Silence of the Sams

I had planned to save these cartoons for this summer, but after Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson's stunning performance in front of Congress this week, now seems to be a good time for Scamback Saturday to remember one of his predecessors at the department.

Samuel Pierce was Secretary of HUD from 1981 to 1989.  Pierce had the distinction of being the only African-American in Ronald Reagan's cabinet, and the only cabinet official to serve in the same post for all eight years of Reagan's presidency.

Several HUD Secretaries have been former mayors or otherwise professionally involved in urban renewal. But like Ben Carson, Pierce had no such experience before Reagan named him to the job. Also like Ben Carson, Pierce was African-American, the Republican euphemism for which is "urban," an area the increasingly exurban and rural Republican Party could hardly care less about. If a Republican president has to have one Black person in the cabinet just for appearances sake, he might as well be Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, even if his field of expertise is brain surgery and he's totally unfamiliar with real estate jargon.

Unlike Carson, however, Sam Pierce at least had ample subcabinet-level experience, starting out in Eisenhower's Department of Labor and later as general counsel to Nixon's Treasury Department. But the tenure of "Silent Sam" at HUD was so low-key that when he and the president who appointed him attended a U.S. Conference of Mayors luncheon, Reagan thought Pierce was one of the mayors.

I'm not kidding.

Chuck Stone, a black editor at the Philadelphia Daily News and longtime acquaintance of Pierce, says the Secretary “has the three B’s Republicans like—brilliance, blackness and blandness. Republicans don’t like audacious blacks.”

It was only after Pierce was gone that an investigation by the U.S. Office of the Independent Counsel uncovered mismanagement and political favoritism in HUD dating from his first days on the job.

UW-Milwaukee Post, July 25, 1989

Despite a pledge during his Senate confirmation hearings to ''sever'' his ties to his former New York law firm, Samuel R. Pierce Jr. regularly did personal favors for his former colleagues and interceded with subordinates in the Department of Housing and Urban Development on their behalf, documents from his office files show.

While there is no indication that the former Secretary broke any law barring conflicts of interest or directed subordinates to act improperly, Representative Tom Lantos, Democrat of California, said the documents raised ''additional questions about Secretary Pierce's management at H.U.D.''  ...

Ethics lawyers at H.U.D. said Mr. Pierce's agreement to sever ties with the firm did not bar him from all dealings with it. And lawyers at the Office of Government Ethics said that to prove a criminal violation against an official like Mr. Pierce, a prosecutor would have to demonstrate that he personally and substantially took part in a matter affecting his former firm. 

Investigators also uncovered several cases in which outside agents managing the foreclosure of properties on behalf of HUD, instead of subtracting their management fees and turning the rest of the proceeds over to HUD, were pocketing the entire proceeds and never filing the paperwork. Contracts went to politically connected landlords and developers, funneling money to the campaigns of a number of politicians.

Drawn for an edition of the Post that wasn't published

As the scandals came to light, Pierce claimed that HUD was too big for him to follow individual programs, and he threw his chief aide, Deborah Gore Dean under the bus. She and others on Pierce's staff would be convicted on various felony charges, but Pierce himself was never charged with any criminal activity.

UW-Parkside Ranger, September 28, 1989

Now, I have to caution that there was never any connection between the shenanigans at HUD and the Iran-Contra scandal.

But one familiar name from the Corrupt Trump Administration pops up in those 30-year-old reports.

As one particular scam involving conversion of some abandoned World War II era internment facilities for Japanese-Americans into apartment dwellings was reported in Newsweek in 1989:

The moving force in the project was Paul Manafort, a Reagan campaign consultant in 1980 who later diversified into lobbying and power brokering. When a friend told him the ancient housing project was for sale, Manafort sounded out Deborah Gore Dean, Pierce's chief aide, and got informal encouragement that he could get a rehabilitation contract. Through another crony, he persuaded New Jersey officials to apply for a grant; with two associates, he formed CFM Development Corp. and bought the project for $4.4 million. HUD promptly approved the project, providing $5 million in construction funds and guaranteeing rent subsidies totaling $31.1 million over 15 years. CFM hired Manafort's firm, Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly [okay, more than one familiar name there!] to keep the wheels greased at HUD, paying it a consultant's fee of $326,000. The rent subsidies guaranteed an operating profit, but the program offered a second bonanza in the form of $11 million worth of tax credits. ...
Mayor Bruce Peterson of Upper Deerfield Township, N.J., called the project "a horrible waste of the taxpayers' money." It was imposed on the community as a fait accompli, he testified; the housing wasn't needed, the buildings were too old and shabby, the work being done was shoddy and the subsidized rents were way above local standards.

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These four cartoons about Samuel Pierce are the most I've ever drawn about any Secretary of HUD. The only other HUD Secretary I've ever cartooned was Jack Kemp, who comes in second place, and only because he's in that second cartoon about Pierce. Which never got published until now, so it shouldn't even count.

UW-Parkside Ranger, November 2, 1989

On the other hand, Kemp did appear in at least one of my cartoons when he was Republican Vice Presidential nominee in 1996. For that matter, I've drawn Carson in at least three cartoons, but as a 2016 presidential candidate.

Since the ratio of verbiage to cartoons in this post is weighted too heavily to the former, here's one of those Carson cartoons.

This Week's Sneak Peek

I bet he's spilling the beans about the secret handshake he and Ben Carson have.

Resign and Replace

Six members of the Presidential Advisory Commission on HIV/AIDS (PACHA) resigned en bloc on June 16 to protest the Trump administration's disregard of their concerns. They announced their resignation in an open letter in Newsweek magazine. (A seventh PACHA member, Dr. Jeffrey Akman, has also resigned, although without public explanation.)

As one of the six, Dr. Michelle Ogle explained to Steve Inskeep on National Public Radio:

OGLE: Since the inauguration, the first thing that happened that was a clue — the Office of National AIDS Policy website was removed. And to our knowledge at this point, that website has not been restored. Also, we've made attempts to communicate with this administration. We sent a letter to Secretary Price and to Mr. Trump to basically let them know what the advisory council does, our goals, how we want to — you know, hope to work with them. And we've just gotten nothing but a very lackluster response from the administration.
INSKEEP: OK. Let's make sure we're clear here. Is it that he doesn't care about the issue or just that he's not listening to your advice?
OGLE: No, he doesn't care about the issue. The budget proposal that he sent forward shows that he doesn't care about the issue. Also, the American Health Care Act, the bill that he's put forward that they celebrated in the Rose Garden with, shows that he doesn't care.

The commission was formed by President Bill Clinton in 1995 and renewed by George W. Bush and HHS Secretary Tommy G. Thompson in July of 2001.  Some 17 or 18 members of the commission remain, and, given the corrupt Trump administration's disinterest, one wonders who, if anyone, will fill the empty chairs now.

Trump couldn't even be bothered to tweet out a 140-characters-or-less congratulatory message for LGBTQ pride month, for crying out loud. He left that apparently onerous duty to daughter Ivanka, who is perhaps the closest thing to an LGBTQ ally in Daddy's administration as there is ever likely to be.

Okay, so it wasn't Jared and Ivanka's wedding planner whom Daddy hired to head Region II of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. It was Eric and Lara Trump's wedding planner whom Daddy hired to head Region II of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

She’s arranged tournaments at Trump golf courses, served as the liaison to the Trump family during his presidential campaign, and even arranged Eric Trump’s wedding.

Now President Trump has appointed longtime loyalist Lynne Patton — who has zero housing experience and claims a law degree the school [Quinnipiac University School of Law] says she never earned — to run the office that oversees federal housing programs in New York.

The sum total of housing or urban development experience in Ms. Patton's résumé is found in her five — count 'em on one hand: five — months as HUD's Director of Public Engagement from January to June, 2017.

But she's black, just like HUD Secretary Ben Carson, the neurosurgeon who by some amazing coincidence also has zero experience in housing or urban development. I don't know if that means that Trump doesn't have any white friends willing to work in the department, or if he thinks that Urban=Black and Those People are all interchangeable anyway.

So that's how I feel about the Trumps. They're all pretty interchangeable.

But I probably need to figure out how I want to draw Eric, and, for that matter, Donald Jr.  As long as the U.S. of A. is a wholly owned subsidiary branch of Trump Enterprises Inc., it makes more sense to be familiar with the people who are really in charge — as opposed to those titular heads of cabinet departments.

This Week's Sneak Peek

While we wait for Ben Carson to venture out of the wings and for Marco Rubio to stop skipping Rubio to stop skipping Rubio to stop skipping Rubio to stop skipping Rubio to stop skipping Rubio to stop skipping *scrrrratch!*

...I'm still stuck on last Saturday's discussion of Hillary and marriage equality.

Q Toon: Smother of Exiles

The Republicans are standing by the golden door again, making damned sure it stays shut...

I couldn't possibly fit all the candidates still in the presidential race into this cartoon, so I offer my  thoughts and prayers to any of them who feel slighted and left out.

Miss Characterization!

In the interest of dialogue, here's a note I received today about this week's cartoon from a reader named Ron in Lincoln, Nebraska:

Tomorrow, I'm going to pull up your cartoon on my laptop to start a discussion in my political science class on media bias. Discuss why today the media's approval rating is below even Congress. I'm not even a Republican and I find your cartoon a willful miss characterization, propaganda and simply astroturfing. It's going to be interesting to see how the students look at your bias creditability. Also, if your cartoon would have been just about Trump, it will be interesting to hear the students' reaction and opinions. My take, the reason the main stream media is going to be so vicious this year is because both you and I know that our candidate Hillary Clinton is extremely weak, and the polar opposite of her smooth husband. Because of Twitter, Facebook, and Internet news sources, I personally question if people are swayed by this type of mudslinging anymore. Today's college students are perceptive enough and understand that you can't put all the Republicans in one pot anymore. At least in my class they recognize the huge political and philosophical differences between Trump vs Carson, Paul vs Christie, Clinton vs Sanders, etc. Democrats better wake up to the digital era because voters, especially college age, are far more sophisticated and informed than they were just four years ago. Or, come November next year we're going to have another Kentucky where the Democrats ran an aggressive negative mudslinging campaign.   

Well, I'm hurt and offended. I've never astroturfed in my life! On the other hand, thank you for inducting me into the main stream media.

I wish you a lively discussion in class, Ron. I suspect that few, if any, of your students are old enough to remember what the Republican Party was like before it was taken over by Tea Partisans, Truthers, Birthers, and Libertarianarchists, but if you have any students from a blue state who have been as dismayed by what the Republican Party has become in the 2010s as I have, I hope they feel as free to speak up as your fellow Nebraskans.

Q Toon: Mixed Nuts

Q Syndicate✒Mar 12, 2015

I'm arriving pretty late to this party — Dr. Ben Carson's ridiculous gays-and-prisons comment has been forgotten amid the furore over Hillary Clinton's private e-mail server and Republican senators' decision to notify Iran that they will never agree to any treaties while Barack Obama is President.

Dr. Carson, in case you've never heard of him before, is the GOP's token black presidential candidate — the guy a select few Republicans support for a while in an effort to show that they're not racist. Then, as with Herman Cain and Alan Keyes before him, they fall away when the rest of the party which hasn't nominated a new face since Wendell Willkie coalesces around some white guy with actual experience in government.

Since blurting out on national TV that homosexual sex in prisons proves that sexual orientation is something everyone chooses, Dr. Carson has apologized, which drove all of his supporters crazy. (A short trip, that.) He has promised never to talk about homosexuality again. He needn't worry; he isn't going to be on national TV much any more.