Greenberg, Orban & Putin: Trump’s GOP?

(In an illustration from the Financial Times of London, Vladimir Putin congratulates Viktor Orban of Hungary on a job well done.)

Did Vikkktor Orban come with gold?

Would Putin’s bagman be so bold?

The same day he arrives from Hungary,

Trump’s bonded debt is suddenly fungery…

Orban the mule for Putin’s rubles?

None of these thugs have ANY scruples.

What’s billions of dollars to hijack democracy?

It won’t be missed in their kleptocracies.

They bought him once in 0’ sixteen,

Then bribed his cultists in between.

Now bleeding bucks and out of dough,

Trump’s still for sale, with Mar-A-Lago.

Kite the payoffs through shells,

Chubb Insurance? Gee, thanks!

Use unscrupulous U.S. businessmen

To cover your flanks.

Trump’s tiny hands in their pockets,

Since his are so empty.

Why aren’t DOJ, SEC,

Acting pre-emptly?

He’ll blow apart NATO

Surrender Ukraine,

If Putin and lackeys

Make money rain.

They’ll pay his fines,

Wipe out his debt;

Control of U.S. secrets,

The least they would get.

On Tucker, On Bannon,

On Miller, On Putin,

Who needs insurrection,

When its easier lootin’?

(NOTE TO READERS: I started drafting this poem on the day after Viktor Orban, Hungary’s Prime Minister, and bagman for Putin, arrived in Mar-A-Lago to visit Donald Trump—at virtually the same time President Biden was beginning his State of the Union address, calling for the urgent defense of democracy. Within 24-hours of Orban’s arrival in Florida, Trump announced that he had miraculously found the $91 million he needed to come up with as a surety bond in the E. Jean Carroll defamation & sexual assault verdict against him.

I thought it was fishy that the money didn’t flow until Orban hit Mar-A-Lago. Turns out, Viktor Orban might not be Putin’s only bag man, delivering money with strings to a flat-broke Donald Trump. Independent journalist and fellow Substack writer Seth Abramson has followed the money in series of astonishing exposes, which traces it through several sources with Russian financial connections.

Among those sources are Evan Greenberg’s Chubb Insurance Company, which guaranteed the first $91 million Trump bond. Greenberg, who held an advisory post in the Trump Administration, is the son of Maurice Greenberg, the longtime boss of AIG, who also ran a Russian investment vehicle known as Starr International, according to Abramson. In fact, Abramson identifies Maurice Greenberg, now 98 years old, as “ a Vladimir Putin business associate, who is also associated with Russian spies, other Kremlin agents, and the 2016 Trump Presidential Campaign.” (See link to Abramson’s article below.)

However, Abramson, whose 3-part series is a scathing indictment of the major American businessmen being used by Putin to leverage Trump, wasn’t the only one to smell something rotten. On Friday, March 8, The New Republic ran a story headlined: “What Idiot Backed Trump’s Bond in E. Jean Carroll Trial? This One.” The focus of the story was on Chubb Insurance CEO Evan Greenberg. The New Republic story went on to report:

“ Court records filed Friday (March 8, 2024) show that the bond was guaranteed by the Chubb Corporation, an insurance group. In 2018, Trump appointed Chubb’s CEO Evan Greenberg to a White House advisory committee for trade policy and negotiations.”

Yes, Trump never stops grifting off of whomever he can get to grift for him. Beyond the Greenbergs, the Chubb Corporation and their national and international insurance dealings, lurks a few urgent questions which may affect U.S. National Security, the security of NATO and the free world:

  • How deeply is Putin behind all of this?
  • What has Trump promised to the Russians in exchange for paying his bonds?
  • Shouldn’t the DOJ, the SEC, the NSA, the CIA and perhaps the U.S. Senate launch investigations into whether the payment of this bond money by third parties, foreign nationals, or, potentially, laundered sources amount to bribery, and violations of national security?
  • And, almost as if on cue, Orban told the BBC on March 11, 2024, after leaving Mar-A-Lago, that Trump told him that if he is elected President in November, “Ukraine would not get another cent from the United States.”
  • Isn’t that precisely the outcome Putin wants?

Following Our Friend: BD Wong & the Golden Thread.

(From left to right: the author; the artist/activist BD Wong; the anchorman, Dan Rather, educating the world about HIV/AIDS.)

“Swifties” have nothing on me, except, perhaps, more disposable income, and a die-hard’s determination to stand in line for hours to get tickets, or at the barricades of sold out concerts. The question is, whether they’ll still love her tomorrow, and whether her work and life will open their eyes to the “Golden Thread.”

Before the talented Taylor Swift was performing, and packing stadiums and arenas worldwide, BD Wong was there. And, so was I.

Before the members of the “slay” (my 15-year old granddaughter’s word) all girl group Boy Genius were born — and, winning Grammy Awards — BD Wong was there. So were we.

No, BD didn’t pack stadiums, nor win Grammies, but in his breathtaking, gender-bending Broadway debut in M. Butterfly, he won every award in the Broadway universe, including the Tony Award. And, the highly acclaimed bright, new Broadway star, born in San Francisco of Chinese ancestry, was six years younger than the 34-year old Taylor Swift when he arrived, as the talk of the town.

His role as the remarkable Chinese cross-dressing spy/opera singer Song Liling, starring opposite John Lithgow, may not have earned him a billion dollars, but the accolades for this astonishing young actor poured in from around the world, paying priceless dividends for Wong and his adoring throng, as well as for other Asian-American actors, for decades to come.

Years later (2015–2019), in the wildly popular USA Network series Mr. Robot, BD Wong –channeling a little of Song Liling — played the role of a transgender Chinese government official, White Rose, whom GQ’s Caity Weaver described as: “ a hacker and a politician who schemes in Mandarin and lies in English.”

Yet, unlike the calculating character he played in David Henry Hwang’s revolutionary M. Butterfly, some 30 years earlier, Wong actually likes his fans, and makes them (us) feel like part of his extended family. Memorably, Song (not Wong) told us how he/she felt about “loyal fans”:

“I love them for being my fans. I hate the smell they leave behind. I too, can distance myself from my people. ‘Art for the masses’ is a shitty excuse to keep artists poor.”

And, unlike his character of Song Liling, who knitted an intricate web of deceit over 20 years to ensnare a French diplomat in a Chinese Spy ring — flipping the entire premise and script of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly — BD Wong’s artistry and insightfulness about all of the characters he would come to play on Broadway, on Television and in the movie — is informed by an honesty, humanity and a gift of being able to touch audiences deeply. That’s how those gifts affected me, and connected me to BD on so many levels, well before we became friends.

Ironically, the themes of sexism, racism and colonialism, which M. Butterfly brilliantly unveiled, reared their ugly heads in the real world, after M. Butterfly’s 2-year, 777 performance run was concluded. Those realities transformed BD Wong from a young actor revealing these harsh truths on stage, to an accidental activist, who would open multiple doors of opportunities for Asian actors, and many, many others from underrepresented communities.

An equivalent action for Taylor Swift today, would be for the superstar to use her vast resources to confront the chilling crusade of Christian Nationalists aimed at crushing anyone who is different, especially if they are LGBTQ, female, or free from their Taliban-like tentacles. There is no media-acceptable middle ground.

In 1990, both Wong and David Henry Hwang, led an organized protest to Broadway’s Actors Equity Association, when the London production of Miss Saigon, announced it was coming to Broadway. In London, the white, Welsh actor Jonathan Pryce, played the lead role of Engineer, an “Euroasian” pimp, for which he wore a prosthetic device to make him “look” part Vietnamese.

Wong and Hwang — fresh off their enormous success with M.Butterfly — made it clear that Pryce’s portrayal (they had seen the play in London) was demeaning to Asians, and that the entire tone of the play was racist and sexist. It was an updated version of Madame Butterfly, with a helicopter, instead of a boat, reeking of racism, misogyny, and imperialism — precisely the central themes eloquently exposed in M. Butterfly.

Initially, Actor’s Equity sided with Wong and Hwang, urging the play’s producers to “break the usual pattern of casting Asians in minor roles.” However, in one of the earliest nationwide backlashes against diversity, equity and inclusion — foreshadowing the twisted victimization of people of privilege in 2024 — editorials in the LA Times, the Washington Post, USA Today and the Wall Street Journal all supported Pryce. Miss Saigon opened in NYC in the spring of 1991, with Pryce in the lead role. When producer Cameron Mackintosh threatened to close down the already pre-sold out show if he couldn’t have his Pryce, the actor’s union relented.

I was working with Governor Mario M. Cuomo at Two World Trade Center in lower Manhattan at that time, and found BD’s courageous campaign for greater diversity, representation and inclusion — especially by a new, young actor with a lot to lose — to be on the front-lines of what we were confronting in the early, nearly-frozen MAGA embryos of the Reagan/Bush years.

Almost daily, especially during most of 1991 when Mario Cuomo was everyone’s favorite presidential candidate who never ran, we were battling to defend difference itself, and against anti-Italian stereotypes in government and the arts. Roger Stone, scumbag supreme, and still a fetid, festering infection on the American body-politic, told the great New Yorker writer Ken Auletta, “ I saw a poll from Texas a week ago, where three people asked if Cuomo was an American name.” Italian-Americans, like Blacks, Jews, Latinos, Asian-Americans, and the LGBTQ community, were considered the “others.”

It didn’t help that Gambino Family Crime Boss John Gotti was on trial for murder the same year the national political boomlet for Cuomo hit its’ peak. Gotti became a daily tabloid darling, with publications like New York Newsday glamorizing the gangster garb Gotti graced the courtroom with each day. Gotti fit what the media imagined Americans wanted to believe about Italians.

What compounded my urgency to smash the stigma against us, was that my own brother served prison time as a bag man for Gotti, while I was quietly serving the public with Cuomo. I was obsessed with showing that only a tiny fraction of Italian-Americans were mobsters.

I detected that same obsession in BD’s fight against ethnic and racial stigma aimed at Asian Americans. His fearless example, and Cuomo’s, inspired me to work even harder against ethnic or sexual “othering” and discrimination. In a few short years, BD Wong took the celebrity he earned from his extraordinary work in M. Butterfly, and used it to pry open a tightly closed casting club, and let his people in.

Despite my work with Mario Cuomo, it took me another 25 years to make my case, culminating in my 2017 book Tightrope: Balancing A Life Between Mario Cuomo and My Brother. (Heliotrope Books, NY). If only I was as graceful, elegant, articulate and effective as BD was in letting loose his primal scream.

Without much fanfare, BD demonstrated that just by persisting, by not backing down, nor accepting second-rate material, or selling himself short to meet someone else’s perceptions, he would overcome. He did it, initially, in opening doors for Asian-American actors — and later for the LGBTQ community — by simply showing how good he was, and what the world was missing by not tapping into such a pool of outstanding talent. More importantly, once he opened the door for others, he held it open, and he was comfortable in continuing to use his celebrity and his prodigious skills to advocate on his communities’ behalf.

He did this in the many television and movie roles for which he became known, dating from in the 1990’s on through the present day, including: Father of the Bride (1991, 1995); Jurassic Park (and all its’ progeny) 1993–2022; Mulan I & II (1998 & 2004); Law & Order, SVU (Dr. George Huang), 2001–2015, Oz (Father Ray Mukada), 1997–2003; Mr. Robot, 2015–2019; and, presently as Wally, in Awkwifina Is Nora From Queens, 2020-present.)

BD’s Broadway roles were as diverse and demanding as those he nailed in front of the camera, and the mastery and craftsmanship he showed on stage, shaped every production, and political action, in which he was involved. Anything involving BD Wong was elevated to a new level of professionalism and quality, and was something I had to experience. In his years of performing, the only one of his stage productions I missed was his portrayal of Lucy’s battered younger brother Linus, in You’re A Good Man Charlie Brown (1999).

Over the next two decades, BD Wong’s live stage performances around the country enriched my life in Pacific Overtures (at the old Studio 54 Stage in NYC), 2004; Herringbone, at the Williamstown Theatre Festival (Massachusetts), June, 2007; The Orphan of Zhao (SF’s American Conservatory Theatre, ACT) 2014; The Great Leap (SF’s ACT), 2019; and Big Data (SF’s ACT), 2024. Each performance was magical.

Astonishingly, while Wong was immersed in his work on stage and screen, his circle of activism was expanding to include advocacy for not just the Asian-American and LGBTQ communities, but also for people living with HIV/AIDS. It was through that work that we became not just fellow activists, but friends.

I was running a national HIV/AIDS Advocacy organization of the Cable Television industry named Cable Positive, which produced 30-second Public Service Announcements (PSA’s) and documentaries, educating millions of Americans about HIV/AIDS. One such set of PSA’s produced by Kismet Film’s Greg Pace, and directed by the actor Liev Schreiber, was entitled “Join the Fight,” with the goal of reducing anti-LGBTQ, anti-HIV/AIDS stigma and discrimination across the country.

BD Wong didn’t hesitate for one moment to, once again, use his growing celebrity to spread the message of inclusivity, understanding and compassion — not an easy task in communities of color and Asian American/Pacific Islander communities, where LGBTQ individuals were often ostracized, and people with HIV/AIDS treated like lepers. Donating their own celebrity to deliver such powerful, pro-bono messages, along with Wong, were actors Jose Llana, Wilson Cruz, Rosie Perez, Gloria Reuben, Judith Licht, Wilmer Verderama, Hill Harper, and others, giving greater credibility and attention to an urgent, life-saving cause.

Wong was a persuasive spokesperson in our “fight,” with television industry insiders, and the viewing public, and his strong support and willingness to speak out never wavered. It was a profound commitment BD — being both Asian American and Gay — never forgot, and I could not let that go unnoticed, traveling across the country to support him in his live stage performances. I felt a little like Linus Van Pelt (Peanuts) when asked about his favorite teacher, “ I never said I worship her, I just said I’m very fond of the ground on which she walks.”

When my partner, Carol Villano, and I traveled to Williamstown, Mass., to see BD in his mesmerizing performance in the one-man musical Herringbone — where he played 11 roles — he gave us a big, family-style welcome when we met him, his mother Roberta (now, 94) and his then 7-year old son, Jackson, at a local ice-cream store.

Each time we saw him in person over the past 10 years during his trilogy of performances at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre (2014, The Orphan of Zhao; 2019, The Great Leap; and just this week, 2024, in Big Data) he welcomed us like members of his family, which lives in San Francisco. For Big Data, a fascinating story of the seductive power of social media, with BD playing the ubiquitous “M”, or media, we sat right in front of his first-cousin.

I remarked to her how the 1500 seat theatre, where BD always longed to play as a student attending San Francisco’s Lincoln High School, was pretty full for a Sunday matinee.

“That’s because most of us are family and friends,” his cousin joked.

While most of Sunday’s big crowd wasn’t, many of us were, either by birth, geography, or by virtue of sharing some of life’s battles for justice along the way. That day, BD was having a special reception in ACT’s downstairs lounge for some of his former classmates from Giannini Middle School, just down the block from his mother’s house where he grew up, in the Sunset District of SF.

We were welcomed into the reception, the way we always were — with a hug — and I took a few group photos of the Giannini classmates and families as they posed on a stairway with a brass handrail, because I’d do just about anything for BD Wong in gratitude for the all the joy, enlightenment and support he’s given us.

I looked at this happy crowd of the kids BD grew up with, and remembered the “Golden Thread, “ that he wrote so beautifully about in the story of the birth of his two sons, Boaz Dov Wong, who lived for 90 minutes, gifting life to Jackson Foo Wong, his twin brother.

As the father of one son, I rode up and down the roller-coaster of emotions shared by BD in his 2003 book, Following Foo: (the electronic adventures of the Chestnut Man, Harper Collins, NY.)but one passage in particular stuck with me for years. It comes at the very end of the book in it’s “Upilogue,” a fantasy taking place sometime in the “Spring, 2025”, which is, amazingly, almost upon us.

The futuristic and fun final scene occurs on the set of “The Okra O’Donahue Show,” where a now grown Jackson Foo Wong, who turns 25 years old in 2025, is being interviewed by the ever-omniscient “Okra.”

Musing on the events of his life to this point, Jackson quotes his Dad, a lover of words and subways:

Dad says a funny thing always happens when you are waiting for the subway. In some stations, about a minute before the train comes, before it actually turns into the station, there’s often a kind of a reflection of the headlights as it bounces off the curve of one of the rails of the track.

“You always see it very gradually way before you see the headlights, or the train, or hear it, or feel it rumbling. And that reflection looks like a fine golden thread, glowing brighter and brighter in the tunnel, and no matter how long you’ve been waiting for the train, when you see the golden thread, you always know that the train is coming, and that everything’s gonna be okay.”

I looked at the warmth and love flowing between BD and his friends and family in Fred’s downstairs lounge at the American Conservatory Theatre on dreary Geary Street in struggling San Francisco, and I could swear I could see that “golden thread” lighting up the brass railing on the stairway leading up toward the street behind them.

And I knew, once again, that everything’s gonna be okay.

#

(Link to BD Wong’s 30-second pro-bono Public Service Announcement on HIV/AIDS:

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A Good Man, Who Liked His Beer.

(Al Villano, my father, on October 1, 1989, his 50th Wedding Anniversary. March 1, marked the anniversary of his birth in another century, and another world. As I get older, I am reminded that he only lived three years past my present age, but he is still with me.)

My father and I stopped at the newspaper kiosk at the Babylon train station’s lower level on the morning of Robert F. Kennedy’s funeral in June, 1968, and picked up a copy of the New York Daily News for him, and the New York Times for me.

We boarded his regular early morning train that was already waiting at the station. Both newspapers predicted huge crowds of mourners would jam Manhattan that day. I pored over every word of every story I could read about RFK’s death, devouring each detail in the Times and leaning over my father’s arm to look at the pictures in the Daily News and read the giant headlines, until he flipped the paper over to the sports section to check what the horseracing handle was from the day before. The last three digits of that total would tell him if he “hit” the number with his bookie.

The contrast of our lives struck me. My father was doing the same thing he had done for 15 years of life on Long Island, catching a pre-dawn train, looking at the horseracing results in the same section of the same newspaper each day, hoping that maybe, this time, this day “our ship would come in,” as he chanted each time he looked.

Each day he got up before everyone else, went to the same job, taking care of tempermental steam boilers that belched hot water and hot air through the pipes running like elevated roadways in the basement of the office building where he worked in Manhattan. On hot days, like that one, he made sure the massive air conditioners continued working in “The Building.” His work was to keep thousands of people safe and comfortable, yet he barely made enough money to support our family, and only because he worked on Saturdays, too, earning overtime pay.

I watched the train conductor punch my ticket and thought of how my father must have watched countless conductors perform the same ritual, ticket after ticket, trip after trip, until he no longer knew it was happening.

I sat and stared out the train window and watched Woodside whiz by, hearing my mother’s refrain repeating itself to the cadence of the train car’s wheels whispering over the tracks: “We live in hopes and die in despair; live in hopes, die in despair; live in hopes, live in hopes…” I looked over at my father, asleep, the Daily News folded in his lap.

No, I insisted to myself, I am the third son of a third son, and I must live a life like no one in my family has ever dreamed; my father told me so. I would learn about the mysterious “they” that my family fussed about whenever something happened out of their control, which was frequently. What I had to guard against, was becoming one of “them,” an unspoken fear between my family and me. We knew I would be different, but how different? Would I become unrecognizable to my mother and father? Go on, take, take, take; but don’t take too much…don’t change too much.

I looked at my father again, always meticulously dressed, his dapper grey fedora resting gently on his head. I could not imagine him going to a politician’s funeral, to pay his respects to one of “them. To Al Villano, it was all distant, part of another “woild,” as he would say. He had all he could do to survive and feed his family in his world.

“Will you have to give la busta?,” he kidded me, when I first told him I was going to RFK’s funeral, referring to the Italian custom of putting a little money in an envelope and giving it to the family of the deceased to help pay funeral expenses. His humor got me to smile.

“I don’t think the Kennedys need it, Dad, “ I said, winking back at him.

We got off the train at Grand Central Station, having changed at Jamaica for the Hunter’s Point train which came into Manhattan just across the street from 100 East 42nd St, the building where he labored.

“Be careful and watch your wallet, Rock,” he said to me, using the nickname for me which I loved, conveying his unspoken love, and belief that I was solid, loyal, and always there for him.

We waved to each other, and I watched as he headed down to the basement of “The Building” where he’d carefully take off his fedora hat, each day, and put on his brown maintenance man’s uniform as soon as he got there.

He wore his working man’s uniform all day, the way the wealthy lawyers and accountants on the floors above wore their designer label suits and ties, while he made certain they were comfortable, even if he was not.

At the end of a long day, and each day was long, my father would take off his work uniform, put back on his suit and carefully brushed fedora, and catch the next Long Island Railroad train back out to either Deer Park or Babylon, where he’d sleep most of the way home, perhaps dreaming that his ship was finally coming in.

Burning Men

(US Air Force Member setting himself on fire outside of the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC, to protest Israeli’s incessant bombing of civilians—mostly children and women—in Gaza.)

What does it take

To set yourself on fire,

So that your soul is not

A liar to itself,

And your life,  no instrument for hire?

What does it take

To enter the nation you fled,

Knowing there’s

A price upon your head

That your heart insists you pay?

How does it feel,

To no longer be numb,

Or blind, or deaf or dumb

To the incessant beating

Of death’s drum, on babies?

What is it like to swallow poison,

But not your pride, to know that you

Will leave your bride,

Fighting for freedom, and your lives,

From a gulag,  deep inside?

What is it like to feel flames melt your skin,

The way it burns those without sin,

Without hope, or relief, or shelter or embrace

To escape the bombs dropped by men like you,

Just doing what they were trained to do?

And, what is it like to feel your last breath,

Knowing your courage cannot, finally, stop your death?

But, instead, ignite other lives, more fires of hope 

To burn brighter than the incandescence of yours, 

Immolating our fears that wars will end all laws.

What does it take,

To step outside your being?

To find the key to freeing

Our souls, and minds, and hearts,

To know, without fear, believing is seeing.

Hill Harper: “Michigan Is A Red State–Until Black People Vote.” Why Don’t Democrats Get That?

(Twenty years ago, Phill Wilson, head of the Black AIDS Institute; Hill Harper, and I were campaigning together to stamp out the damaging stigma and educate the public about HIV/AIDS. Harper, then at the beginning of his film and TV career, recorded pro-bono Public Service Announcements to raise awareness in Black communities around the nation. Harper did this just a few years after his starring role in the 2000 film “The Visit”, where he portrayed a prisoner dying of AIDS who tries to put his life back together.)

It’s the heart of winter, but usually frosty Michigan is on fire. 

No, it’s not one of the Wolverine State’s Big 10 winning sports teams on a hot streak; nor, the simultaneous series of historic wild forest fires—fanned by the same sizzling winds that whipped the Great Chicago Fire of 1871–devastating 2.5 million acres of Michigan’s land.

It’s Michigan’s present-day politics and the State’s outsized role in determining the nation’s future that’s setting off five-alarms.   Especially this year.

Everyone’s eyes are on this pivotal Mid-Western state of 10 million people, whose 16 electoral votes helped elect Joe Biden as President in 2020, and Donald Trump in 2016.  While the Democrats–led by second-term Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who clobbered the GOP in 2022–control both the Michigan State Senate and the House, the latest poll results published in the Detroit Free Press just this week, has both the Presidential and US Senate races in Michigan as toss-ups.

Any polls (particularly those nine months out from an election) involving convicted sexual assaulter and financial fraud Donald Trump as a candidate, have a history of being as inaccurate and chaotic as Trump himself.   This one, conducted by ERIC-MRA Polling out of Lansing, Michigan, and relying heavily on cell phone contacts, may be suspect as well.    

My own suspicions about the poll were deepened when I learned that the pollster’s name was Bernie Porn.  Really?  A poll conducted by a guy named “Porn” that has Trump ahead by two points, coming out one-month ahead of the Stormy Daniels “Hush Money” trial? Are we ready to bet the mortgage on that?

It would be easier to dismiss the “Porn Poll” as a joke, if, it wasn’t being reported on by one of the nation’s most respected newspapers, the Detroit Free Press.  In its’ story of February 21, 2024, the Free Press reports that the poll’s present finding is that Trump leads Biden in Michigan 43-41, with another 14% undecided.  The poll also found that the leading Democratic Senatorial contender, Rep. Elissa Slotkin, was locked in a “dead heat” with her two leading GOP opponents.

The story goes on to say that “the poll indicates that Biden’s refusal to heed calls—especially among younger, more progressive Democrats, and Michigan’s large Arab American and Muslim communities to demand a ceasefire in Gaza, is a factor,” in Biden’s weak showing.

It might be tempting to pooh-pooh this punditry from a pollster named Porn, if the same basic themes hadn’t been appearing for months in a number of other credible media outlets, and from present and former Michigan public officials.

U.S. Representative Rashida Tlaib, for one, who represents the largest Arab American Congressional District in the nation, and is the only Palestinian-born Member of Congress, has urged Michigan Democrats to cast a vote for “uncommitted” in the February 27, Michigan Democratic Presidential Primary, as a form of protest against President Biden’s reluctance to demand a ceasefire in Gaza.

Before you dismiss this counter-campaign being called “Listen to Michigan” as a rash move by Rashida, some other Michiganders, who don’t live in Tlaib’s district and aren’t Muslim, are listening as well, and taking action.

Last week, (February 16, 2024) the Jewish Telegraph Agency reported that some “Michigan Jews aim to pressure Biden on Israel by voting ‘uncommitted’ in the Primary.”  The JTA’s Andrew Lapin writes:

“About two dozen progressive Jewish activists tuned into the “MI Jews Uncommitted Phone Bank” this week, ready to ask their networks not to vote for President Joe Biden.  Their virtual phone bank, held ahead of Michigan’s Feb. 27 primary, was unlike any other. Instead of a get-out-the-vote campaign, this crew would be better described as don’t-get-out-the-vote.” 

Lapin goes on to quote the official statement from the group of “Michigan Jews Uncommitted,” a part of the “Listen to Michigan” campaign:

“As Michigan Jews, we are important messengers in a multiracial and multi-faith, anti-war coalition telling President Biden that we are uncommitted to his administration’s funding of genocidal war in Gaza.”

Among the leaders of Michigan’s progressive Jewish community is former Michigan Congressman Andy Levin, the son of Sander Levin, who immediately preceded him in Congress, and the nephew of former Michigan U.S. Senator Carl Levin.   Andy Levin was targeted for defeat by AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) in the 2022 Democratic Primary campaign, because of his criticism of Israel’s Netanyahu government.  Apparently, AIPAC’s definition of being “Pro-Israel,” means being “pro-Bibi” and showing blind loyalty to Netanyahu’s extreme right wing government.   

The Levin family’s generations of support for Israel in both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives wasn’t good enough for AIPAC, which, used it’s deep pockets to pick off the last Levin two years ago.   AIPAC and its’ front organizations (the Democratic Majority for Israel, and, it’s PAC, the United Democracy Project) poured millions of dollars into the primary campaign of a more conservative, pro-Bibi Democrat, Haley Stevens, who handily beat Levin.

Amazingly, Andy Levin—still loyal to the Democrats, if not to AIPAC– is working to help Biden, urging the President to change course on the ceasefire, to avoid losing Michigan, and the Presidency, in November:

“I’m betting on Joe Biden to find a way to become a peacemaker in Israel and Palestine, so that people can vote for him later,” Levin said. “I feel like this is existential for Joe Biden’s political survival. I don’t see how he wins reelection without winning Michigan, and I don’t see how he wins Michigan without changing course.”

Levin went on to tell the Jewish Telegraph Agency reporter that he doesn’t think “the President’s current course on Israel will cut it: not just for Arab and Muslim Americans, but also for other constituencies like Black Churches, which have become increasingly vocal in their calls for a ceasefire.”

That warning—coming from a 63 year old, well-established, White, Jewish lawyer—was echoed in a Michigan-based article in Rolling Stone Magazine this week (Feb. 20, 2024) entitled: “Young, Black & Done With Biden:  The Issues That Could Decide the Election.”

The article, by Andre Gee, a young, gifted, Black, writer from Brooklyn, NY, spent time interviewing Black artists and community leaders in Troy, Michigan—30 miles outside of Detroit—and within the city itself, which is nearly 80% Black. Although Biden carried 92% of the Black vote throughout Michigan in 2020, he’s currently polling at around 62%–a flashing warning light on his dashboard he cannot ignore.

Gee writes:  “Biden’s penchant for the status quo has left many young, Black voters disillusioned with him.”  The author, who frequently writes about music for Rolling Stone, spent time with young community organizers, like Harrison Shelby, active in the non-profit group Detroit Action, who underscores the point that the Biden/Harris ticket needs to “strengthen its’ presence in the city” by addressing housing, food insecurity, unemployment and poverty”—the essential issues Detroit Action addresses.

The temptation among mainstream Democrats might be to dismiss Gee’s reporting as an outlier, because he “only” quotes young Black people (which he doesn’t)—not older, more reliable Black voters–and gives voice to hip-hop performers, artists and community activists. That would be a grave, tactical mistake for Democrats.  The author underscores that warning by interviewing Quentin Fulks, Biden’s principal Deputy Campaign Manager:

            “Young Black voters are key to our re-election, which is why we’re investing earlier than ever to mobilize them around an agenda that is fighting for their future.”

For now, those formulaic words from Fulks—a young, Black Georgia Democrat who was the campaign manager for Senator Rafael Warnock’s 2022 re-election campaign—are more rhetoric than reality.

No “investment” of any kind by the Biden campaign has been made to the only Black male Democratic candidate seeking national office in Michigan this year:  actor/writer/entrepreneur and Detroit resident Hill Harper, running for Michigan’s open U.S. Senate seat, being vacated by incumbent Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow.

Harper is a Harvard Law School classmate of Barack Obama’s; owner of downtown Detroit’s Roasting Plant Coffee; a television and movie actor appearing in such popular TV series as CSI: NY, Homeland and The Good Doctor, and a wide range of moviesand a New York Times’ best selling author of five self-help books aimed at young, Black people. If elected, he would become the first Black U.S. Senator to represent Michigan in the State’s history. 

It’s a poignant point Harper hits again and again as he campaigns across the State of Michigan, during Black History Month, and a fact that Fulks’ ought to be aware of, considering his recent work for Rafael Warnock, one of only two Black Democratic Senators.  Fulks failed to make any mention of the fact that Harper would be Michigan’s first Black Senator if elected.

Ironically, the only current Black member of Michigan’s 15-member Congressional Delegation (including its’ two US Senators) is Republican Representative John James, who lost two previous campaigns for the U.S. Senate against Democrats in 2018 and 2020.   It’s the first time in 57 years that Michigan has been without a Black, Democratic member of Congress.

Hill Harper did a wide-ranging podcast interview with The Lever’s David Sirota late last month, and uttered a quote that should be inscribed on the forehead of every Democrat in the country:

            “Michigan is a Red State—until Black people vote.”

That failure of Michigan’s Black Democratic Congressional representation alone—considering that Detroit is the nation’s largest Black majority city which consistently delivers crucial votes for national Democratic victories—should arrest the attention of the Biden Administration and Democratic national leaders, like Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, the Vice-Chair of the Democratic National Committee. But, astoundingly, they don’t seem to get it. 

Instead, the national Democratic establishment has lined up behind Rep. Slotkin crowning her as the presumed “incumbent,” in the race for the first open U.S. Senate seat in Michigan in 30 years.  As Sirota wisely noted in his conversation with Hill Harper,   “continuing to run the same establishment selected candidates, is a very, very dangerous game for the Democrats.”

Yet, Harper’s campaign is receiving a Michigan freeze-out from the national  Democratic establishment and its corporate donors.  This week’s big news for the Harper campaign was getting the public backing from Civil Rights attorney, Ben Crump, not a darling of the Democratic Party, even though he’s revered in the Black community.

 ABC News reported this month that Harper’s campaign was floundering, having raised under a half-million dollars, while Slotkin, his main opponent in the August 6, Democratic Senatorial primary and AIPAC’s pick, has raised six times as much.  The Lever’s Sirota, a long-time activist in progressive politics, author, journalist and co-writer of the riveting film “Don’t Look Up, defines Slotkin this way:  “ a donor-friendly, establishment defending, status quo maintaining Democrat.”

Even Slotkin’s clear, conservative cast— working in the Bush Administration, opposing Medicare for All, opposing the flying of Pride flags on military bases, and voting against Nancy Pelosi for Speaker in the 116th Congress—isn’t enough to shake loose traditional Democratic support for Harper.  What don’t they understand about Harper’s observation that: “Michigan is a Red State—Until Black People Vote.?”

Four years ago, following Biden’s big win in Michigan, the Detroit Free Press (Nov. 13, 2020) acknowledged the Democrats’ debt to Detroit’s Black voters, quoting the Rev. Kenneth Flowers of the Greater New Mount Moriah Baptist Church in Detroit:

            “The Black Votes in Detroit, Oakland County, Wayne County, were the ones that took Joe Biden over the top…it shows that the Black Community is still very powerful in terms of determining who wins these elections.”

Despite the dependable track record of Detroit’s Black voters, national Democrats appear to take that support for granted, and aren’t giving the time of day to possibly the most highly educated, qualified, charismatic, and admired Black candidate for national office to appear since Hill Harper’s former Harvard Law School classmate, Barack Obama.  In 2007 and 2008, Harper, an extraordinary motivational speaker, bucked the Clinton-backed Democratic establishment as one of Barack Obama’s most effective surrogate speakers around the country.

If you don’t have a large African American turnout in Michigan, “ Harper told David Sirota, “ there is no way that President Biden can win.”  It’s hard to picture Elissa Slotkin generating that kind of turnout among Michigan’s Black voters.

Regardless of how many times national Democrats get hit over the head with this flashing neon sign of 2024’s politics, they don’t seem to read the handwriting.

A cancer survivor appointed to President Obama’s Cancer Task force, on which he and Joe Biden served together, Harper is a long-time grassroots activist on a number of public health, community-based issues.  

Some two decades ago, before most Americans were aware of the devastating impact the HIV/AIDS epidemic was having on communities of color, Harper was working with the Black AIDS Institute, and doing 30-second pro-bono Public Service TV spots to raise awareness and destigmatize the disease.  For many Black Americans, even being suspected of being HIV Positive, could mean life or death.

Harper, the single father of an eight-year old son, has devoted enormous amounts of time and personal resources to uplifting young Black men and women with his series of self-help books:  Letters to a Young Brother; Letters to a Young Sister; Letters to An Incarcerated Brother.  The inspired genius behind those books—is not only Harper’s modeling them after Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet—but establishing the non-profit Manifest Your Destiny Foundation, which gives tangible assistance to underserved youth to achieve their goals.

But, the Democratic Party’s disconnect here must be something more than its’ insecure support for incumbents, unwillingness to listen to unpleasant news, and insatiable appetite for corporate and institutional money.  Well, maybe not.

Fortunately, at least one powerful institution in Democratic and Michigan politics—the United Auto Workers Union–has gotten the message.   After decades of locking Blacks out of top union leadership positions, the UAW has recognized, as the Detroit Bureau of the The Voice of the Automotive World  noted in a Black History series, that “Blacks played a key role in the growth of the UAW.”

 Union President Shawn Fain, who led the UAW’s recent industry-wide strike which was supported by 75% of all Americans, was preceded in office by two prominent Black labor leaders, Rory Gamble, the first Black President of the UAW, and Ray Curry.  According to the Economic Policy Institute in 2021, Black workers now make up 25.5% of the unionized auto sector.

Perhaps it was on the strength of those demographics that the UAW has intentionally not endorsed either Harper or Slotkin—a rare move for a major union to refrain from backing an incumbent member of Congress (Slotkin) not hostile to labor.  Or, the union’s decision could have been influenced by the fact that Hill Harper is a card-carrying union member (Screen Actors Guild) himself, who walked the picket line with striking UAW workers, before Joe Biden did.

The most charitable explanation of the Democrats’ tone deafness toward Michigan’s Black voters and their top candidates this year, is that the Party establishment is terrified of rocking the boat between its’ loyal Black and Jewish constituents, who regularly give national Democrats more than 75% of their votes.  As a convert to Judaism, I find that cowardice reprehensible, particularly concerning the life and death urgency of a ceasefire, the freeing of Israeli hostages, and humanitarian aid for innocent Palestinian survivors in Gaza. It’s almost, but not nearly, as shameful as AIPAC raising $90 million off the bodies of massacred and missing Israelis, in the first few months following the October 7 attacks by Hamas.

Unfortunately, Harper—one of only two Democratic Senatorial candidates across the country supporting a ceasefire in the Netanyahu/Hamas War–was forced to confront both constituencies, when he refused to accept a $20 million campaign contribution (bribe?) from an alleged supporter of Israel, if Harper agreed to withdraw from the U.S. Senate race, and instead, run a bought-and-paid-for primary against AIPAC’s Public Enemy #1, Rashida Tlaib.

In immediately rejecting the offer, Harper was fearless in stating:  “I’m not going to run against the only Palestinian-American in Congress just because some special interests don’t like her.”

With AIPAC planning to pump up to $100 million into the campaign coffers of more conservative candidates to unseat seven progressive Members of Congress—all people of color—known as “The Squad,” who’ve been vocal critics of the Israeli government, Harper’s courageous declaration that he “won’t be bossed, bullied or bought,” didn’t win him any friends at AIPAC, which has consistently found Slotkin to be their favorite kind of Congressional slot-machine.

In a saner, more humane world, not hypnotized by money and hate, Hill Harper’s extraordinary action of turning down a $20 million offer for power and glory, would be hailed each night on national network television as an example of “America Strong.”  But, corporate media doesn’t want to encourage that kind of courage and independence.

Hill Harper already knew that, telling The Lever’s Sirota that, “the fact that someone has the ability to make that kind of call (the $20 million bribe) is abhorrent.”

Harper went on to tell Sirota how such similarly sleazy offers were made to him during the years he was pursuing his acting career:

In the context of my acting career, there’s so many roles I turned down over the course of my career, that would have made me a lot more money.  I declined.   I wanted to represent the way I think as a Black person and wanted to represent myself in the community.  I want young people to look at me, and the character and projects I do, with a sense of pride, not denigration.”

What don’t the Democrats get about this level of dignity, character and courage?

Mother Russia.

(Yulia Navalnaya speaking to the world following Putin’s murder of her husband, Alexsei Navalny.)

One of the most important videos of our lifetime. Please take two and one-half minutes of your time to view it. With worldwide support, this strong woman can put an end to Putin’s reign of terror. Let the murderous dictator try to ban “Mother Russia” the way he banned Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption organization. Please click on the link below, and pass it on:

https://www.nbcnews.com/video/alexei-navalny-s-widow-appears-in-video-on-his-youtube-channel-204475461644