Yesterday, Donald Trump announced what he bragged would be “the most crushing economic operation ever taken against any country.” You will be astonished to learn that Trump’s threat to economically strangle Iran has a name: “Operation Economic Fury.” If that sounds familiar, maybe it’s because his shooting war was called “Operation Epic Fury” before it became Operation Abject Failure and began receding into the mists of time.

Trump has an idea about countries he considers lesser entities than the one he’s in charge of. They’re weak, and he can push them around. If he gets mad enough, he can drop some bombs on them and send some of our missiles their way and blow them up. That’ll show ‘em.

How’s that working out for you, you flabby toothless menace?

In fact, what has the record been for the good ole’ USA when we decided to bomb countries we didn’t like and bury them with our gigantic and all-powerful economy?

Let’s ask North Vietnam, now referred to as plain old Vietnam, after the U.S. spent ten years bombing the shit out of them and killing more than a million of its citizens. Are they behaving the way we wanted them to, back when they were a communist domino that if it fell over would cause the entirety of Asia to go commie – or whatever the hell the theory was? Depends on how you look at it, I guess. These days, they’re making t-shirts and socks and plastic toys for Walmart and Target, so there’s that.

Or how about Afghanistan? We spent 20 years trying to kill enough of them that they would do what we told them. Who’s in charge over there these days? Same guys who were running things when we first attacked them in 2001: the Taliban. Have they changed their ways? Not according to the number of women who aren’t allowed to work and must appear in public with their bodies and heads and faces covered.

The problem with countries like Vietnam and Afghanistan and Iran is, they have a thing that has confounded incipient conquerors for centuries: borders.

Afghanistan has borders with Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, China and Iran – which we’ll return to in a moment. If anyone tries to impose sanctions on Afghanistan, like try to keep them from importing goods and essential material they don’t produce like gasoline and steel and aluminum and even lumber, they just start smuggling. Afghanistan has borders that are mountainous, that are flat deserts, that are snowbound in winter and hot as hell in summer. Do you think that stops them? Ha! They’ve been moving goods across those borders since they did it on the backs of donkeys. These days, they’ve got trucks, many of them made by Mercedes Benz, huge diesel-powered six and ten-wheeled monsters with flat-faced cabs that are capable of splashing through rushing rivers, crossing 10,000 and 15,000 foot high passes, and plowing their way through roadless tracks of mud and sand to get where they’re going. Where they’re going, most of the trucks don’t have to pass through tunnels or under overpasses, so they can be piled impossibly high with cargo. The photo at the top shows some of these trucks after having crossed over a pass in Afghanistan.

See the people riding on top? Many of them could be smuggled, too. What are the trucks carrying? Who knows? They follow smuggling routes that are largely unpoliced, that cross borders where there are no border cross-points. Immigration? Customs? They’ve been moving people, livestock, precious materials, essentials such as fabric and rugs and wheat and coal for decades on trucks, and before that, for centuries using primitive carts, and on the backs of men and donkeys.

When I was in Afghanistan, I drove a road between Jalalabad and Asadabad near the border with Pakistan. It was so pot-holed and bombed out by war, it was a 10 mile per hour dirt road that took more than three hours to travel just 30 miles. We passed dozens of trucks like the ones in the photo headed south. In a village where we stopped for water, my translator questioned the driver of one of the trucks. He had begun his trip in China, crossing into a narrow finger of Afghanistan, then into Pakistan and through a mountainous region, crossing back into Afghanistan near Asadabad, never going through a single formal border crossing or being assessed a penny of duty or travel fees, on dirt roads the whole way.

When they stop for the night, drivers and passengers, if there are any, get out and build cooking fires and make dinner. Then they unroll blankets and sleeping bags and sleep under the trucks until dawn, and they get going again.

Hey, Donny! Do you think you’re going to stop smugglers like those guys with a declaration of economic war?

This story is about Trump’s threat to beat Iran economically, just like he says he beat them with bombs and missiles, so let’s have a look at a map of Iran, shall we?

Iran has 3,600 miles of border with seven countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Turkey, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, and a very short 22-mile border with Armenia. If you’re following closely, and I know you are, you’re probably noticing the names of some of the same countries that have borders with Afghanistan. This is where the culture of smuggling comes from. The people who live in these countries have been there for centuries. They’ve been trading across these borders since before there were borders. The Afghan-Pakistan border has been there only since 1893, when it was established between the ruler of Afghanistan and the foreign secretary of British India, back when Great Britain still had colonies all over the globe. It’s one of what they call “natural borders,” running largely along a ridge of mountains that begins in the foothills of the Himalayas and runs all the way down to the thinly populated desert of southern Afghanistan.

The border between Iran and Afghanistan didn’t exist until it was established over 60 years of negotiations and treaties and surveys between 1872 and 1935 held by Turkey and the British – there they are again, the Brits with their fingers in everything they can reach by sea or conquest by army.

Then there are Iran’s other borders, and of course its very long and strategic coastline on the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman in the south, and let’s not forget its coast on the Caspian Sea, which it shares with a few other countries…let’s see who they are…oh! That’s right! Russia and Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan, and what do you know, there’s Turkmenistan again.

More smuggling by boats large and small, modern and ancient, such as the wooden sailing vessels called dhows. And wouldn’t you know, dhows still sail the waters of the Middle East in the Persian Gulf, Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the coast of Africa as they have for centuries.

Are you picking up a trend here, the one involving the word “centuries?”

And along comes Donald Trump, and he figures that because he’s a big, important guy who’s got a huge ballroom under construction at the White House, along with a new helipad that will allow him to walk a few feet to his helicopter instead of several hundred feet, and he’s got golf courses, and hotels and gold-plated country clubs and even a gold plated 747 that was gifted to him by an Emir from the Persian Gulf, and of course, he’s got his own political party that will do his bidding…well, Donald Trump is so big and so important that if he says jump, all those countries that have been smuggling stuff for centuries and centuries will answer, how high, just like his lackeys in the Republican Party do!

Trump’s threat to damage Iran’s economy includes sanctions, of course, which has been tried before, going all the way back to 1979 when the hostage crisis turned Iran into a pariah state and the U.S. decided they shouldn’t be allowed to play with the big boys economically and froze tens of billions of their assets in foreign banks.

But Iran smuggles money, too. You’ve had a look at the big trucks going through the Afghan pass. Now imagine trucks just like those are traveling across Iran’s border with Afghanistan or Russia or any of the other countries Iran has a border with, and under those sacks of concrete or wheat or fabric or whatever are big piles of cash money in U.S. dollars or Chinese renminbi or Japanese yen or another currency of any other country that buys Iran’s oil.

Iran can move money anywhere it wants, and not just by truck. Iran can use the informal Hawala system, a global network that moves money through a kind of Arabic and Asian honor system that is as ancient as smuggling by land. The system doesn’t use electronic transfers between banks. It doesn’t even move cash across borders. It works like this: a customer in one country, say Iran, contacts a Hawala broker. He wants to move money from Iran to another country. He gives the money to the Hawala broker in Iran, who contacts a broker in another country. That broker gives money in cash to the recipient in the other country, with the brokers in each country taking a transfer fee. It can also work the other way: the person in Iran wants money, so he goes to a Hawala broker and promises that a friend in the foreign country will cover the transaction. The Hawala broker gives him cash in Iranian currency. In the second country, the friend passes cash in the local currency to the Hawala broker in that country. Each broker takes their cut. No cash moved, except within the country where the debt was incurred.

When I was in Afghanistan in 2004, I ran out of cash. Afghanistan didn’t have cash machines, and I couldn’t go to a machine and use my debit card and get Afghan currency. I was introduced to a Hawala broker who owned a grocery store. I gave him a check for $1000 on my bank in Los Angeles. He gave me $800 in Afghan money and recorded $100 for himself. The Afghan broker sent the check by mail to a broker in L.A. He cashed it for $1000 and noted the $100 fee for himself. The transaction was recorded between the two brokers. The next time it happened in the other direction, the U.S. broker took the $1000 from the person transferring the money and took $100 for himself. On the other end, the Afghan broker gave $1000 to the recipient and kept $100 for himself.

No money exchanged hands except within each country.

The same sort of transaction can happen with tens, hundreds of thousands, even millions. It’s all done by fees and by honor between the brokers. Nothing is recorded in banks or wire transfers. It just happens.

How does Donald Trump plan on beating smugglers of goods and money with centuries of experience? He doesn’t have a clue. Iran beat him by standing up to his bombs and missiles. They’ll beat him by standing up to his sanctions. If there are borders, there are holes in them. If there are coastlines, there are pipelines and unregistered tankers and dhows.

If Trump decides none of his plans and schemes are producing the results he wants, he’ll start shooting missiles at Iran again. Iran will shoot missiles back at U.S. allies and U.S. bases. Trump will declare Iran beaten for the 13th time. Iran will laugh and keep smuggling.

This could go on for a while. Watch this space.

Give a gift subscription

Leave a comment

Share

The big story that’s all over the place this afternoon is the firing of the editor of Stars and Stripes, the quasi-governmental semi-independent newspaper that is provided for free to service members around the world. The paper’s publisher, who had recently announced his retirement at the end of September, was fired yesterday. The editor in chief, Erik Slavin, told the Associated Press that he was fired “for insubordination” after giving an interview to CBS in which he stated that “censorship of news for service members would constitute a red line.” A reporter for the paper who covers the Middle East, Lara Korte, was also fired after she told CBS that she works “for Stars and Stripes, not the Pentagon, not the administration, and not any policy maker.”

Stars and Stripes, which has a daily circulation online and in print of about one million readers, is distributed to members of the military all over the world. In many, far-distant locations, it is the only English language paper servicemembers have access to.

Secretary “I can read good if I try real hard” Pete Hegseth was not the first Defense Secretary to go after Stars and Stripes. In 2020, Defense Secretary Mark Esper announced that the Pentagon’s budget for the paper, $15 million a year, amounting to about half the paper’s budget, would be cut to zero. Esper ordered the Stars and Stripes to vacate government-owned office space at all facilities around the world, and then he ordered the paper to close down completely. There was an uproar in Congress over the shuttering of the Stars and Stripes, and Trump did something he rarely does: he reversed Esper’s order, and the paper was kept open.

In January of this year, the Washington Post reported that new employees of the paper were being asked to answer questions about their political leanings and loyalty to the Trump administration.

Stars and Stripes reporters have always occupied a middle zone between purely civilian newsgatherers and military spokespeople. Some reporters for Stars and Stripes are civilian, and some are senior enlisted soldiers. Reporters for the Stars and Stripes are trusted by soldiers, and the paper has often beat civilian newspapers to stories about bogus decisions made by commanders and conditions down in the ranks in the services. Stars and Stripes was among the first to report on unsanitary conditions on the USS Lincoln aircraft carrier, and the paper covered the strain on families of sailors who had been deployed for more than 250 days. Hegseth criticized the coverage and called the reports “dishonest.” Reporters for Stars and Stripes shared their notes with me after a military command press conference I missed in Afghanistan and helped me out when I was embedded with the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq. Stars and Stripes reporters were hardworking and often shared insights they had into what was going on with the troops that other reporters lacked.

Today Hegseth’s spokesman, Sean Parnell, told reporters that the Stars and Stripes would henceforth be directed “away from woke distractions that syphon morale.” The first thing Hegseth did was cancel the paper’s publishing of comic strips, a long tradition that goes back at least to World War II, when cartoonist Bill Mauldin published his famous “Willie and Joe” cartoons in the paper.

Mauldin’s cartoons poked fun at officers and celebrated enlisted soldiers, depicting Willie and Joe as unshaven and unkempt, while officers in the middle of a war zone were perfectly uniformed and groomed. General George Patton accused Mauldin of insubordination and ordered him removed from his command. (The cartoon above is one that got Mauldin in trouble with Patton.) Mauldin found a home in the Fifth Army, commanded in Italy by my grandfather, and continued to publish his cartoons in the Stars and Stripes. Grandpa loved Mauldin. They stayed in touch after the war, and Mauldin gave him a copy of his book, “Bill Mauldin’s Army,” with a hand-drawn cartoon of Willie and Joe dedicating the book to him inside the cover. He remained a family friend of the Truscotts until his death in 2003. I visited him with my son Lucian V in his nursing home in California the day before he died.

Hegseth’s hand-puppet Parnell went on X in January and posted this, which perfectly sums up the attitude and philosophy of Trump, Hegseth, and every other shithead in the administration: “Stars and Stripes will be custom tailored to our warfighters. It will focus on warfighting, weapons systems, fitness, lethality, survivability and ALL THINGS MILITARY. No more repurposed DC gossip columns; no more Associated Press reprints.”

Just this week, Hegseth ordered the disbandment of the Army’s only unit focused on drone warfare, the Unmanned Assault Battalion. Part of the 173^rd Airborne Brigade, the battalion was involved in learning from Ukraine’s experience with drone warfare and was focused on wars of the future. In the future, the battalion will focus “on its core warfighting tasks as an airborne infantry battalion assigned to a Mobile Brigade Combat Team (Airborne),” a spokesman for the Pentagon said.

Lots of hollow image-conscious “warfighting.” No cartoons. No “woke” stories in the Stars and Stripes from those counterculture hippies at the Associated Press.

Stars and Stripes is probably not long for this world under the Trump administration, which has a long record of attacking the First Amendment, suing news organizations, and going after writers and entertainers they don’t like. If he were still around, Bill Mauldin would have had a field day with the recent video of Hegseth spit-shining his pompadour.

Long live Stars and Stripes and the honorable service the paper has provided for decades to soldiers and to the nation.

Give a gift subscription

Leave a comment

Share

A summer anecdote: when on holidays in France, on a sunny August day, we visited a castle garden in rural Normandy. When buying the tickets, we got the usual: “Your postcode or country of origin?” We said “Germany,” and suddenly the face of the young woman at the counter lit up. “Would you mind doing us a favor?,” she asked, while fishing a piece of paper from a big pile – it turned out to be a German version of the leaflet about the garden. “We’ve recently made those, but they need to be checked. Would you mind having a look?” “Sure,” we said, and asked for a pen to insert whatever corrections might be needed.

Quite a few, it turned out. We spend far more time in this garden than we had anticipated. But it was lovely: we took turns looking at the flowers and reading through the leaflet, helping each other out with formulations or googling the names of plants to see whether the translations were correct. All along, we were musing whether the translation had been done by a French person who had learned German the way French people learn German – or by AI. The longer we went on, the clearer it became that it was AI (as the woman at the counter later confirmed). As is often the case with AI, it got most factual statements right but could not deal with context. On a little plan that showed a “lookout point,” it had translated it as “point of view.” “We’re probably robbing a local translator of their job,” my husband said afterwards, and suddenly my heart sank. I had thought a lot about how algorithmic management might change the future of work (see some thoughts here), but I had not yet taken into account how customers might be part of the picture, too.

For us, it had been fun: almost a gamified activity that was pleasurable to do on a sunny summer morning, without any pressures. But the dynamics in this story can play out in far less benign ways: tasks that were bundle into jobs get rebundled, not only between different workers, but also by being redistributed to customers or volunteers. They end up being cheaper – but not because less work has been done.

If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of AI system, trying to deal with some problem at a bank, insurance company, or service provider, you probably know that value can not be added, but also be destroyed – at least in the sense of people’s time being massively wasted. A few days after our holidays, I stood in the queue of a postal office, and at the counter next to me a rather desperate elderly man told the – also increasingly desperate – officer about his odyssey of failed phone calls, many of which obviously with automated systems, in his attempts to get a mistake corrected. Nothing had worked, spelling mistakes had gotten in and made things worse, his battery run out when waiting endlessly in the phone line. The redistribution of work to customers can be brutal if the systems don’t work well, if people feel left alone, and if things that matter to them are at stake. Meanwhile, service workers have to deal with more cases of people who are frustrated and angry because the systems failed them.

The longer AI is around, the longer I’m waiting to see the cases where it would really bring progress to humanity, on dimensions that really matter – rather than make work worse and alienate human beings from each other. The greater ease at finding information is undeniable, but it is undermined by the lack of reliability. The reshuffling of tasks can mean that jobs that included some elements of creativity and agency – such as translation – risk becoming a matter of error-correction under increased time pressure. In countries where union exist, they struggle how to protect employees against employers’ expectation that everything can be sped up when AI gets used, failing to consider that somewhat simpler tasks in between things can also be moments that allow people to breathe.*

I’m very much hoping that my pessimism will be proven wrong, but when I look at the power relations – in workplaces, but also in many company-customer relations – under which AI gets introduced these days, I don’t see much hope. Apart from the fact that large language models have been a massive operation of expropriation, the risk is real that they will be used to survey and control ever more areas of human life. Maybe some jobs will become nicer because “boring” elements can be done faster – but overall, the number of “bad” jobs** is likely to increase, and the divide between “good” and “bad” jobs to widen, because AI can be used to instruct, but also control, employees in ever more fields of work.

I’ll therefore end with a shoutout to this excellent essay by Jelena Belic and Kritika Maheshwari, about what universities should do when called up to prepare students for an AI-driven labor market. Maybe not only critical thinking, but also strategies of resistance, need to be included in the curricula!

• An example that was given to me by a union representative was the writing of minutes of conversations between nurses and patients, which can be replaced by AI-produced transcripts.

** Or not even jobs, but gigs algorithmically managed on platforms.

An impaired-driving collision may happen at an intersection or on a highway, but the chain of decisions leading to it can begin hours earlier. Someone drives to dinner knowing they’ll probably drink. Another person assumes they’ll “figure out” the ride home later. By the end of the night, leaving the car behind suddenly feels inconvenient.

That’s what makes impaired driving different from many other roadway risks. The dangerous situation often doesn’t begin with a split-second mistake behind the wheel. There may have been several earlier opportunities to prevent the vehicle from ever entering traffic.

Understanding that timeline is important when thinking about DUI accidents . Alcohol or drugs can affect the abilities needed for safe driving, but one of the most important decisions may happen before the engine ever starts.

Impairment Changes the Skills Driving Depends On

Driving looks almost automatic when you’ve done it thousands of times. In reality, even an ordinary trip requires constant judgment. Drivers monitor speed, maintain lane position, estimate distances, recognize hazards, follow signals, and react to dozens of small changes around them.

Alcohol and other impairing substances can interfere with those abilities. Reaction time may slow, coordination can suffer, and attention may become less reliable. Vision and the ability to accurately judge distances or changing situations can also be affected.

That creates a dangerous combination. A driver doesn’t need to completely lose control of the vehicle for impairment to matter. Being slightly slower to notice brake lights, judge a turn, recognize a pedestrian, or react to another driver’s mistake can be enough to turn an ordinary roadway situation into an emergency.

The Most Important Decision May Happen Hours Earlier

Once someone has been drinking, deciding whether they’re capable of driving can become a poor safety strategy. The substance affecting driving judgment may also affect the judgment being used to make that decision. Planning transportation beforehand avoids that problem.

A designated driver, rideshare, taxi, public transportation, overnight arrangement, or ride from a friend can remove the need to make a difficult decision at the end of the night. The specific option matters less than having one available before impairment enters the equation.

It can help to think about transportation as part of the original plan rather than something to solve afterward. People make reservations, choose where they’re going, and decide when they’ll meet. Deciding how everyone will get home can be another part of that preparation.

Investigators May Reconstruct the Hours Before the Crash

Observations at the scene may become relevant, including a driver’s behavior, speech, coordination, or other circumstances noticed by officers and witnesses. Depending on the situation and applicable law, alcohol or drug testing  may provide additional information.

Other evidence can help reconstruct the timeline. Surveillance video may show where the driver had been. Witnesses may describe what they observed before the person drove. Receipts, electronic records, or other documentation may sometimes provide context about the hours leading up to the collision.

No single detail necessarily tells the entire story. The goal is often to compare multiple sources and determine whether impairment contributed to the driver’s actions. A crash investigation may therefore stretch backward well beyond the few seconds immediately surrounding impact.

One Driver’s Decision Can Spread Far Beyond One Car

Passengers have no control over the decisions being made behind the wheel. Another driver traveling home may suddenly encounter someone drifting across the centerline. A pedestrian crossing legally or a cyclist riding nearby can become involved without having any opportunity to anticipate the danger.

The consequences can continue outward from there. Serious injuries can mean surgeries, rehabilitation, missed work, and long-term limitations. Families may suddenly become caregivers. A fatal collision can permanently change several families because of one decision made before a relatively ordinary drive.

Conclusion

Alcohol and drugs can interfere with reaction time, attention, coordination, vision, judgment, and other abilities drivers rely on constantly. Once those abilities are affected, simply promising to “drive carefully” doesn’t restore them.

Planning another way home removes the problem before it reaches the roadway. Arrange the ride, choose the designated driver, stay overnight, or leave the vehicle behind. Those decisions can feel unnecessarily cautious hours before anyone is ready to leave.

Photo: beyzahzah via Pexels

CLICK HERE TO DONATE IN SUPPORT OF DCREPORT’S NONPROFIT MISSION

The post The Crash That Begins Before the Driver Even Starts the Car appeared first on DCReport.org.

Natalie Harp would be just another of those adoring faces behind Trump at a rally, ever smiling, laughing at the weakest of his jokes, delighted when he breaks into his absurd Trump-dance, fists jutting out, jowl-flaps quivering. Instead, as has been pointed out ad nauseum over the last few days, there she is seated at his side in Marine One, at his heels on the tarmac, even included in his stealth exit from the G-7 summit in an airline food service container, carted off to a lesser version of Air Force One as the real plane served as a decoy.

That Harp was among the select few in Turkey is what publicly reintroduced her as ever-present in Trump’s life: his “human printer,” Trump’s “binkie,” according to the increasingly acerbic Maggie Haberman, who seems to have delightfully discovered her inner-snark since the book she wrote about Trump with Jonathan Swan, “Regime Change,” hit the number one slot on the Times bestseller list.

Every blog on the planet has taken on the phenomenon of Natalie this week. Jonathan V. Last at the Bulwark weighed in with “Trump’s Human Printer is Cray-Cray.” Jo Jo from Jerz wrote a hilarious take-down of the woman she calls “Trump’s flowers in the attic fluffer,” counseling that she should be, at age 35, drowning herself in a margarita in a “glass the size of a Home Depot lighting fixture” and “spending six disastrous weeks with a personal trainer named Bryce” she met on Hinge.

Everyone is taking note of Harp’s apparent devotion to The Man Who Doesn’t Deserve It, Donald Trump, whose own wife has decamped permanently, or just about, to New York to be with Barron as he studies for his classes at NYU and makes crypto trades on inside information he gloms from his brothers and his daddy.

Harp is said to be the one who stays up late with Trump in the White House helping him post his insane Truth Social rants. She was at his side at Mar a Lago when Trump posted more than 40 attacks on E. Jean Carroll after he was found liable of sexually abusing and defaming her. When he travels – which is at least weekly to one of his golf resorts -- Harp follows him around carrying a portable printer she uses to supply him with a never-ending plethora of stories praising him that she prints out from right wing media such as Gateway Pundit.

In other words, her job – she is a government employee working in the White House – is to keep the President of the United States happy.

Senator Jon Ossoff brought Harp to the fore last week in a campaign speech in Georgia when he noted that given his druthers, Trump would rather “travel with Natalie” on his flying Qatari bribe palace than do the actual job of overseeing a war on Iran that has driven the price of gas and everything else through the roof and caused the deaths of 18 U.S. servicemembers.

In response, Trump compared Ossoff to Pew Wee Herman, and the right-wing media went performatively nuts, defending…well, what exactly were they defending? Trump’s right to be attended by a Stepford person outfitted in tight skirts and skyscraper heels and blond hair and perfect makeup, just the way Trump likes them?

Yes. That’s what they’re defending, because Natalie Harp fits in with the right-wing uber-narrative that Donald Trump is entitled to Whatever He Wants, whether it’s destroying the White House or slapping his name on everything in Washington from the Kennedy Center to neighborhood trash receptacles. Jonathan Last at The Bulwark got close to it with this: “Trump’s defenders are eager to pretend that Ossoff was suggesting an affair between Trump and Harp because the reality of the relationship is so much worse.”

But beyond all the juicy inside-Washington hint-dropping about the relationship between Trump and Harp, whatever it is, what’s really going on here?

If you expand the definition of what an abusive relationship is, this is one of them. Trump is the problem, not Natalie Harp. We don’t know what goes on between them behind closed doors. They might do a little light petting, or he might find ways to belittle her the way he does to every female media figure. We’ll never know unless Harp one days treats us to a tell-all, revealing their secret love-texts or the inside details of his twisted take on women.

But it’s clear that Trump is taking advantage of her. He is using her in the way that abusive men use women who are dedicated to them as spouses or bosses. The gigantic bag Harp is photographed carrying around behind him could contain a portable printer, or it could be his laundry, or as the snark-set speculates, a supply of his Depends. She is his porter, and he obviously enjoys seeing her in that role. Whatever the bag contains could be transported to Marine One or to his limousine or through the doors of Mar a Lago or Bedminster by an actual porter, an employee hired for the purpose of carrying luggage and other accoutrements of a traveling executive.

Trump gets off on Harp’s self-negating devotion. He doesn’t have to belittle her in public to bend her to his will, the aim of every abuser. She does it to herself. Natalie Harp is a victim in a sick relationship. She is not to blame. Trump is.

Give a gift subscription

Leave a comment

Share

It’s a heartrending story that has been making headlines across the country: A nurse from Alaska was working as a surrogate mother for a California couple when the fetus was diagnosed with a serious heart condition that would require multiple surgeries and would likely impact his health for the rest of his life. The biological parents demanded an abortion. The surrogate fought them, making her way to anti-abortion Texas for maximal protection. The parents said they would withhold medical treatment if the surrogate didn’t go through with the abortion; she defied them. Baby Gabriel has now been born, and while the surrogate has not succeeded in claiming parental rights, he is getting the treatment he needs in Dallas.

Heartrending indeed. And basically none of it is true.

Subscribe now

The baby’s name is not Gabriel; it’s Rumi. His parents, Omar Ahmed and Nausheen Gilkar, did not demand that the surrogate, McKenna West, terminate or else they would allow a newborn baby to suffer without treatment; they in fact want him getting treatment at a top-rate facility in Los Angeles, not at a less-excellent one in Texas. The surrogate parents legally could not have forced West to terminate in the first place, no matter which state she was in, and when she said she didn’t want to have an abortion they said that was fine. She didn’t decamp to Texas because it bans abortion, but because Texas often confers parental rights onto whoever gives birth. Rumi’s parents are in fact getting him the treatment he needs, which has been complicated by the fact that West insisted on birthing in Texas instead of in California, where Rumi’s care would have been better. And it strikes me as… interesting… that the anti-abortion movement gave the baby a strongly Christian-coded name without having any idea of what his actual parents planned to call him.

The story is a story because it’s a mess, but it’s also a story because the anti-abortion movement has latched onto it and exploited it. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is currently running against James Talarico for a US Senate seat, has put himself in the middle of the whole debacle in order to score campaign points. Some of the country’s most prominent “pro-life” activists have made this their latest cause as a way of demonizing both abortion and surrogacy. The degree to which abortion opponents have manipulated and outright invented facts in this case is stunning, even from a movement rife with dishonestly and manipulation.

They have, however, succeeded in directing the public’s attention to this case, and by extension to commercial surrogacy. And defenders of women’s rights are perilously off-guard. Unlike our counterparts across most of Europe, American feminists have not deeply grappled with the surrogacy issue, instead layering it onto American abortion politics, if we think about it at all. That winds up with simplistic and unsatisfying conclusions, like “her body her choice” — when commercial surrogacy is complicated by money, contracts, power, biology, and truly complex ethical questions about paying for reproduction and whether something can even be fairly considered paid work if it comes with no seconds let alone days off, no labor protections, no way to simply quit, and significant physical risk up to and including death.

The anti-surrogacy movement, which overlaps significantly with the anti-abortion movement, has an easy answer: Babies shouldn’t be commodities; surrogacy should be banned. It’s tempting for supporters of women’s rights and abortion rights to simply negatively polarize ourselves here — if “pro-lifers” are against surrogacy, then we should probably be for it. That would be a mistake. And it’s women who will end up paying the price.

Subscribe now

I will tell you up-front that I have no ideal legal framework to regulate commercial surrogacy. It is banned in almost all of Europe. Countries that allow it with little regulation have found themselves turned into hubs for human trafficking, as women from poor nations are moved to surrogacy-friendly ones to turn out babies for foreigners. It is hard to overstate what a total nightmare a whole lot of international commercial surrogacy is for the women who are coerced into it.

Read more