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Massage Parlor Entrepreneur Was Selling Access To Trump

Massage Parlor Entrepreneur Was Selling Access To Trump

It was awkward enough when pictures surfaced showing that Trump spent Super Bowl Sunday partying with a woman, Li “Cindy” Yang, who is implicated in a prostitution and human trafficking scandal. Now, it looks like Yang was also selling access to Trump and his inner circle.

Li Yang used to own the “spa” where New England Patriots owner (and Trump pal) Robert Kraft was arrested for solicitation. That spa has been linked to a human trafficking pipeline from China to Florida. Yang sold the spa a few years ago, but there’s evidence she knew sexual services were offered there when she owned the spa.

And Yang isn’t just linked to Trump. She’s partied with both of Trump’s sons and high-level Florida Republicans, like Sen. Rick Scott and Gov. Ron DeSantis.

All of this would be swampy — and sketchy — enough, but Yang was also using her time hobnobbing with the Florida GOP to literally sell access to Trump.

Here’s how it worked. Yang started a consulting and public relations firm that was supposed to help businesses in America get established in the Chinese marketplace. It isn’t clear that she actually did that. But the business was helping Chinese clients connect to United States politicians, and it partially revolved around Mar-a-Lago.

Yang’s now-defunct website advertised “the opportunity to interact with the president” and said the company could arrange for its clients to attend dinner at the White House. It also promised access to New Year’s Eve with the Trump family at Mar-a-Lago, including a chance for the Chinese businesspeople to get their picture with Trump family members.

Yang also arranged for a group of Chinese executives to attend a private fundraiser for Trump in December 2017. Of course, none of those people are allowed to donate money to Trump, because they are foreign nationals. So, either Yang paid the way for multiple people to attend the fundraiser and hobnob with Trump, or the fundraiser took money from Chinese nationals.

Funnily, it doesn’t appear that Yang is all that political. Though she is a registered Republican, before the 2016 election she hadn’t voted in a decade.

Now, though, she’s a common sight at East Coast GOP parties. Mostly, Yang is just pro-Trump. Her purse is rhinestone-encrusted and spells out MAGA. She’s given $42,000 to the Trump Victory PAC and $16,000 directly to Trump’s campaign.

Selling access to the president is precisely the sort of thing Republicans accused Bill and Hillary Clinton of doing. Asserting, baselessly, that Hillary Clinton engaged in pay for play with Clinton Foundation donors was a staple refrain of Trump’s 2016 campaign.

Turns out the people dwelling that deep in this particular swamp are Donald Trump and his cronies.

Published with permission of The American Independent.

IMAGE: Li “Cindy” Yang with Donald Trump.

Epstein, Starr, Acosta And Male Privilege In The Age Of Trump

Epstein, Starr, Acosta And Male Privilege In The Age Of Trump

In the Age of Trump, it often seems that powerful, entitled men have taken to imitating the behavior of the great man himself: forcing themselves upon reluctant women (and sometimes girls), relying upon their power and money to protect them from the consequences. So go ahead and grab them, boys, because “when you’re a star, they let you do it.”

Maybe you could even let them touch your Super Bowl trophy — assuming that illegal Asian immigrants working 15-hour shifts in West Palm Beach “massage” parlors would have any idea what it represented. Apart from “big, strong me,” compared to “little, insignificant you,” that is.

Not a subtle message, actually.

“It’s unbelievable but apparently true,” comments feminist author Amanda Marcotte. “America’s intensifying wealth inequality has created a class of hyper-rich men who act like cartoon villains.”

She’ll get no argument from me. Trump hardly invented such practices, although he surely embodies them.

See, if women threaten to tell, there’s always a Michael Cohen around to bribe them into silence. And if things go seriously wrong, a randy billionaire can avail himself of the services of an Alan Dershowitz or Kenneth Starr — the brilliant advocates revealed last week as the brains behind convicted sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s secret sweetheart deal with federal prosecutors in the Southern District of Florida.

Think about it: the eponymous puritan scold behind the Starr Report (largely written by Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh), humiliating Bill Clinton for his sweaty sexual sins. Then in 2008, Starr helped to arrange what a federal judge called a “calculated plan by the prosecutor” to allow billionaire financier Epstein to serve a mere 13 months in a private Palm Beach jail he left daily to visit his office, while keeping the arrangement secret from the teenaged girls who’d been his victims. (Not notifying them was the illegal part.)

Miami-based U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta, it’s reliably reported, “did not want bad publicity for Epstein, they did not want other perpetrators exposed and/or they did not want the victims to object.”

Acosta currently serves as President Trump’s secretary of labor.

Kenneth Starr, of course, subsequently went on to greater glory as president of Baylor University, where he distinguished himself by running on the football field in cheerleader garb before being removed in 2016 for helping cover up sexual assaults by football players.

Anyway, what a cast of characters: Kenneth Bleeping Starr, the perpetually indignant Alan Dershowitz, a Trump Cabinet secretary, and Epstein himself: a sleek, billionaire sex offender jetting about in his private airplane (which cynics dubbed the “Lolita Express”) with pals like Trump, Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew.

I ask you: If we can’t have televised congressional hearings about a scam like that, what’s the point of paying taxes?

But enough raillery. Back to the Super Bowl trophy and its humiliated owner, Robert Kraft: business tycoon, philanthropist, owner of the New England Patriots and longtime Trump crony. His company donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration; he’s a frequent guest at Mar-a-Lago, the very fattest of cats.

Humiliated, because until he asked his chauffeur to drive him from his $29.5 million Palm Beach mansion for a couple of furtive visits to the Orchids of Asia Day Spa, a strip mall “massage” joint in nearby Jupiter, Florida, Kraft was a well-respected (if not universally beloved) man.

Now, at age 77, he’s the punchline of a national joke. His seemingly inevitable election to the NFL Hall of Fame has been delayed indefinitely; he may never live to see it. I know: boo hoo-hoo.

The legal penalties are derisory for somebody of Kraft’s wealth. He and a couple of hundred other men (less prominent billionaires among them) are charged with misdemeanors. Fines of up to $1,000 and no jail time are the likely outcome — not much worse than a speeding ticket.

Indeed, the mystery is why a person of his means would frequent a sad-sack joint like Orchids of Asia. At $79 for an hour’s entertainment, if you’ve got the price of a modest lunch at a Palm Beach restaurant, they’ve got to let you do it — whatever it is you want these powerless victims of human trafficking to do.

And smile while they’re doing it.

Local cops have persuasively depicted the women as victims of a cynical, corrupt industry. “These girls are there all day long, into the evening. They can’t leave, and they’re performing sex acts,” a Vero Beach officer told The New Yorker. “Some of them may tell us they’re OK, but they’re not.”

Marcotte thinks it’s about the sadistic exercise of power. “At a certain point,” she writes, “it’s about being able to inflict cruelty.”

Absolutely. But it’s also about the many powerful men who are emotional cripples: incapable of experiencing the love of mature women they know first as the dearest of friends — the only form of sexual intimacy worth having.

IMAGE: Attorney Kenneth Starr speaks during arguments before the California Supreme Court in San Francisco, March 5, 2009. REUTERS/Paul Sakuma.

Support Criminal Justice Reform? Then You’re with Kaepernick

Support Criminal Justice Reform? Then You’re with Kaepernick

The most interesting part of Super Bowl LIII wasn’t watching the game; it was seeing the celebrity seas part over former San Francisco 49er Colin Kaepernick’s ostracization from the NFL.

Megastars Cardi B and Rihanna, activist Shaun King, actress Piper Perabo, and award-winning director Ava Duvernay all boycotted the event and indicated their support for the former 49ers quarterback, many tweeting #ImWithKap. It was the usual lineup of the social justice varsity.

Not only have each of those people positioned themselves against police brutality specifically, they’ve aligned themselves with criminal justice reform generally. Kaepernick’s ban from the NFL crystallizes one of the most important aspects of reform, and it’s not simply free speech or the abuse of black bodies. It’s the need for redemption and re-entry.

To me, whether or not you agree with Kaepernick’s protest of police brutality isn’t at issue. The NFL decreed that his taking a knee during the national anthem was wrong, and now Kaepernick’s facing lifetime punishment and lack of employment for that allegedly bad behavior.

It’s no different than the discrimination faced by poorer black men when they have to reveal past bad decisions on job applications by checking the “felony conviction” box. They are being kept out of an economy because they committed an offense.

Michelle Alexander, author of  The New Jim Crow, wrote that the purpose of the modern criminal legal system in the United States is racially motivated social control of black men to create “a lower caste of individuals who are permanently barred by law and custom from mainstream society.” Kap isn’t outside of society at large, but he’s out of the league and he’s being controlled, professionally speaking. The new Jim Crow is Roger Goodell.

It looks like non-celebs are making this issue unnecessarily complicated — and inconsistent.

Seventy-five percent of people polled last winter agreed that the current criminal justice system needs an overhaul because they know that mass incarceration itself is unpatriotic; too many people are locked up. And we economically bully people who’ve broken the law. And, yes, police cross the line sometimes.

Even though his protest is only a fraction of the larger reform agenda they claim to align with, a majority of people surveyed don’t think that Kap’s kneel is appropriate.

Because I’m citing separate surveys, it’s hard to tease out the hypocrites who are calling for reform out of one side of their mouths and screaming “Boycott Nike!” out of the other.

But there’s one easily identifiable person who’s rooting for reform while also sidelining Colin: owner of six-time Super Bowl-winning team the New England Patriots, Robert Kraft.

Just weeks ago, The REFORM Alliance, a new organization formed by rapper Meek Mill and Sixers’ owner Michael Rubin, announced its intention to free 1 million people from correctional control, namely probation and parole.

Motivated by their “collective disgust,” nine founding partners pledged to “leverage (their) considerable resources to change laws, policies, hearts and minds” to achieve reform of oppressive supervision systems. Kraft is one of the nine partners.

To be fair, Kraft is the only NFL team owner to be reported to have said that he thinks Kaepernick should be rehired in the league, so I don’t dismiss the Patriots’ owner as a total pretender.

But I’m not willing to call Kraft a prize, either. Back in September, when reporters asked him if he would hire Kaepernick, Kraft refused to talk about it.

The man who’s raising the sole Super Bowl ring-clad fist to champion rehabilitation and release from social control should let Kaepernick re-enter the NFL on his team; after all, Kap’s still younger than Kraft’s second-string quarterback.

But more than that, keeping Colin Kaepernick out of the league runs headlong into the justice reform movement that Kraft’s trying to advance.

Proper overhaul of the criminal justice system would never include blacklist on anyone’s employment. If you’re in favor of criminal justice reform, then you’re with Kap, too. It’s that simple.

To find out more about Chandra Bozelko and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.