theconservativetreehouse | The FISA court identified and quantified
tens-of-thousands of search queries of the NSA/FBI database using the
FISA-702(16)(17) system. The database was repeatedly used by persons
with contractor access who unlawfully searched and extracted the raw
results without redacting the information and shared it with an unknown
number of entities.
The outlined process certainly points toward a political spying and
surveillance operation. When the DOJ use of the IRS for political
information on their opposition became problematic, the Obama
administration needed another tool. It was in 2012 when they switched
to using the FBI databases for targeted search queries.
This information from Jim Jordan and Matt Gaetz had the potential to
be extremely explosive. However, the absence of any follow-up
reporting, or even debunking from the traditional guardians of the DC
swamp is weird. What’s going on?
I wrote about these suspicions in depth throughout 2017, 2018 and eventually summarized in 2019:
theconservativetreehouse |I am going to explain how the Intelligence Branch works: (1) to
control every other branch of government; (2) how it functions as an
entirely independent branch of government with no oversight; (3) how and
why it was created to be independent from oversight; (4) what is the
current mission of the IC Branch, and most importantly (5) who operates
it.
The Intelligence Branch is an independent functioning branch of
government, it is no longer a subsidiary set of agencies within the
Executive Branch as most would think. To understand the Intelligence
Branch, we need to drop the elementary school civics class lessons about
three coequal branches of government and replace that outlook with the
modern system that created itself.
The Intelligence Branch functions much like the State Dept, through a
unique set of public-private partnerships that support it. Big Tech
industry collaboration with intelligence operatives is part of that
functioning, almost like an NGO. However, the process is much more
important than most think. In this problematic perspective of a corrupt
system of government, the process is the flaw – not the outcome.
There are people making decisions inside this little known,
unregulated and out-of-control branch of government that impact every
facet of our lives.
None of the people operating deep inside the Intelligence Branch were
elected; and our elected representative House members genuinely do not
know how the system works. I assert this position affirmatively because I
have talked to House and Senate staffers, including the chiefs of staff
for multiple House & Senate committee seats. They are not malicious
people; however, they are genuinely clueless of things that happen
outside their silo. That is part of the purpose of me explaining it,
with examples, in full detail with sunlight.
Time | While people of color, individually and as groups, have been helped
by affirmative action in the subsequent years, data and studies suggest
women — white women in particular — have benefited disproportionately. According to one study,
in 1995, 6 million women, the majority of whom were white, had jobs
they wouldn’t have otherwise held but for affirmative action.
Another study
shows that women made greater gains in employment at companies that do
business with the federal government, which are therefore subject to
federal affirmative-action requirements, than in other companies — with
female employment rising 15.2% at federal contractors but only 2.2%
elsewhere. And the women working for federal-contractor companies also
held higher positions and were paid better.
Even in the private sector, the advancements of white women eclipse those of people of color. After IBM established
its own affirmative-action program, the numbers of women in management
positions more than tripled in less than 10 years. Data from subsequent
years show that the number of executives of color at IBM also grew, but not nearly at the same rate.
wikipedia | As chairman of the United States House Committee on Rules starting in 1954,[5]
Smith controlled the flow of legislation in the House. An opponent of
racial integration, Smith used his power as chairman of the Rules
Committee to keep much civil rights legislation from coming to a vote on
the House floor.
He was a signatory to the 1956 Southern Manifesto that opposed the desegregation of public schools ordered by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education
(1954). A friend described him as someone who "had a real feeling of
kindness toward the black people he knew, but he did not respect the
race."[6]
When the Civil Rights Act of 1957
came before Smith's committee, Smith said, "The Southern people have
never accepted the colored race as a race of people who had equal
intelligence and education and social attainments as the whole people of
the South."[7] Others noted him as an apologist for slavery who used the Ancient Greeks and Romans in its defense.[6]
Speaker Sam Rayburn tried to reduce his power in 1961, with only limited success.
Smith delayed passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
One of Rayburn's reforms was the "Twenty-One Day Rule" that required a
bill to be sent to the floor within 21 days. Under pressure, Smith
released the bill.
Two days before the vote, Smith offered an amendment to insert "sex" after the word "religion" as a protected class of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Congressional Record
shows Smith made serious arguments, voicing concerns that white women
would suffer greater discrimination without a protection for gender.[8] Reformers, who knew Smith was hostile to civil rights for blacks, assumed that he was doing so to defeat the whole bill.[9][10]
In 1968, Leo Kanowitz wrote that, within the context of the anti-civil
rights coalition making "every effort to block" the passage of Title
VII, "it is abundantly clear that a principal motive in introducing
["sex"] was to prevent passage of the basic legislation being considered
by Congress, rather than solicitude for women's employment rights."[11] Kanowitz notes that Representative Edith Green,
who was one of the few female legislators in the House at that time,
held that view that legislation against sex discrimination in employment
"would not have received one hundred votes," indicating that it would
have been defeated handedly.
In 1964, the burning national issue was civil rights for blacks.
Activists argued that it was "the Negro's hour" and that adding women's
rights to the bill could hurt its chance of being passed. However,
opponents voted for the Smith amendment. The National Woman's Party (NWP) had used Smith to include sex as a protected category and so achieved their main goal.[12]
The prohibition of sex discrimination was added on the floor by
Smith. While Smith strongly opposed civil rights laws for blacks, he
supported such laws for women. Smith's amendment passed by a vote of 168
to 133.[10][13][14]
Smith expected that Republicans,
who had included equal rights for women in their party's platform since
1940, would probably vote for the amendment. Some historians speculate
that Smith, in addition to helping women, was trying to embarrass Northern Democrats, who opposed civil rights for women since labor unions opposed the clause.[8]
therealnews | So 64 years ago, Brown vs. Board of Education found that separate and
unequal education systems for African Americans was unconstitutional.
You argue that many Virginians initially actually accepted this
decision, but a public campaign was launched to sway public opinion
against it. Can you talk about that? You start off the first chapter of
your book with this history, talking about how students and teachers in
Virginia, led by students, weren’t organized to be part of Brown. And
then the public response against it.
NANCY MACLEAN:Yeah, in the state of Virginia
in 1951 there was an extraordinarily inspiring event that is really, in
a way, a precursor to some of what we’re seeing now with the teachers
strikes, and student and teacher mobilizations for good public
education. In that strike in 1951 in Prince Edward County, Virginia, a
young woman named Barbara Rose Johns joined with her favorite teacher,
and the two of them worked together, kind of strategized for a strike, a
student strike, to demand a better high school for the black children
of Prince Edward County. At that point many of the students were taking
classes in tar paper shacks. They did not have indoor plumbing, in many
cases, while the white school was the extraordinary state of the art
facility. And so the 200 students in this high school went out on a 100
percent solid students strike for a better high school.
It was an incredibly inspiring event with the support of over
90 percent of their parents, the local black clergy, and NAACP. And what
they wanted was a chance to learn, to grow, to have the same
opportunities as other children in their cohort and their era and their
community. And they only went back to school when the NAACP agreed to
take their course. I’m sorry, to take their case against discrimination
to the courts. And at that point the students went back to school, and
this case from Prince Edward County became one of the five eventually
folded into Brown vs. Board of Education.
Fast forward a bit, and after the Brown decision was issued by
the court, Virginia’s extremely conservative white elite began in 1955
and ’56 to do everything it could to undermine the success of that
decision, and to deny black children and communities the constitutional
rights that had just been recognized by the court. The way that they did
this was through a program called massive resistance, and they led the
program of massive resistance and goaded the wider white South onto it.
And one element of that massive resistance was state-funded tuition
grants, what we today would call vouchers, to enable white parents to
pull their children from public schools to private schools that would be
beyond the reach of the Federal Court’s ruling that segregation was
unconstitutional.
So that’s actually how I got into this story, and it was a
story that led me to the surprising discovery that essentially the
entire American right, and particularly of interest, this free market
fundamentalist right that was just beginning to get organized in those
years, supported these tax-funded school vouchers. And even, in many
cases, supported the school closures in Prince Edward County to prevent
the Brown decision from being implemented.
So that was fascinating to me. And I discovered that Milton
Friedman, the Chicago school free market economist, had issued his first
manifesto for such vouchers in 1955 in the full knowledge of how it
could be used by the white segregationists of the South. And then I also
stumbled onto a report by this James McGill Buchanan that we were
discussing earlier, who essentially tried to pull the segregationist
chestnuts out of the fire in early 1959, when a massive mobilization of
moderate white parents had come together to try to save the schools from
these school closures, and the bleeding of these tax monies out to
private schools. And after the courts had ruled against school closures
of schools that were planning to desegregate in Virginia. So that’s how
Buchanan got on my radar. But what I realized was that this was a much
deeper story about the right’s radical antipathy to public education
precisely because it was public.
And here I think it’s important to point out that when this
was happening in the late 1950s, American schools were the envy of the
developed world. We lead the world in the efficacy of our public
education system. Our schools were a model for the wider world. And yet
this right was attacking public education even then. And as important,
teachers were not organized then. There were no recognized teachers
unions. There was no collective bargaining structure for teachers in
those years. The right was attacking public education as a monopoly,
saying that it denied choice, all the kinds of things that they say now
against public education, and they were doing this at a time when
teachers had no collective power.
So the antipathy that we see on the right toward teachers
unions today, toward public education, is not really because of any
failing on their part. It is ideological. It is dogmatic. It is an
antipathy to public education precisely because it is public.
politico | In May 1969, a group of African-American parents in Holmes County,
Mississippi, sued the Treasury Department to prevent three new
whites-only K-12 private academies from securing full tax-exempt status,
arguing that their discriminatory policies prevented them from being
considered “charitable” institutions. The schools had been founded in
the mid-1960s in response to the desegregation of public schools set in
motion by the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. In
1969, the first year of desegregation, the number of white students
enrolled in public schools in Holmes County dropped from 771 to 28; the
following year, that number fell to zero.
In Green v. Kennedy (David Kennedy was secretary of the
treasury at the time), decided in January 1970, the plaintiffs won a
preliminary injunction, which denied the “segregation academies”
tax-exempt status until further review. In the meantime, the government
was solidifying its position on such schools. Later that year, President
Richard Nixon ordered the Internal Revenue Service to enact a new
policy denying tax exemptions to all segregated schools in the United
States. Under the provisions of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which
forbade racial segregation and discrimination, discriminatory schools
were not—by definition—“charitable” educational organizations, and
therefore they had no claims to tax-exempt status; similarly, donations
to such organizations would no longer qualify as tax-deductible
contributions.
Paul Weyrich, the late religious conservative political activist and co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, saw his opening.
In the decades following World War II, evangelicals, especially
white evangelicals in the North, had drifted toward the Republican
Party—inclined in that direction by general Cold War anxieties,
vestigial suspicions of Catholicism and well-known evangelist Billy
Graham’s very public friendship with Dwight Eisenhower and Richard
Nixon. Despite these predilections, though, evangelicals had largely
stayed out of the political arena, at least in any organized way. If he
could change that, Weyrich reasoned, their large numbers would
constitute a formidable voting bloc—one that he could easily marshal
behind conservative causes.
“The new political philosophy must be defined by us [conservatives]
in moral terms, packaged in non-religious language, and propagated
throughout the country by our new coalition,” Weyrich wrote in the
mid-1970s. “When political power is achieved, the moral majority will
have the opportunity to re-create this great nation.” Weyrich believed
that the political possibilities of such a coalition were unlimited.
“The leadership, moral philosophy, and workable vehicle are at hand just
waiting to be blended and activated,” he wrote. “If the moral majority
acts, results could well exceed our wildest dreams.”
But this hypothetical “moral majority” needed a catalyst—a standard
around which to rally. For nearly two decades, Weyrich, by his own
account, had been trying out different issues, hoping one might pique
evangelical interest: pornography, prayer in schools, the proposed Equal
Rights Amendment to the Constitution, even abortion. “I was trying to
get these people interested in those issues and I utterly failed,”
Weyrich recalled at a conference in 1990.
The Green v. Connally ruling provided a necessary first step: It captured the attention of evangelical leaders , especially
as the IRS began sending questionnaires to church-related “segregation
academies,” including Falwell’s own Lynchburg Christian School,
inquiring about their racial policies. Falwell was furious. “In some
states,” he famously complained, “It’s easier to open a massage parlor
than a Christian school.”
One such school, Bob Jones University—a fundamentalist college in
Greenville, South Carolina—was especially obdurate. The IRS had sent its
first letter to Bob Jones University in November 1970 to ascertain
whether or not it discriminated on the basis of race. The school
responded defiantly: It did not admit African Americans.
Although Bob Jones Jr., the school’s founder, argued that racial
segregation was mandated by the Bible, Falwell and Weyrich quickly
sought to shift the grounds of the debate, framing their opposition in
terms of religious freedom rather than in defense of racial segregation.
For decades, evangelical leaders had boasted that because their
educational institutions accepted no federal money (except for, of
course, not having to pay taxes) the government could not tell them how
to run their shops—whom to hire or not, whom to admit or reject. The
Civil Rights Act, however, changed that calculus.
Bob Jones University did, in fact, try to placate the IRS—in its own
way. Following initial inquiries into the school’s racial policies, Bob
Jones admitted one African-American, a worker in its radio station, as a
part-time student; he dropped out a month later. In 1975, again in an
attempt to forestall IRS action, the school admitted blacks to the
student body, but, out of fears of miscegenation, refused to admit unmarried African-Americans.
The school also stipulated that any students who engaged in interracial
dating, or who were even associated with organizations that advocated
interracial dating, would be expelled.
The IRS was not placated. On January 19, 1976, after years of
warnings—integrate or pay taxes—the agency rescinded the school’s tax
exemption.
For many evangelical leaders, who had been following the issue since Green v. Connally,
Bob Jones University was the final straw. As Elmer L. Rumminger,
longtime administrator at Bob Jones University, told me in an interview,
the IRS actions against his school “alerted the Christian school
community about what could happen with government interference” in the
affairs of evangelical institutions. “That was really the major issue
that got us all involved.”
newstatesman | The tendency to treat political struggles and disagreements as forms
of conspiracy is not only a polarising feature of the current moment,
but also, paradoxically, a stabilising one. American political
development over the past several decades has not merely been divided
into opposing camps, around, for example, questions of race and gender
equality, reproductive rights, or gun ownership; it has also been locked
into a dynamic of partisan competition that encourages threat
inflation, yielding important contributions from both parties to
expansively coercive institutions, in the name of collective security.
From the early Cold War, US partisanship revolved around which party was
better prepared to fight communism, leading to covert actions, proxy
wars and full-scale military invasions, culminating in a disastrous,
immoral war in Vietnam. By the 1970s, this morphed into a question of
which party was tougher on crime – a policy orientation that delivered a
regime of mass incarceration unprecedented in world history. The attacks of 9/11
raised the question of which party would keep the American “homeland”
safe from foreign predators, leading to two more decades of fruitless
war in the Middle East and west Asia, and a deportation delirium that
has swept up millions. What if the banal revelation at the end of the US
wars on communism, crime and terror is simply that Americans are their
own worst enemies?
The spectre of civil war might be better
understood as a metaphor for waning confidence in the (liberal) US
empire. The breakdown of the “rules-based international order” as a
regulative ideal is part of an attrition of what Raymond Geuss has called the “sheltered internal space of… Homo liberalis”
fashioned during the post-1945 golden age of American pluralism, rising
affluence, increasing tolerance and expanding civil rights. The “Great
Society”, the name that was given to the effort to institute social
democratic liberalism inside the US, and the civil rights revolution
that made the country a formal multi-racial democracy for the first time
in its history, was its high watermark. With the war in Vietnam raging,
and the protests of impoverished black residents and rising crime
roiling American cities, however, President Lyndon Johnson concluded
that the US now faced a “war within our own boundaries”, before abdicating instead of pursuing a second full term. Americans have been talking about civil war ever since.
Why did the NGO borg pivot to niche identities? Because the cause of substantive black equality is so much harder than declaring the gender binary defunct through acts of bureaucratic stipulation and language change
In these same years, a conception of politics as civil war by other
means captured the imagination of the modern US right on its ascent to
power. The politician and GOP presidential candidate Barry Goldwater
laid down the gauntlet in the 1960s with a famous declaration that “extremism in defence of liberty is no vice”.
Ronald Reagan was his successful heir, rising to the presidency while
declaring himself a “state’s righter” against an overweening federal
government. Shrinking the welfare state would go hand in hand with
expanding the carceral state: “running up the battle flag”, as Reagan
put it, against a feral, drug-abusing, black “underclass”. In 1994,
forging the first GOP majority in both the House of Representatives and
the Senate in four decades, Newt Gingrich made these inner war analogies
explicit. Our politics is a “war [that] has to be fought with the scale and duration and savagery that is only true of civil wars”, he argued. “While
we are lucky in this country that our civil wars are fought at the
ballot box, not on the battlefield, nonetheless, it is a true civil war.” Trump’s “American carnage” was something of a belated echo.
The modern GOP has avidly fought Gingrich’s version of civil war at
the ballot box and in the courts, leveraging counter-majoritarian
institutions and using the individual states as laboratories for
reactionary politics: advancing model legislation against public
regulations; periodically mobbing local school boards; gerrymandering
congressional districts; undermining public unions; funnelling federal
spending on health, welfare and police via block grants to maximise
state discretion; defending a right of foetal personhood that trumps a
woman’s right to bodily autonomy; making it more difficult to register
to vote and to cast a vote; stimulating white revanchism and moral
outrage against expressions of public disorder and anti-normative
behaviour at every opportunity.
In the process, they successfully captured the commanding heights of
the judiciary, and have now successfully rolled back landmark,
50-year-old national civil rights gains: striking down federal
voting-rights protections, ending a national right to abortion and
overturning legal protections for criminal suspects in police custody.
Winning two of the last five national presidential elections with a
minority of the popular vote, and deploying the Senate filibuster during
periods in the congressional minority, the GOP has pursued civil war by
other means as a well-honed and effective strategy.
In the face of this challenge, it is difficult to judge the
Democratic Party as anything more than a feckless, mildly recalcitrant
partner. Over the past 40 years, it has alternatively sought to ratify,
in gentler tones, GOP-driven projects and demands to lower corporate
taxes, get tough on crime, end welfare as we know it, expand the ambit
of deportation and sustain open-ended military authorisations. It has
sought to placate vulnerable constituents with forms of symbolic
recognition and modest regulatory action, often undergirded by weak
executive authority and moral sentiment. It is the undeniably saner and
more constructive of the two electoral options Americans are forced to
choose between. But it also operates an effective pincer movement
against alternatives further to the left that seek to transform skewed
imbalances in the power of capital and labour, police authority and
public safety. When constituents choose to fight, for example, against
police abuse, or for labour rights, Democrats are missing in action, or
else warning against unpopular opinions that will awaken the monster on
the right. Forever counselling that we choose the lesser evil, they have
instead grown habituated to living with the fox inside the chicken
coop.
omna tigray | It has been over a month since the Ethiopian government declared what
it claimed to be a “humanitarian truce,” promising to facilitate
humanitarian access to Tigray. However, since this declaration, less
than 4 percent of the trucks required to address the man-made famine in
Tigray have been allowed to enter the region. The irregular and
piecemeal humanitarian convoys that have been allowed into the region
are severely inadequate in addressing the humanitarian catastrophe that
has been caused by the Ethiopian government’s 10 months-long siege.
Despite the Ethiopian government’s proclaimed commitment to facilitate
humanitarian deliveries to Tigray, aid workers, including Michael
Dunford of the World Food Programme (WFP), report negotiating with
regional authorities for the safe passage of aid convoys. That
humanitarian organizations have to negotiate access with regional
leaders rather than the federal government indicates that the federal
government is either unable or unwilling to exercise control over
regional authorities.
While the federal government and regional authorities continue to
obstruct aid delivery, the man-made famine in Tigray grows more severe.
Previously, the number of trucks of food that needed to enter Tigray was
around 600 a week. In April 2022, a United Nations (UN) official
reported that about 2,000 trucks of food are needed every week to meet
the region’s needs. Without consistent and unhindered humanitarian
deliveries, the scale of the need will continue to increase.
Additionally, farmers’ lack of access to essential agricultural supplies
like seeds and fertilizers means that many will miss the planting
season, leading to poor harvest and a food crisis that will affect the
region for years to come.
The severe food shortage also affects the ability of healthcare
professionals to assist patients in the region. Healthcare professionals
at Ayder Referral Hospital reported in April 2022 that Ayder Hospital,
one of the last functioning hospitals in Tigray, has begun discharging
patients after its food supplies ran out. After completely depleting
their food supplies, doctors revealed that they have had to send
hundreds of patients home, including infants, children, and people
waiting for cancer treatment. In addition to the severe food shortage,
the Ethiopian government’s siege has also prevented medicine and medical
supplies from reaching the region, leaving doctors unable to provide
medical care.
As well as the brutal siege on Tigray, several areas in Tigray remain
under the occupation of brutal invading Eritrean forces and Amhara
regional forces, including Northern and Western Tigray. In these areas,
these forces continue to commit atrocities, among them, forced
displacement and weaponized starvation in Irob district in northeastern
Tigray, and campaigns of ethnic cleansing in Western Tigray, which
comprises of mass arrest, torture, extrajudicial killings, massacres,
weaponized rape, and forced displacement. On April 6, 2022, a joint
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International report on atrocities
committed in Western Tigray detailed the events that have taken place
since November 2020 and labeled them as ethnic cleansing. The Amhara
forces’ illegal occupation of Western Tigray is arguably the largest
barrier to facilitating peace.
Furthermore, the federal government is engaged in or unable to reign
in the numerous conflicts and unrest across the country that threaten to
further destabilize Ethiopia and the broader East Africa region. The
government is currently waging a military offensive against the Oromo
Liberation Army (OLA) in Oromia, while clashes between the government
and armed groups have been reported in the Benishangul Gumuz, Gambella,
Somali, and Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples Regions
(SNNPR). The federal government and militias operating across regional
borders have killed hundreds of people, destroyed entire villages, and
deeply traumatized communities across the country. This growing
political instability comes as swaths of Oromia and Somali regions face a
severe drought that threatens hundreds of thousands of people’s lives.
Overall, Ethiopia’s political and humanitarian conditions are
extremely fragile. With Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s administration
unwilling and unable to address and willfully fueling the multitude of
complex issues that plague the country, the situation is sure to
deteriorate quickly, jeopardizing regional and global security.
foreignpolicy | The United States is pulling the plug on its drone operations in
southern Ethiopia as demands on its fleet of unmanned aircraft expand
elsewhere across the continent with the rise of the Islamic State in
Libya, and extremist militants in Nigeria, Mali, Chad and Cameroon.
Since 2011, the U.S. had been using the air base in Arba Minch, 250
miles south of the capital, to launch surveillance drones aimed at
groups in East Africa with links to al Qaeda. U.S. personnel primarily
focused on al-Shabab, a Somali group which has waged deadly terrorist
attacks across East Africa.
Pentagon officials remained tightlipped on Monday about the reasons
behind the move. Lt. Col. Michelle Baldanza, a Defense Department
spokeswoman, said the U.S. and Ethiopia agreed that the continued
presence of the drone base was “not required at this time.”
Some experts say the fight against
Shabab was going well enough that the Pentagon’s Africa Command, or
Africom, had the opportunity to redistribute its scarce resources
elsewhere.
“Shabab remains virulent, but as a significant terrorist threat with
high profile leaders in range for drone attacks, much less so,” said
Peter Pham, director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center.
Other
groups, by contrast, are rapidly gaining strength — and presenting far
more tempting targets for the Pentagon and its drone operators.
In recent months, the Islamic State has consolidated its power in Libya, allowing it to easily move
into the port city of Surt, and now control an estimated 150 miles of
territory along the country’s Mediterranean coast. Its presence has
reportedly forced the U.S. to focus on gathering intelligence there in
order to better monitor militant movements in North Africa.
The continued strength of Boko Haram —
the extremist group terrorizing northeastern Nigeria and parts of
Cameroon, Chad, and Niger — has also forced Washington to dedicate more
resources in the Lake Chad region as well. Since 2009, Boko Haram has
killed more than 10,000 people and by last year the group controlled an
area the size of Belgium. After the militants were forced out of some of
their Nigerian strongholds by a multinational African task force last
spring, they switched to more asymmetrical tactics and increased suicide
bombings and cross border raids. In September, President Barack Obama
pledged $45 million to help countries in the Lake Chad region beat back
the group. And in October, the U.S. sent a fleet of surveillance drones and 300 troops to Cameroon.
Those pressures have forced Africom to reevaluate where it allocates resources, say experts.
“Africom remains under-resourced and our entire drone program,
although it’s grown tremendously over the years, is facing a wide array
of demands,” said Pham.
Jennifer Cooke, director of the Africa
program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in
Washington, said that the U.S. military is likely facing pressure to
tackle other African threats, and is trying to consolidate its bases in
the region.
“It may be that with a base in Djibouti there’s just not the need for as many positions in East Africa as before,” she said.
medium |The
West’s Horn of Africa experts have been meeting with a TPLF leader and
TPLF/OLF supporters in secret, even as its governments claim to be
impartial — TPLF’s Berhane Gebre-Christos speaks as TPLF member,
proposed head of “transitional government” (limo/Uber drivers) and
Washington-based Ethio-American diaspora.
Donald Yamamoto, recently the U.S. Ambassador to Somalia who just retired this year, to TPLF official Berhane Gebre-Christos:
“Abiy
is not listening… Obasanjo has not been extraordinary helpful or very
active, and so are there any other opportunities that you see?”
Vicki Huddleston,
former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for African Affairs
and US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa to Berhane
Gebre-Christos:
“I couldn’t agree more that you know, Abiy should step down, there should be an all-inclusive transition government.”
Former
ambassadors and current diplomats for the United States, Britain and EU
had a Zoom meeting this past Sunday with an official for the TPLF in
what amounts to a green light from the West for the terrorist group’s
attempts to overthrow the democratically elected Ethiopian government.
And there’s evidence to prove it: a phone-cam video of the two-hour
meeting.
The
Western powers — Britain, the EU and especially the United States —
have been posturing for months that they have not taken sides in the
conflict and are pushing negotiations only in the interests of peace.
But the Zoom talk rips away the façade, revealing a chummy circle of
foreign policy elite, both retired and still active who mostly know each
other and are in sympathy with TPLF objectives. They include Donald
Yamamoto, one of the U.S. government’s most senior Africa experts who
just retired this year as the American ambassador to Somalia, and
Spain’s diplomat Carmen de la Peña.
Former
EU ambassador to Ethiopia Tim Clarke admitted that all of the
attendants “maintain contacts with our former employees. Just the other
day I was talking to the existing EU ambassador to Ethiopia.”
NC | There’s a simple lesson here: Tigrayans are the bulk of
combat power in the Highlands of the Horn. You’d think that would lead
to the conclusion that you shouldn’t mess with Tigray unless you’re
ready to get in a long, nasty war, even when the conventional military
wisdom is that the Tigrayans don’t have a chance. They weren’t supposed
to have a chance against the Europeans in 1896, either–or the Ethiopian
Derg in the 1980s. If you’re running a war-nerd bookmaking business, put
a sign on the window: “No bets on wars in Tigray.”
One reason we all underestimated Tigray is that no one
outside TPLF circles seems to have admitted to themselves how much of
the combat power of both Eritrean and Ethiopian forces came from ethnic
Tigrayans. Admitting that would be politically unwise, especially in
Ethiopia. Officially, Ethiopia is a federal, multi-ethnic state in which
all ethnic groups are equal. But that’s a polite fiction. The Ethiopian
state is the product of 19th-c. conquests by the “Habesha,” which is
what the Highland Orthodox peoples, Tigrayan and Amhara, call
themselves. Ethiopia was created by Habesha armies pushing south and
east, absorbing Somali, Afar, Oromo, Sidamo, and dozens of other peoples
who became Ethiopian citizens, but had very little share in ruling the
country.
The real struggle for power was always between the two
Habesha peoples, Tigrayan and Amhara. Since Menelik II moved the capital
southward to Shewa, the Amhara seemed like the stronger of the two
groups. Amhara are a much bigger group, for starters. Tigrayans are only
about 6% of the population, Amhara about 26%.
But after the Eritrean/Tigrayan insurgents destroyed the
Derg in the late 20th c., it was the Tigrayans of the TPLF who really
ruled Ethiopia. Their domination was so clear that the TPLF tried to
minimize their power, dutifully talking about their multi-ethnic
coalition, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). No one was fooled; it was the TPLF who had the power in Ethiopia.
The TPLF leader Meles Zenawi was
the ultimate power in the country all through the first two decades of
this century. Zenawi knew that the TPLF was so much better organized
than the other members of the EPRDF coalition that he and his fellow
Tigrayans could let the EPRDF make a show of ethnic equality while
keeping Tigrayan control. Henri IV went through the motions of
converting to Catholicism in return for the throne with the line “Paris
is worth a mass or two,” and Zenawi seems to have decided “Addis and the
whole GDP is worth letting those weaker militias from other ethnic
groups share the credit.”
Zenawi’s PR campaign worked so well that Ethiopians forgot
the hard truth that it was the Tigrayans who had the real combat power.
The Tigrayans’ only rival in terms of military power was the
Eritrean army (EDF.) The “Eritrean” label made people forget that the
EDF is also dominated by ethnic Tigrayans. Tigrinya-speakers are the majority in Eritrea, not only the dominant but the biggest ethnic group.
That has never stopped Eritrean Tigrayans from killing other
Tigrayans. That shouldn’t be a surprise — when have people of the same
ethnic group ever fretted about killing each other? — but it does
underline what seems like the dominant fact at the moment: The Tigrayans
are the most formidable people in the Horn.
tabletmag | Recent days have witnessed the emergence of a new rift in our pandemic debate. Strikingly, this time the dispute is not just partisan, but also splitting the Democratic Party. While Democratic governors appear to see where political winds are blowing, some blue cities are moving in the opposite
direction. And many states that are dropping adult mask mandates are
retaining them for kids, resulting in the absurd prospect of indefinite
masking for a less vulnerable population for whom masks have more significantdownsides.
How
did partisan warfare over mask mandates become such a central feature
of the pandemic? The familiar answer is that the mask wars are just
another symptom of national polarization. When Donald Trump casually
denigrated cloth masks as president, the stage was set for a Democratic
backlash—turning masks into not just a public health measure, but also a
talismanic symbol
of virtue signaling on one side and a rallying cry about freedom for
the other. But polarization is only part of the story. Mask mandates are
a microcosm of a key failure of our pandemic response: the poor climate for public discourse fostered by an elite culture whose overconfidence led to a prolonged strategy of undermining open discussion in a vain attempt to prove that complex questions could have only one universal and immutable answer.
From
the beginning of the pandemic, technocratic elites have offered us a
dubious bill of goods. Aided and abetted by the media and by many
academics, politicians proffered—indeed, likely believed—the idea that
the pandemic would go away if everyone just did as they were told. “If
everyone wore a mask for two weeks …” became a telltalerefrain,
a claim that was neither true nor possible. Pundits celebrated
President Joe Biden’s ill-fated “hundred days of masking,” which
promised “just 100 days to mask, not forever.” This habit of
exaggeration and blind optimism among elites helps explain gaffes like
Biden’s bizarre claim during his campaign that every single pandemic death could have been averted by better leadership.
Choices
needed to be made, and leaders got some right (accelerating vaccine
research) and others wrong (failing to protect the elderly). In other
instances, they missed opportunities, failing to strengthen policies
like sick leave that would improve our resilience—a topic almost
entirely avoided by political elites, who prefer to blame the pandemic’s
consequences on a handful of dissenters. But in acting as if their
policy choices came from scientific omniscience, elites minimized the
messiness of the real world—in which chance, trust, and voluntary decisions all play a crucial role.
Today,
the plerophory of elites—born of hubris and unbridled self
confidence—is bearing bitter fruit. For some, the overselling of policy
has led them to religiouslike zeal and dogmatism about particular
interventions. For others, it has led to a complete loss of faith
in institutions like the CDC, the FDA, and the NIH, which depend on
public trust in order to fulfill their missions. Masking was
simultaneously described as a panacea—better than a vaccine,
in the memorable words of the former CDC director—yet it wasn’t good
enough to quickly reopen many closed schools, even given that an
unvaccinated child faced lower risk
than a vaccinated grandparent. The arbitrariness of the resulting
policy recommendations and mandates is etched into the many photographs
of masked kids, sometimes posed with unmasked politicians, that will likely come to represent much of our badly flawed pandemic response.
NYTimes | It has not been uncommon, in recent years, to hear Americans worry about the advent of a new civil war.
“Is Civil War Ahead?” The New Yorker asked last month. “Is America heading to civil war or secession?” CNN
wondered on the anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Last
week, Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois told “The View” that “we
have to recognize” the possibility of a civil war. “I don’t think it’s
too far of a bridge to think that’s a possibility,” he said.
This isn’t just the media or the political class; it’s public opinion too. In a 2019 survey
for the Georgetown Institute of Politics, the average respondent said
that the United States was two-thirds of the way toward the “edge of a
civil war.” In a recent poll
conducted by the Institute of Politics at Harvard, 35 percent of
voting-age Americans under 30 placed the odds of a second civil war at
50 percent or higher.
And in a result
that says something about the divisions at hand, 52 percent of Trump
voters and 41 percent of Biden voters said that they at least “somewhat
agree” that it’s time to split the country, with either red or blue
states leaving the union and forming their own country, according to a survey conducted by the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia (where I am a visiting scholar).
Several
related forces are fueling this anxiety, from deepening partisan
polarization and our winner-take-all politics to our sharp division
across lines of identity, culture and geography. There is the fact that
this country is saturated with guns, as well as the reality that many
Americans fear demographic change to the point that they’re willing to
do pretty much anything to stop it. There is also the issue of Donald
Trump, his strongest supporters and their effort to overturn the results
of the 2020 presidential election. Americans feel
farther apart than at any point in recent memory, and as a result, many
Americans fear the prospect of organized political violence well beyond
what we saw on Jan. 6, 2021.
There
is, however, a serious problem with this narrative: The Civil War we
fought in the 19th century was not sparked by division qua division.
Slate |Your chapter on “The Fall of New York”focuses
on threat multipliers for instability – economic, climate, property.
Part of me wonders if part of the Canadian protest – in a country known
for being almost smugly civil and polite and law abiding – is just a
growing recognition that stuff is broken, governments are bankrupt, the
climate is an existential threat, and that institutions are not up to
the task of repair. I guess what I am asking is, when lawful Canadians are boiling over, is it a sign that the conditions you identified in the U.S. are in fact worldwide?
There
is no question that the Trucker Convoy is the toxic American political
environment spilling across our border. I mean, its biggest supporters,
by far, have been Donald Trump and Elon Musk. But when you say Canadians
are boiling over, we’re talking about a few thousand Canadians boiling
over. And who can blame them? I mean, honestly, I sympathize with the
frustrations of these truckers. I’m sick of this Covid shit, too. It
makes me want to go to a major city in a piece of machinery and blare
the horn too. But I don’t think the Trucker Convoy is anywhere near as
significant as Jan. 6, and not simply because it happened in Canada!
It’s a temper tantrum. And everyone in the country is disgusted by the
temper tantrum. But it’s not much more than that.
So
in a way, you’re saying that even this Canadian event is somehow more
revealing about what’s going on in America than in Canada?
There
is political insanity everywhere. That’s not unique to America. The
question is how ready the systems are to deal with the insanity. Covid
happened everywhere. It was brutal everywhere. It led to political
unrest everywhere. But it was vastly more toxic, and more divisive, in
America than elsewhere. That’s true about much more than Covid. For
example, during the tour for this book, I’ve been asked how much social
media is driving America’s toxic politics. Of course, it does have an
impact but look at the rest of the world. They’ve all had to deal with
Facebook too. But they didn’t have their entire political apparatus
disrupted. German political parties entered into a “gentleman’s agreement” not to spread foreign misinformation. Which would never be possible in the United States today.
America
is ripe for conflict in a way that Canada simply isn’t. The forces that
cause civil war are manifesting in the States. The legitimacy of its
institutions are in decline, its legal system is increasingly partisan,
inequality is exploding, and climate change is starting to manifest in
direct destruction. These are the subjects of The Next Civil War.
I get the sense you’re not as anxious about all this as, well, like, me?
The
truckers actually entered my neighborhood in Toronto yesterday. I went
to check it out. They certainly disgusted me. But later, on my way home,
I saw them shopping on my block. They marveled at all the pot shops and
fancy bakeries. Their trip to the big city.
Societies are subject to revolution when an elite faction wants it, the enforcer class is unwilling to defend the status quo, and there is a significant popular faction who want change. All three are generally necessary.
The Ottawa incident is conspicuously overshadowed by the Ambassador Bridge blockade, because the latter has serious economic consequences. We will soon know exactly how serious the Canadian Conservative Party is if the Detroit-Windsor choke point isn’t rapidly cleared. (It began clearing up Saturday morning - following an enhanced show of force)
The bridge blockades to date haven’t been happening to provinces like B.C or Quebec, but provinces with Conservative Premiers like Doug Ford (brother of Rob Ford) and Jason Kenney. It’s almost as though the protestors know that the authorities in those provinces won’t take steps to rein them in.
If I were among Canada’s current rulers, I’d be worried, not by the left, but by the right. The left doesn’t have an elite faction supporting it or the complicity of at least some police.
The vast majority of Canadian covid restrictions are provincial, not federal. The federal ones (international travel and air transport) are high-profile.
This makes it easy to sort the partisans partisans by the nature of their complaints – if the Feds/Trudeau are at fault for everything, they’re either hard-core conservatives or outright sympathizers. If [insert conservative premier(s)] are at fault for everything, they’re hardcore Liberal (possibly NDP). [Does not apply to Quebec, one half-hour later in Newfoundland.]
Ontario’s premier, Doug Ford, is keeping his head down and wants this all to fall to Trudeau – it’s not like he’s out there actively helping Ottawa, mobilizing police, or clarifying which rules are provincial. He has an election coming up in June this year. This approach is mostly being repeated in other provinces, with some differences (Quebec very different) – blame the feds, duck and cover.
It’s also very clear that Ford and others would far, far prefer the Feds have to mobilize federal resources instead of them – i.e. the military (because RCMP is provincial police force in many provinces). Trudeau does not want to be the second Trudeau to deploy the military domestically (that would drive the right berserk in a bad way).
Provincial announcements lifting restrictions (or setting timelines) have made it pretty clear the convoy protestors/their leadership (widely referred to here as #FluTrucksKlan) really do not care about the policy specifics – the only core, unmutable thing they want is Trudeau’s resignation. Draw your own conclusions.
It has not helped that the conservative party is going through its own throes of deciding between the somewhat-moderate leadership of O’Toole or throwing him under the bus and doubling down on social conservatives and anti_Trudeau everything.
O’Toole’s gone and everyone angling to replace him has been flirting with the protests – swerving back to hrumph-hrumph when they sense it’s getting really unpopular. Not that anyone expected courage from the federal conservatives, but unified party leadership might have kept the twitter-happy from getting too far over their skis and outright associating with the very nasty parts of the protest. (We shall see but I think this will hurt them long-term)
There are lots of ‘normal Canadians’ who symphathize with parts of the ‘movement’ complaints about covid restrictions. Some of those non-awful people are out protesting. Some will come out and hold signs supporting. Some just say ‘I don’t like this convoy stuff, but I am pissed off about …[insert own thing].” No-one I know thinks schools have been handled well – not a single person – but they mostly disagree about what should have been done. (Schools of course entirely provincial responsibility, some delegation to municipalities – but that doesn’t stop about a quarter of the pop from blaming Trudeau anyway).
But the leadership of the convoys is a different matter – they’ve just found a social wave they can surf and grift. Most of these have just been throwing lines out hoping for a hit for ages.
theline | I don't honestly know the backstory of the how and why the Ottawa
protest was allowed to settle into the downtown core the way it did. It
was obviously a massive intelligence and planning failure, but what kind
of failure? And whose? Did they not have enough information? Bad
information? Did they have good information that, for whatever reason,
they didn’t accept or trust? That's not the sort of thing you can
discover wandering the site. But I can tell you that some of the
protesters themselves are surprised by how easy it was for them to set
up shop.
I have the terrible feeling, and I've spoken with five
separate sources in government roles or in adjacent security positions
who all confirmed this, that Sloly is one of the damn few people in
Ottawa who understands the situation he's in, and he's trying to get
everyone else to notice, or at least to catch up to his understanding.
My sources, alas, seem to think that most others involved in
decision-making are only just now starting to realize the enormity of
the challenge in the capital. Sloly figured it out last week.
The
chief is very political. I say that with no disrespect. Becoming the
chief of a major police force isn't something that happens because you
catch the most bad guys. It happens because you're good at working your
way up through the power structures of a very particular institution.
Sloly talks like a politician. But if you listen closely, and if you
follow along across his briefings, you start to see a theme. From the
moment he first mentioned that there might not be a policing solution to
this protest, and hinted that we need the armed forces, he's been
signalling to the public that Ottawa, as a city, has lost control of
itself. That's a blunt description, but as I noted in a Twitter thread
after a pretty remarkably stark Ottawa Police Services Board meeting on
the weekend, Sloly was clear: the city needs to be rescued. It has lost
control, it is outnumbered, and it cannot fix this problem with the
resources on hand.
Rescued from what? The crowd around Parliament Hill is mostly — not
entirely, but mostly — peaceful. I grant that; I've seen it with my own
eyes. And a few minutes' walk from those sites, now that the horns have
been largely silenced by a court order, the city feels quite normal. The
idea that Ottawa needs rescuing may seem absurd, but it's not. The
longer this goes on, the harder it will become to convince the
protesters to leave, and the harder it will be to stop others from
joining in. The Ambassador Bridge, which links Windsor to Detroit, is
now blocked. Would that have happened if Ottawa had been cleared quickly
and decisively?
The inaction that has so infuriated Ottawans, and the very visible
displays of police ineffectiveness as protesters fuel trucks from
jerrycans despite the city’s stated plan to stop such activity, cannot
be easily explained, and no doubt has multiple contributing causes. Some
is probably simply political expediency, with all the various leaders
wanting someone else to take the blame in case it goes badly (which it
likely will). Some is probably just necessary delay while plans are made
and logistics arranged. And then there’s just the good, old-fashioned
problem of our expectations being a problem, as I’ve written about here.
Canadian officials are struggling to realize just how deep in the muck
they are, despite what seems like increasingly exasperated efforts by
Sloly (and I believe a few others) to get them caught up to the present.
I don't think most of our leaders are there yet.
Also, there’s this: there's another element of the protest that's nothing at all like a festival.
dissentmagazine | At this point we need to ask whether the growing militancy
of the Republican right can be adequately explained by the triumph of
small over big business, as Tea Partiers and Trump himself would have us
believe. Even the most sophisticated commentators have taken the Tea
Party at its word on this matter. But as Trump’s example reminds us,
what is at stake here is less an alliance of the small against the big
than it is an insurrection of one form of capitalism against another:
the private, unincorporated, and family-based versus the corporate,
publicly traded, and shareholder-owned. If most family enterprise was
confined to the small business sector in the 1980s—when public
corporations accounted for the bulk of big business—this shorthand does
not apply today, as more large companies go private and dynastic wealth
surges to the forefront of the American economy. The historian Steve
Fraser has noted that the “resurgence of what might be called dynastic
or family capitalism, as opposed to the more impersonal managerial
capitalism many of us grew up with, is changing the nation’s political
chemistry.” The family-based capitalism that stormed the White House
along with Trump stretches from the smallest of family businesses to the
most rambling of dynasties, and crucially depends on the alliance
between the two. Without its network of subcontracted family businesses,
the dynastic enterprise would collapse as a political and economic
force. Meanwhile the many small business owners that gravitate toward
Trump are convinced that their own fortunes rise and fall along with
his.
It is no accident that Trump’s most significant donors
hail from the same world of privately held, unincorporated, and
family-based capitalism as he does. In 2020, Forbes named Koch
Industries as the largest privately held company in the United States.
The Mercers, who did so much to underwrite Trump’s rise to power, owe
their wealth to Renaissance Technologies, a privately held hedge fund
that was subject to the so-called “small business” tax on pass-through
income. Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, was born into a
business dynasty that made its fortune through the privately held Prince
Corporation. When she married Dick DeVos in 1979, she sealed an
alliance between the Prince family and Amway, still one of the largest
private companies in the country. Most of Betsy DeVos’s personal income
derives from pass-through entities like LLCs and limited partnerships,
which means that the Trump tax cuts would have saved her tens of
millions of dollars. Amway itself is structured as an
S-corporation, a type of pass-through that also would have qualified for
Trump’s 40 percent marginal tax cut to small business.
As the scions of private dynastic capital invest the halls
of power, they have also inflated the fortunes of their own trade and
political associations. Organizations such as the Koch-funded American
Legislative Exchange Council and the theocratic Council for National
Policy (the latter with its close connections to the DeVos and Prince
dynasties) once existed on the far fringes of the American right. Today
their progeny—from Americans for Prosperity to FreedomWorks and the
Family Research Council—dictate the form of Republican Party politics,
while the once all-powerful Business Roundtable and other corporate
trade associations watch from the sidelines. The newly ascendant
organizations would like to convince us that theirs is the voice of
small family business ranged against the vested power of the corporate
and bureaucratic elite. More plausibly, however, they represent a shift
in the center of gravity of American capitalism, which has elevated the
once marginal figure of the family-owned business to a central place in
economic life at every scale. If the large publicly listed corporation
was still the uncontested reference point for American business at the
turn of the millennium, it is now being increasingly challenged by a
style of family-based capitalism whose reach extends from the smallest
to the most grandiose household production units. The infrastructural
basis of today’s far-right resurgence is neither populist nor elitist in
any straightforward sense: it is both. The collapse of the public
corporation into a thicket of privately contracted commercial relations
has weakened the old union-mediated bonds among workers and created real
economic intimacies, however fraught, between the small family-owned
business and the dynastic enterprise. To prevent the emergence of some
more dangerous version of Trump, we would need to build an alternative
set of economic and affective solidarities potent enough to dismantle
this clientelist symbiosis of households.
patrick-wyman | Commercial agriculture is a lucrative industry, at least for those
who own the orchards, cold storage units, processing facilities, and the
large businesses that cater to them. They have a trusted and reasonably
well-paid cadre of managers and specialists in law, finance, and the
like - members of the educated professional-managerial class that my
close classmates and I have joined - but the vast majority of their
employees are lower-wage laborers. The owners are mostly white; the
laborers are mostly Latino, a significant portion of them undocumented
immigrants. Ownership of the real, core assets is where the region’s
wealth comes from, and it doesn’t extend down the social hierarchy. Yet
this bounty is enough to produce hilltop mansions, a few high-end
restaurants, and a staggering array of expensive vacation homes in
Hawaii, Palm Springs, and the San Juan Islands.
This class of
people exists all over the United States, not just in Yakima. So do
mid-sized metropolitan areas, the places where huge numbers of Americans
live but which don’t figure prominently in the country’s popular
imagination or its political narratives: San Luis Obispo, California;
Odessa, Texas; Bloomington, Illinois; Medford, Oregon; Hilo, Hawaii;
Dothan, Alabama; Green Bay, Wisconsin. (As an aside, part of the reason I
loved Parks and Recreation was because it accurately portrayed
life in a place like this: a city that wasn’t small, which served as
the hub for a dispersed rural area, but which wasn’t tightly connected
to a major metropolitan area.)
This kind of elite’s wealth
derives not from their salary - this is what separates them from even
extremely prosperous members of the professional-managerial class, like
doctors and lawyers - but from their ownership of assets. Those assets
vary depending on where in the country we’re talking about; they could
be a bunch of McDonald’s franchises in Jackson, Mississippi, a
beef-processing plant in Lubbock, Texas, a construction company in
Billings, Montana, commercial properties in Portland, Maine, or a car
dealership in western North Carolina. Even the less prosperous parts of
the United States generate enough surplus to produce a class of wealthy
people. Depending on the political culture and institutions of a
locality or region, this elite class might wield more or less political
power. In some places, they have an effective stranglehold over what
gets done; in others, they’re important but not all-powerful.
Wherever
they live, their wealth and connections make them influential forces
within local society. In the aggregate, through their political
donations and positions within their localities and regions, they wield a
great deal of political influence. They’re the local gentry of the
United States.
We’re not talking about international oligarchs;
these folks’ wealth extends into the millions and tens of millions
rather than the billions. There are, however, a lot more of them than
the global elite that tends to get all of the attention. They’re not the
face of instantly recognizable global brands or the subjects of
award-winning New York Times profiles; they own warehouses and
Applebee’s franchises, concrete companies and chains of movie theaters,
hop fields and apartment complexes.
Because their wealth is rooted
in the ownership of physical assets, they tend to be more rooted in
their places of origin than the cosmopolitan professionals and
entrepreneurs of the major metro areas. Mobility between major metros,
the characteristic jumping from Seattle to Los Angeles to New York to
Austin that’s possible for younger lawyers and creatives and tech folks,
is foreign to them. They might really like heading to a vacation home
in Bermuda or Maui. They might plan a relatively early retirement to a
wealthy enclave in Palm Springs, Scottsdale, or central Florida.
Ultimately, however, their money and importance comes from the
businesses they own, and those belong in their localities.
Gentry
classes are a common feature of a great many social-economic-political
regimes throughout history. Pretty much anywhere you have a hierarchical
form of social organization and property ownership, a gentry class of
some kind emerges: the local civic elites of the Roman Empire, the
landlords of later Han China, the numerous lower nobility of late
medieval France, the thegns of Anglo-Saxon England, the
Prussian Junkers, or the planter class of the antebellum South. The
gentry are generally distinct from the highest levels of a regime’s
political and economic elite: They’re usually not resident in the
political center, they don’t hold major positions in the central
administration of the state (whatever that might consist of) and aren’t
counted among the wealthiest people in their polity. New national or
imperial elites might emerge over time from a gentry class, even rulers -
the boundaries between these groups can be more or less porous - but
that’s not usually the case.
Gentry are, by definition, local elites.
The extent to which they wield power in their localities, and how they
do so, is dependent on the structure of their regime. In the early Roman
Empire, for example, local civic elites were essential to the
functioning of the state. They collected taxes in their home cities,
administered justice, and competed with each other for local political
offices and seats on the city councils. Their competition was a driving
force behind the provision of benefits to the common folk in the form of
festivals, games, public buildings, and more basic support, a practice
called civic euergetism.
tabletmag | But
what of the states and the federal government? These two tiers of the
U.S. constitutional order are merely the battlegrounds on which the
intra-elite feuds of the American metro areas are fought.
In
states like Texas, in which Republicans control the state government
while the big cities are controlled by the Democratic hourglass
coalition, there is a constant game of cat-and-mouse between progressive
city councils that enact left-wing policies and right-wing legislatures
passing legislation to overrule them. The Texas state legislature has
used state law to annul ordinances of the far-left Austin City Council
ranging from plastic bag bans, to enabling an explosion of homeless
encampments in public spaces, to declaring Austin a “sanctuary city”
whose police officers would be ordered to refuse to collaborate with
federal immigration authorities.
The
state usually wins, because under our constitutional system the
policies of cities, counties, and local governments under most state
constitutions can be overruled in many areas by the state government. In
this way, metro area conservatives, having lost city councils to
progressive Democrats, can use allies in state government to defeat
their enemies downtown.
But
the downtown Democratic coalition has allies of its own in the federal
government. Beginning in the 1960s, Democrats—by then having become the
urban party they are today—discovered that by means of federal
“grants-in-aid,” they could circumvent state legislatures and go
directly to Congress. According to one estimate,
in 2018 federal aid to state and local governments, taking the form of
grants to specific programs in areas from K-12 education to
environmental policy to transportation and infrastructure, amounted to
$697 billion, doled out via 1,386 separate programs that bind localities
to the federal government.
As a result of all of these targeted federal spending programs, about one-third of state spending actually comes from the federal government.
This
in turn means that a substantial number of state and local government
employees are in effect paid by the federal government, either to
administer grants or to ensure compliance with the many complicated
federal regulations attached to the grants.
Many
of the “culture war issues” that divide left and right are provoked by
the metro area left’s attempt to use federal regulations to impose
policies that could not be passed by the city council or the state
government. The threat that the federal government would cut off aid to
colleges and universities was used to intimidate them into compliance
with controversial leftist sexual harassment policies denying due
process to the accused under the Obama administration. Also in the Obama
years, the federal government used the threat of cutoffs of federal aid
and civil rights lawsuits to bully state governments and local school
districts into letting biological boys and men compete in female sports
teams and use female showers, locker rooms, and restrooms. In the case
of the latter controversy, the federal government’s pressure on state
legislatures and local school districts was reinforced by extortion from
“woke” national and multinational corporations, which fund Democrats.
When
federal grants-in-aid and corporate blackmail are understood as weapons
of the downtown Democrats, the power of Republican red state
legislatures to override blue city ordinances looks less impressive.
While targeted grants-in-aid may benefit only a few state citizens, it
is the noisy few who will fill up the phone lines to state legislators
if the federal government threatens to cut them off as part of a
progressive blackmail campaign. Democratic legislators have also found
ways of tying more popular forms of federal aid—for transportation,
housing, and schools—to more arcane priorities in cultural areas,
forcing localities to choose between embracing Democratic ideas of race,
gender, and sexual orientation or risk losing federal funding for
schools and highways.
Even
more intimidating is extortion by left-leaning corporations.
Particularly in poorer, more working-class Republican states, the state
economic development strategy often involves luring major national or
multinational corporate investment. The socially (though not
economically) progressive Democrats and liberal Republicans who run
corporate America can insist that the states competing for their money
not only shower them with tax breaks but also write New York and Bay
Area social values into state law, or suffer an investment boycott.
A Foundation of Joy
-
Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
-
4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
-
Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
-
Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
-
sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...