some of the kind of traction the swastika did with the Nazis, can be incorporated directly into the party name. And there will no longer be any doubt about where the Republican leadership’s sympathies lie.