HuffPo | The urban poor in the United States are experiencing accelerated
aging at the cellular level, and chronic stress linked both to income
level and racial-ethnic identity is driving this physiological
deterioration.
These are among the findings published
this week by a group of prominent biologists and social researchers,
including a Nobel laureate. Dr. Arline Geronimus, a visiting scholar at
the Stanford Center for Advanced Study and the lead author of the study,
described it as the most rigorous research of its kind examining how
"structurally rooted social processes work through biological mechanisms
to impact health."
What They Found
Researchers
analyzed telomeres of poor and lower middle-class black, white, and
Mexican residents of Detroit. Telomeres are tiny caps at the ends of DNA
strands, akin to the plastic caps at the end of shoelaces, that protect
cells from aging prematurely. Telomeres naturally shorten as people
age. But various types of intense chronic stress are believed to cause
telomeres to shorten, and short telomeres are associated with an array
of serious ailments including cancer, diabetes, and heart disease.
Evidence
increasingly points to telomere length being highly predictive of
healthy life expectancy. Put simply, "the shorter your telomeres, the greater your chance of dying."
The
new study found that low-income residents of Detroit, regardless of
race, have significantly shorter telomeres than the national average.
"There are effects of living in high-poverty, racially segregated
neighborhoods -- the life experiences people have, the physical
exposures, a whole range of things -- that are just not good for your
health," Geronimus said in an interview with The Huffington Post.
zerohedge | Several years ago (and then subsequently renewed almost every year) Barack Obama unviled a
manufacturing initative during one of his countless teleprompted
appearances before the nation, in which he promised to do everything in
his power to boost the US manufacturing sector. It should therefore come
as no surprise that in the month of April America's attempts to
rekindle a manufacturing renaissance have fizzled once again, with a
tiny 1,000 manufacturing jobs added, following zero manufacturing jobs
added the month before.
Putting this in perspective, for every manufacturing job added in
April there were 26 new waiters and bartenders confirming the
"robustness" of America's jobs recovery. The chart below shows the
progression of how America is slowly but surely transforming from a
manufacturing society to one of waiters and bartenders.
dailyimpact | Arthur Berman is perhaps the most credible debunkers of oil hype on the
planet because he is a highly qualified petroleum geologist and a
longtime, top-tier employee of the oil industry. In a presentation early
this year, he made an offhand remark in answer to a question about
Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson. “Oh,” Berman responded, “Rex knows his
company is in liquidation and he’s terrified his stockholders are going
to find out.” I don’t know if anyone else heard a thunderclap at that
moment. The discussion moved quickly onward, but I sat stunned (as I
listened to the tape). It seemed to me I had just heard spoken aloud the
essential truth of our industrial age: it’s in liquidation, and the
people in charge are terrified we are going to find out.
Liquidation, also known as a going-out-of-business sale, is a
stunning word to use about the oil industry, unless you think about it
for a minute. A company in liquidation stops
making or buying its product and keeps selling until its inventory is
gone, then turns out the lights and locks the doors. Oil companies don’t
make oil, they have to find it, and they aren’t finding any. What’s
more, take a look at their capex (capital expenditures for exploration
and development) numbers and you see that after a decade of increasingly
frenzied and expensive searching for new oil fields, with
ever-diminishing returns, the industry has virtually stopped looking. Which brings us once again to the shoals of peak oil.
Oil hypists have been declaring the “theory” of peak oil to be dead
since the phrase was first used. Never more enthusiastically than when
the shale oil “revolution,” a.k.a. the fracking boom, took hold in
America five years ago. The assault on logic and uncommon sense was
massive, well funded and for a time successful: for a while, the term
“peak oil” became synonymous with “loser.” Not any more. Peak oil is
back, and Rex Tillerson is, if anything, more terrified than he was at
the beginning of the year.
TomDispatch | The stock market continued its meteoric rise in anticipation of a
banker-friendly conclusion to the legislation that would deregulate
their industry. Rising consumer confidence reflected the nation’s
fondness for the markets and lack of empathy with the rest of the
world’s economic plight. On March 29, 1999, the Dow Jones Industrial
Average closed above 10,000 for the first time. Six weeks later, on May
6th, the Financial Services Modernization Act passed the Senate. It
legalized, after the fact, the merger that created the nation’s biggest
bank. Citigroup, the marriage of Citibank and Travelers, had been
finalized the previous October.
It was not until that point that one of Glass-Steagall’s main
assassins decided to leave Washington. Six days after the bill passed
the Senate, on May 12, 1999, Robert Rubin abruptly announced his
resignation. As Clinton wrote, “I believed he had been the best and most
important treasury secretary since Alexander Hamilton... He had played a
decisive role in our efforts to restore economic growth and spread its
benefits to more Americans.”
Clinton named Larry Summers to succeed Rubin. Two weeks later, BusinessWeek reported
signs of trouble in merger paradise -- in the form of a growing rift
between John Reed, the former Chairman of Citibank, and Sandy Weill at
the new Citigroup. As Reed said, “Co-CEOs are hard.” Perhaps to patch
their rift, or simply to take advantage of a political opportunity, the
two men enlisted a third person to join their relationship -- none other
than Robert Rubin.
Rubin’s resignation from Treasury became effective on July 2nd. At
that time, he announced, “This almost six and a half years has been
all-consuming, and I think it is time for me to go home to New York and
to do whatever I’m going to do next.” Rubin became chairman of
Citigroup’s executive committee and a member of the newly created
“office of the chairman.” His initial annual compensation package was
worth around $40 million. It was more than worth the “hit” he took when
he left Goldman for the Treasury post.
Three days after the conference committee endorsed the
Gramm-Leach-Bliley bill, Rubin assumed his Citigroup position, joining
the institution destined to dominate the financial industry. That very
same day, Reed and Weill issued a joint statement praising Washington
for “liberating our financial companies from an antiquated regulatory
structure,” stating that “this legislation will unleash the creativity
of our industry and ensure our global competitiveness.”
On November 4th, the Senate approved the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act by a
vote of 90 to 8. (The House voted 362–57 in favor.) Critics famously
referred to it as the Citigroup Authorization Act.
Mirth abounded in Clinton’s White House. “Today Congress voted to
update the rules that have governed financial services since the Great
Depression and replace them with a system for the twenty-first century,”
Summers said. “This historic legislation will better enable American
companies to compete in the new economy.”
But the happiness was misguided. Deregulating the banking industry
might have helped the titans of Wall Street but not people on Main
Street. The Clinton era epitomized the vast difference between
appearance and reality, spin and actuality. As the decade drew to a
close, Clinton basked in the glow of a lofty stock market, a budget
surplus, and the passage of this key banking “modernization.” It would
be revealed in the 2000s that many corporate profits of the 1990s were
based on inflated evaluations, manipulation, and fraud. When Clinton
left office, the gap between rich and poor was greater than it had been
in 1992, and yet the Democrats heralded him as some sort of prosperity
hero.
When he resigned in 1997, Robert Reich, Clinton’s labor secretary,
said, “America is prospering, but the prosperity is not being widely
shared, certainly not as widely shared as it once was... We have made
progress in growing the economy. But growing together again must be our
central goal in the future.” Instead, the growth of wealth inequality
in the United States accelerated, as the men yielding the most financial
power wielded it with increasingly less culpability or restriction. By
2015, that wealth or prosperity gap would stand near historic highs.
sputniknews | Torture is being practiced in the United States’ prison system,
formerly incarcerated Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) whistleblower
John Kiriakou told a public meeting in Washington, DC.
“I want to talk about the kind of torture that
still goes on in our own prisons today,” Kiriakou said on Wednesday. “I
want to talk about why the UN [United Nations] Special Rapporteur
on Human Rights is not allowed into our prisons,” he added.
Kiriakou was recently released from house arrest after serving more
than 23 months in a maximum security US federal prison in Loretto,
Pennsylvania for exposing the CIA’s post-September 11 torture program.
The United States does not allow UN inspectors into its prisons “because
we have something to hide,” Kiriakou said. “Their human rights are
being violated and we are covering it up.”
While serving his sentence, Kiriakou witnessed prisoners being
beaten, having medication withheld, living in dangerously overcrowded
conditions as well as being kept in solitary confinement for prolonged
periods.
“I have come to believe that solitary is a form of torture,” he commented.
After leaving prison, Kiriakou announced he will focus on prison and
criminal justice reform at the social justice organization, the
Institute for Policy Studies.
Kiriakou stressed that the lack of effective oversight by the US
Congress means the un-redacted US Senate Intelligence committee torture
report, documenting the CIA's enhanced interrogation program, will
likely not come to light.
“There is no oversight on Capitol Hill,”
Kiriakou said on Wednesday commenting on the possibility of the full
torture report being released by Congress. “We have these oversight
committees… they act as nothing more than cheerleaders for the agencies
they are supposed to have jurisdiction over.”
thenation | The public exposure in mid-2004 of a government-sanctioned and highly
bureaucratized program of torture and cruel treatment caused a
political crisis that threatened to derail the Bush administration’s
interrogation and detention policies. In the wake of that crisis, some
American Psychological Association (APA) senior staff members and
leaders colluded, secretly, with officials from the White House, Defense
Department and CIA to enable psychologists’ continuing participation in
interrogations at CIA black sites, Guantánamo, and other overseas
facilities. One result of this collusion was a revision in 2005 of the
APA’s code of ethics for interrogations in order to provide cover for
psychologists working in these facilities.
The participation of psychologists was essential for the CIA’s
torture program to continue during the Bush years. The legal authority
for CIA interrogations was based on then-classified Office of Legal
Counsel memos. The first set of memos, authored by John Yoo, signed by
OLC head Jay Bybee and dated August 1, 2002, were withdrawn in late 2003
by Jack Goldsmith (who replaced Bybee when he became a federal judge).
In June 2004, one of the Yoo/Bybee “torture memos” was leaked to the
press, and public outcry about the legal reasoning—especially among
lawyers—created pressure on the Bush administration to release some
additional legal memos and policy directives relevant to prisoner
policies. In December 2004, acting OLC head Daniel Levin revised the
narrow definition of torture in the Yoo/Bybee memos but reaffirmed their
legal opinions. In the spring of 2005, the CIA requested new legal
opinions to validate the techniques in use, and OLC head Stephen
Bradbury authored three new memos in May. All of these OLC opinions were
a “golden shield” against future prosecutions of officials responsible
for the CIA program. According to Bradbury’s 2005 memos, the involvement
of health professionals in monitoring and assessing the effects of
“enhanced” techniques was necessary in order for them to be considered
legal.
Why was the APA’s secret collusion so essential for continuance of
the program? A key reason was because other physicians and psychiatrists
were increasingly reluctant to participate in national security
interrogations. In June 2005, doctors in the CIA’s Office of Medical
Services refused a new role required by the Bradbury memos to engage in
monitoring and research to determine whether the treatment and
conditions to which a detainee was subjected were cruel, inhumane, and
degrading. In 2006 the American Psychiatric Association and the American
Medical Association passed directives barring their members from
participating in such interrogations on professional ethical grounds.
The APA, in collaboration with the Bush administration, was willing to
allow psychologists to fill the role balked at by other health
professionals.
Details of this collusion—which APA officials have concealed and denied for a decade—are the subject of a new report, All the President’s Psychologists,
authored by Drs. Stephen Soldz and Steven Reisner, and Nathaniel
Raymond. The information comes from 638 e-mails from the accounts of a
RAND Corporation researcher and CIA contractor, Scott Gerwehr, who died
in 2008. James Risen, a New York Times journalist and author, most recently, of Pay Any Price, obtained the e-mails through Freedom of Information Act litigation and shared them with the report’s authors.
HuffPo | A government psychologist who helped craft policies central to the
CIA’s torture program is now advising an FBI-led interrogation project,
according to a series of emails revealed in a new independent report.
The
High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group is the Obama administration’s
response to the now-defunct CIA effort. Its members are dispatched to
question terror suspects. Dr. Susan Brandon leads the HIG’s research
committee, which studies and recommends the most effective methods of
noncoercive interrogation.
But as a Bush White House official,
the new report says, Brandon helped that administration base the
legality of the CIA’s interrogation techniques -- now widely denounced
as torture -- on the assessments of psychologists present during the
interrogations.
“Susan Brandon ... played a central role in the development of the
2005 [Psychological Ethics and National Security] policy,” states the
report, which examined the complicity of psychologists in the CIA’s
torture program. The language that Brandon helped write, the report
says, has served to protect former torturers and their superiors from
prosecution.
The report, titled "All The President’s Psychologists,"
was released last week on the heels of a separate inquiry examining the
potential complicity of the American Psychological Association (APA) in
the torture program. The latest investigation came from a group of
university-affiliated psychologists, other medical professionals and
human rights investigators.
Emails from the mid-2000s, cited in
the report, tie Brandon to CIA contract psychologists Bruce Jessen and
James Mitchell, masterminds of the torture program. She had personal
contact with them at a conference she arranged in 2003 and, according to
emails, appears to have been in regular contact with their CIA
supervisor. The extent of Brandon’s knowledge about Mitchell and
Jessen’s activities at the time is unknown, though she is included on an
email that discusses them as “doing special things to special people in
special places.”
"What we see is associations. And the
associations with the apparent supervisor of Mitchell and Jessen at each
step of the process over a period of three years,” said Nathaniel
Raymond, one of the report's co-authors and a program director with the
Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. “The issue here is not about what she
thinks about torture; the issue is about what she did in the past to
knowingly or unknowingly create a legal heat shield for the president
using the ethics of the APA. That’s the issue. This is not a question of
torture. It’s a question of alleged corruption."
theatlantic | Hillary Clinton has already staked
out multiple stances that contrast starkly with Bill Clinton's policies.
This week, in Las Vegas, she laid out a set of immigration policies
including "full and equal citizenship" for undocumented immigrants,
protecting the parents of young "Dreamer" undocumented immigrants from
deportation, and softening deportation policies. Bill Clinton, on the other hand,
signed several restrictive immigration measures during his tenure,
speeding deportations, increasing penalties, and making it harder for
the undocumented to gain legal status. The measures were passed by the
Republican Congress at the time.
Hillary Clinton recently expressed hope that the Supreme Court would make same-sex marriage
a constitutional right; her announcement video even featured a gay
couple talking about their upcoming wedding. Bill Clinton, in 1996,
signed the Defense of Marriage Act to deny federal marriage protections
to same sex couples—a law that the Supreme Court ruled largely
unconstitutional in 2013.
As the campaign continues, progressives can be expected to push
Hillary Clinton to take more stances that contravene Bill Clinton's
record. Trade and financial regulation are two notable areas of liberal
angst: Many critics blame Bill Clinton's repeal of the Glass-Steagall
Act for the 2008 financial crisis, and the North American Free Trade
Agreement, which he championed, is frequently cited in the current
debate over trade authority as an example of a bad free-trade deal.
Welfare reform is another Bill Clinton compromise that many modern-day
progressives reject. The Hillary Clinton of 2016 has yet to take a
position on these issues, though she issued a statement
expressing concern about the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership trade
deal. Obama strongly supports the deal, and Hillary Clinton previously
advocated it as secretary of state.
NYTimes | There are many ways for journalists to gain access to an inaccessible
presidential candidate. Hang on the rope line and shout. Fire off
questions via e-mail to media reps. Stake out. Ambush!
Now comes what we’ll call the “air question.” In a post this afternoon,
New York Times reporter Amy Chozick notes that Democratic presidential
hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton has answered seven questions since
launching her campaign on April 12. Or roughly three-tenths of a
question per day.
Given that rate, Chozick and the New York Times
have decided to disclose the questions they would have posed to Clinton
if only they’d had the opportunity. Coming off of Clinton’s remarks
Tuesday about immigration reform, the Times launches the first in a
series:
“President Obama said his
executive action on immigration went as far as the law will allow. You
say you would go beyond what he did. How could you stretch the law
further than the president of your own party and his Justice Department
says it can go?”
The Erik Wemple Blog pledges
another post on this series if the Times air-questions Clinton on her
sparse Q-and-A availability, which would be a glorious meta-media
moment.
charleshughsmith | Despite
the PR about how corporate profits benefit widows and orphans, this
vast wealth is concentrated in the top 1% and the top 5%.
I am honored to share a remarkable data base of Corporate Fines and Settlements from the early 1990s to the present compiled by Jon Morse. Here
is Jon's description of his project to assemble a comprehensive list of
all corporate fines and settlements that can be verified by media
reports:
"This spreadsheet is
all the corporate fines/settlements I’ve been able to find sourced
articles about, mostly in the period from the 1990’s up to today (with a
few 80’s and 70’s). This is by far the most comprehensive list of such
things online. At least that I could find, because the lack of any
decent list is what made me start compiling this list in the first
place."What struck me was the sheer number of corporate violations of laws and regulations--thousands
upon thousands, the vast majority of which occurred since corporate
profits began their incredible ascent in the early 2000s--and the list
of those paying hundreds of millions of dollars in fines and
settlements, which reads like a who's who of Corporate America and Top 100 Global Corporations.
I encourage you to open one of the three alphabetical tabs at the bottom of the spreadsheet on Google Docs and scroll down to find your favorite super-profitable corporation.
Many have a long list of
fines and settlements, and many of the fines are in excess of $100
million. Many are for blatant cartel price-fixing, not disclosing the
dangers of the company's heavily promoted medications, destroying
documents to thwart an investigation of wrong-doing, etc.
In other words, these were not wrist-slaps for minor oversights of complex regulations-- these are blatant violations of core laws of the land.
mises | Mr. Max Ehrendfreund, writing in the Washington Post’s Wonkblog, believes that he has discovered something new: that the world is producing too much
and doesn’t know what to do with it. His solution, of course, is to
confiscate the overproduced products, such as oil and cotton, from its
rightful owners and give it to the people who need it. This phony
problem and its statist solution goes back at least as far at the 1930’s
socialist calls for “production for use” vs. the hated capitalist concept of “production for profit“.
Mr. Ehrenfreund commiserates that a “surplus…challenges some basic
principles of conventional economics…”. Ah, now we see why Mr.
Ehrenfreund has a problem; he understands only “conventional economics”.
Austrians have no such problem understanding why many commodities are
currently in surplus. Our understanding of Austrian business cycle
theory tells us that years of interest rate suppression by monetary
authorities worldwide has disrupted the time structure of production;
i.e., that artificially low interest rates have led entrepreneurs and
their business partners to believe that sufficient resources exist for
the profitable completion of longer term projects, such as increasing
investment in oil and cotton production. Austrians do not contend that
there cannot be a surplus of some goods. Of course, there can! But we
know that a surplus of some goods means that there is a scarcity of
others. Resources were “malinvested” in some projects instead of those
more urgently desired by the public.
Here’s a rather humorous example. A good friend was teaching in West
Germany during the age of Tito, when he and his wife decided to
vacation along Yugoslavia’s beautiful Adriatic coast. While there they
tried in vain to find swimming accessories, like fins and masks, but
shop after shop sold only one product. That one product? Panama hats!
True story. So here is a good example of zero demand for Panama hats and
a scarcity of swimming accessories in one of the most beautiful seaside
vacation spots in the world. But these surpluses and scarcities are not
always so obviously related. A surplus of oil and cotton may mean that
there is a scarcity of millions of other goods that could otherwise have
been produced.
The socialist dogma, to which Mr. Ehrenfeund seems to be enamored,
blinds him to the concept that a successful economy does not need
centralized control. In fact a successful economy needs no guidance at
all, except the rational decisions of the owners of the means of
production to put their resources to the most desired use. How do they
know what that “most desired use” is? The price system tells them! A
dynamic economy is controlled by millions upon millions of people making
billions upon billions of decisions that are in constant flux.
Manipulating the price of any factor of production, such as cotton
prices, will cause disruptions. But our governments have done much worse
than manipulate the price of a few major factors o f production; they
have manipulated the price of money itself, the medium of exchange that
is the lubricating and knowledge transmission device for ALL economic
decisions.
So, Mr. Ehrendreund, brush up on your Mises, Rothbard, Hayek, Habeler, and Garrison.
Your confusion will disappear to be replaced, no doubt, by exasperation
that you ever could have harbored such silly notions as those you
espouse in your article.
Guardian | Behold the shopping mall – the built epitome, according to its
critics, of the mindless, car-bound consumerism of white-bread suburban
America. Yet Southdale Center, the first fully enclosed,
climate-controlled collection of shops from which all the 1,100 or so
similarly designed malls now standing across the United States descend, came from the mind of an anti-car, pro-pedestrian European Jewish socialist.
Victor Gruen, a refugee from Nazi-occupied Austria, arrived in
America in 1938 with high architectural aims. He soon launched a career
creating New York City storefronts for urban businesses, like Ciro’s on
Fifth Avenue and Steckler’s on Broadway, 14 years into which he received
a commission to design something else entirely: a shopping centre 10
miles outside Minneapolis.
This job offered Gruen a blank canvas on which to realise his
long-imagined utopian vision of an indoor city centre that would import
the urbanity of his native Vienna into his fast-growing adopted
homeland. Southdale itself went up as he had imagined it – but nothing
else went according to plan. By the 1970s, Gruen had returned to Austria
to live out his days having all-too-clearly realised what a suburban
monster he’d created.
Though few built environments now seem as prosaic as that of the
shopping mall, it looked downright radical when Gruen first came up with
it. He first publicly submitted such a design in 1943, to Architectural
Forum magazine’s competition “Architecture 194X”, which called upon
modern architects to imagine the city of the post-war future. Alas
Gruen’s entry, with its full enclosure and lack of a central square,
struck even those forward-thinking editors as a bit much, and they sent
him back to the drawing board.
The real postwar America proved far more accommodating to Gruen’s vision
than the imagined one. The 1952 commission that brought Southdale into
the world came from the Dayton family, a name synonymous with department
stores in 1950s Minneapolis. They wanted a shopping centre to
complement the new Dayton’s location that was planned for the suburb of
Edina, a growing town of 15,000 people located — in line with the
concerns of cold war America — just outside the blast radius of a
nuclear bomb dropped on the city.
gizmodo | Recently, we did an experiment: We took an outdated issue of a respected popular science magazine, Scientific American,
and researched exactly what happened to the highly-touted breakthroughs
of the era that would supposedly change everything. What we discovered
is just how terrible we are at predicting the long arc of scientific discovery.
The daily
churn of science news tends toward optimism. You know what I’m talking
about: New cure! New breakthrough smashing Moore’s law! New
revolutionary technology! I write about science, and I am always
uncomfortable trying to predict how a new piece of research will change
the future.
That’s
because science can be wrong. It can go down dead ends. And even when it
doesn’t, almost everything is more complicated and takes longer than we
initially think. But just how wrong and how long?
We can’t
very well time travel to the future for those answers, but we can look
backward. I recently dig up the 2005 December issue of Scientific Americanand went entry by entry
through the Scientific American 50, a list of the most important trends
in science that year. I chose 2005 because 10 years seemed recent
enough for continuity between scientific questions then and now but also
long enough ago for actual progress. More importantly, I chose Scientific American
because the magazine
publishes sober assessments of science, often by
scientists themselves. (Read: It can be a little boring, but it’s
generally accurate.) But I also trusted it not to pick obviously
frivolous and clickbaity things.
Number one
on the list was a stem cell breakthrough that turned out to be one of
the biggest cases of scientific fraud ever. (To be fair, it fooled
everyone.) But the list held other unfulfilled promises, too: companies
now defunct, an FBI raid, and many, many technologies simply still on
the verge of finally making it a decade later. By my count, only two of
its 16 medical discoveries of 2005 have resulted in a drug or hospital
procedures so far. The rosy future is not yet here.
Science is
a not a linear march forward, as headlines seem to imply. Science is a
long slow slog, and often a twisty one at that. That’s obvious in
retrospect, when we can see the dead ends and the roadblocks. It’s less
obvious looking ahead, as we’re being bombarded with promising new drugs
and wondermaterial breakthroughs. So let’s take a look together.
kunstler |Of course, the Freddie Gray riots in Baltimore last week prompted the
usual cries for “an honest conversation about race,” and countless
appeals to fix the “broken” public school system. So, in the spirit of
those pleas, I will advance a very plain and straightforward idea: above
all, teach young black kids how to speak English correctly.
Nothing is more important than
acculturating ghetto kids out of their pidgin patois and into real
English with all of its tenses, verb forms, and cases. It’s more
important initially than learning arithmetic, history, and science. I
would argue that it is hardly possible to learn these other things
without first being grounded in real grammatical English.
When these kids grow up, their
manner of speech will identify them and their prospects for success at
least as much as the color of their skin —
and probably more, in my opinion. Their ability to speak English
correctly will be the salient feature in how others assess the content
of their character
I’m sure by now that the racial
justice hand-wringers are squirming over this proposal. All dialects are
equally okay in this rainbow society, they might argue. No they’re not.
Have you noticed that TV news, business, show biz, education, and
politics increasingly employ people whose parents came from India and
other parts of Asia. Do they speak in a patois lacking in complex verb
forms? Apparently not. Are they succeeding in American life, such as it
is? Apparently so.
Notice that the speech issue —
how people talk — is never part of the “honest conversation about race”
that we are supposed to have. Has anybody noticed that in his public
speeches Martin Luther King spoke regular English correctly, if with a
Southern inflection? Has anybody noticed how important that was in his
role as “a communicator?” Why is this crucial question of language
absent from the public conversation about “the intractable problems of
race in America?” Is it because both blacks and whites are too fearful,
too cowardly, to face this particular problem of how English is spoken?
Perhaps this raises the specter
of IQ. I’d like to know how any IQ test can be meaningful when the
person taking it can’t speak the language that the test is given in. I’m
sure that any ghetto kid drilled in English for two years would show
substantial improvement in such a generalized test. But, of course,
first the American people of all skin tones would have to admit that
this is important.
We don’t want to. We’d rather wring our hands over “structural racism” and other canards.
thenation | This is why those pious calls to “respect the law,” always to be
heard from prominent citizens each time the ghetto explodes, are so
obscene. The law is meant to be my servant and not my master, still less
my torturer and my murderer. To respect the law, in the context in
which the American Negro finds himself, is simply to surrender his
self-respect.
* * *
On April 17, some school children overturned a fruit stand in Harlem.
This would have been a mere childish prank if the children had been
white—had been, that is, the children of that portion of the citizenry
for whom the police work and who have the power to control the police.
But these children were black, and the police chased them and beat them
and took out their guns; and Frank Stafford lost his eye in exactly the
same way The Harlem Six lost their liberty—by trying to protect the
younger children. Daniel Hamm, for example, tells us that “…we heard
children scream. We turned around and walked back to see what happened. I
saw this policeman with his gun out and with his billy in his hand I
like put myself in the way to keep him from shooting the kids. Because
first of all he was shaking like a leaf and jumping all over the place.
And I thought he might shoot one of them.”
He was arrested, along with Wallace Baker, carried to the police
station, beaten—“six and twelve at a time would beat us. They got so
tired beating us they just came in and started spitting on us—they even
bring phlegm up and spit on me.” This went on all day in the evening.
Wallace Baker and Daniel Hamm were taken to Harlem Hospital for X rays
and then carried back to the police station, where the beating continued
all night. They were eventually released, with the fruit-stand charges
pending, in spite of the testimony of the fruit-stand owner. This
fruit-stand owner had already told the police that neither Wallace Baker
nor Daniel Hamm had ever been at his store and that they certainly had
had nothing to do with the fruit-stand incident. But this had no effect
on the conduct of the police. The boys had already attracted the
attention of the police, long before the fruit-stand riot, and in a
perfectly innocent way. They are pigeon fanciers and they
keep—kept—pigeons on the roof. But the police are afraid of everything
in Harlem and they are especially afraid of the roofs, which they
consider to be guerrilla outposts. This means that the citizens of
Harlem who, as we have seen, can come to grief at any hour in the
streets, and who are not safe at their windows, are forbidden the very
air. They are safe only in their houses—or were, until the city passed
the No Knock, Stop and Frisk laws, which permit a policeman to enter
one’s home without knocking and to stop anyone on the streets, at will,
at any hour, and search him. Harlem believes, and I certainly agree,
that these laws are directed against Negroes. They are certainly not
directed against anybody else. One day, “two carloads of detectives come
and went up on the roof. They pulled their guns on the kids and
searched them and made them all come down and they were going to take
them down to the precinct.” But the boys put up a verbal fight and
refused to go and attracted quite a crowd. “To get these boys to the
precinct we would have to shoot them,” a policeman said, and “the police
seemed like they was embarrassed. Because I don’t think they expected
the kids to have as much sense as they had in speaking up for
themselves.” They refused to go to the precinct, “and they didn’t,’’ and
their exhibition of the spirit of ’76 marked them as dangerous.
Occupied territory is occupied territory, even though it be found in
that New World which the Europeans conquered, and it is axiomatic, in
occupied territory, that any act of resistance, even though it be
executed by a child, be answered at once, and with the full weight of
the occupying forces. Furthermore, since the police, not at all
surprisingly, are abysmally incompetent—for neither, in fact, do they
have any respect for the law, which is not surprising, either—Harlem and
all of New York City is full of unsolved crimes. A crime, as we know,
is solved when someone is arrested and convicted. It is not
indispensable, but it is useful, to have a confession. If one is carried
back and forth from the precinct to the hospital long enough, one is
likely to confess to anything.
NYTimes | Early
this year, Megan E. Green, a St. Louis alderwoman, met with officials
of a local police union to discuss a proposal for a civilian oversight
board that would look into accusations of police misconduct. After Ms.
Green refused to soften her support for the proposal, the union backed
an aggressive mailing campaign against her.
But
Ms. Green won her primary with over 70 percent of the vote, and the
Board of Aldermen approved the oversight board by a large margin. “All
that stuff backfired,” Ms. Green said. “The more they attacked me for
it, the more people seemed to rally around me.”
During
the urban crime epidemic of the 1970s and ’80s and the sharp decline in
crime that began in the 1990s, the unions representing police officers
in many cities enjoyed a nearly unassailable political position. Their
opposition could cripple political candidates and kill police-reform
proposals in gestation.
But
amid a rash of high-profile encounters involving allegations of police
overreach in New York, Baltimore, Cleveland, Ferguson, Mo., and North
Charleston, S.C., the political context in which the police unions have
enjoyed a privileged position is rapidly changing. And the unions are
struggling to adapt.
“There
was a time in this country when elected officials — legislators, chief
executives — were willing to contextualize what police do,” said Eugene
O’Donnell, a former New York City police officer and prosecutor who now
teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “And that time is
mostly gone.”
This table lists the top donors to this candidate in 1999-2014. The organizations themselves did not donate,
rather the money came from the organizations' PACs, their individual members or employees or owners, and those
individuals' immediate families. Organization totals include subsidiaries and affiliates.
NOTE: All the numbers on this page are for 1999-2014
and based on Federal Election Commission data
available electronically on
Monday, March 09, 2015. ("Help!
The numbers don't add up...")
Feel free to distribute or cite this material, but please credit the Center for Responsive Politics.
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contact the Center.
WaPo | The
first question people ask me when they learn that my husband lost his
job, our house went underwater and we went from middle class to barely
working poor during the 2008 economic crash is: How did you stay together?
It
always struck me as a strange question. But it’s actually a reasonable
one. Overall, America’s divorce rate has fallen. But like many things,
the poor have not reaped the benefits of this trend. The number of
married, college-educated couples splitting by their seventh anniversary
has dropped from more than 20 percent in the early 1980s to just 11 percent today. But among the poor, those numbers are stagnant. According to the New York Times, 17 percent of lower-income couples (pairs making no more than twice the federal poverty line of just over $30,000) get divorced, about the same rate as it was in the 1980s.
Why this discrepancy?
To start, money is a major source of tension for all couples (they fight more about it than about anything else,
including sex and child care). And less money can equal more
problems. Raevan Zayas stays at home with her 1-year-old baby in
California while her husband struggles at a low-paying job.
“I can’t
afford child care to go to work. We can barely afford groceries. Our kid
needs new shoes and clothes, and I can’t remember the last time Isaac
and I did something nice together,” she said. “Our relationship is so
strained. How are you supposed to work through the problems in your
relationship when you’re worried about how you’re going to buy milk for
your kid?”
University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers said
he’s also found that working-class families have more stringent views
about men as providers. The economy has shifted so that those without
college degrees have more trouble finding such work, which contributes
not only to financial hardship but also to relationship stress. As Johns
Hopkins sociologist Andrew Cherbin explains: “I’ve looked at the
marriage gap between men with high- and low-earning occupations, and it
varies directly with the amount of economic inequality in the country.
The more unequal the earning opportunities, the greater the marriage
gaps between the classes.”
NYTimes | In
the aftermath of racially charged unrest in places like Baltimore,
Ferguson, Mo., and New York, Mr. Obama came to the Bronx on Monday for
the announcement of a new nonprofit organization that is being spun off
from his White House initiative called My Brother’s Keeper. Staked by
more than $80 million in commitments from corporations and other donors,
the new group, My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, will in effect provide the
nucleus for Mr. Obama’s post-presidency, which will begin in January
2017.
“This
will remain a mission for me and for Michelle not just for the rest of
my presidency but for the rest of my life,” Mr. Obama said. “And the
reason is simple,” he added. Referring to some of the youths he had just
met, he said: “We see ourselves in these young men. I grew up without a
dad. I grew up lost sometimes and adrift, not having a sense of a clear
path. The only difference between me and a lot of other young men in
this neighborhood and all across the country is that I grew up in an
environment that was a little more forgiving.”
Organizers
said the new alliance already had financial pledges from companies like
American Express, Deloitte, Discovery Communications and News
Corporation. The money will be used to help companies address obstacles
facing young black and Hispanic men, provide grants to programs for
disadvantaged youths, and help communities aid their populations.
Joe
Echevarria, a former chief executive of Deloitte, the accounting and
consulting firm, will lead the alliance, and among those on its
leadership team or advisory group are executives at PepsiCo, News
Corporation, Sprint, BET and Prudential Group Insurance; former
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell; Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New
Jersey; former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.; the music star John
Legend; the retired athletes Alonzo Mourning, Jerome Bettis and
Shaquille O’Neal; and the mayors of Indianapolis, Sacramento and
Philadelphia.
The
alliance, while nominally independent of the White House, may face some
of the same questions confronting former Secretary of State Hillary
Rodham Clinton as she begins another presidential campaign. Some of
those donating to the alliance may have interests in government action,
and skeptics may wonder whether they are trying to curry favor with the
president by contributing.
“The
Obama administration will have no role in deciding how donations are
screened and what criteria they’ll set at the alliance for donor
policies, because it’s an entirely separate entity,” Josh Earnest, the
White House press secretary, told reporters on Air Force One
en route to New York. But he added, “I’m confident that the members of
the board are well aware of the president’s commitment to transparency.”
NYTimes | “In
a democratic society, people have a say in how they are policed, and
people are saying that they are not satisfied with how things are
going,” said Sean Whent, the police chief in Oakland, Calif. The city
has a troubled history of police abuse and misconduct, but some policy
changes and a new approach to training have led to sharp declines in the
use of force, Chief Whent added.
Like
the 21-foot rule, many current police practices were adopted when
officers faced violent street gangs. Crime rates soared, as did the
number of officers killed. Today, crime is at historic lows and most
cities are safer than they have been in generations, for residents and
officers alike. This should be a moment of high confidence in the
police, said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive
Research Forum, a law enforcement policy group. Instead, he said,
policing is in crisis.
“People
aren’t buying our brand. If it was a product, we’d take it out of the
marketplace and re-engineer it,” Mr. Wexler said. “We’ve lost the
confidence of the American people.”
Mr.
Wexler’s group will meet with hundreds of police leaders in Washington
this week to call for a new era of training, one that replaces truisms
such as the 21-foot rule with lessons on defusing tense situations and
avoiding violent confrontations. While the Justice Department and chiefs
of some major police departments are supportive, the effort has not
been widely embraced, at least so far. Some police unions and others
have expressed skepticism, saying officers are being unfairly
criticized.
“All
this chatter just increases the idea that these encounters are
avoidable and law enforcement is at fault,” said Jeff Roorda of the St.
Louis Police Officers’ Association, who said officers already thought
about ways to avoid confrontations.
The
typical police cadet receives about 58 hours of training on how to use a
gun and 49 hours on defensive tactics, according to a recent survey by
Mr. Wexler’s group. By comparison, cadets spend just eight hours
learning to calm situations before force is needed, a technique called
de-escalation.
“Everything
now is: You get there, you see a guy with a knife, you resolve it,”
said Mr. Wexler, a former senior Boston police official. In many
situations, he said, officers who find themselves 21 feet from a suspect
can simply take a step backward to buy themselves time and safety.
The president established this commission several months ago, in
response to similar incidents that occurred in Ferguson, Missouri. What
is found in the report are dozens of recommendations and action items
to involve the US Department of Justice further into local law
enforcement, further consultations and studies, significant federal
funding, etc. In other words, using events such as those in Baltimore as
an opportunity for significant expansion of federal power and
encroachment at the local level; and, if a false flag, even fomenting
those events.
I am not in any position to make a statement regarding the false flag
part of the discussion; however I found the report worthy of some
interest. It is this that I explore here.
What is the motive force behind this report?
Trust between law enforcement agencies and the people
they protect and serve is essential in a democracy. It is key to the
stability of our communities, the integrity of our criminal justice
system, and the safe and effective delivery of policing services.
True, true and true.
In light of the recent events that have exposed rifts in
the relationships between local police and the communities they protect
and serve, on December 18, 2014, President Barack Obama signed an
Executive Order establishing the Task Force on 21st Century Policing.
But to the observant, “recent events” were not necessary to bring this lack of trust to light.
In establishing the task force, the President spoke of
the distrust that exists between too many police departments and too
many communities—the sense that in a country where our basic principle
is equality under the law, too many individuals, particularly young
people of color, do not feel as if they are being treated fairly.
The report offers six “Pillars” and a recommendation for
implementation of the entire program. I will briefly introduce these.
Each “pillar” is followed by several recommendations and action items –
none of which will solve the underlying problems; instead all will only
expand the bureaucracy behind the problems – opportunities for hundreds
of millions of dollars for consulting contracts, billions of dollars in
funds transferred from the federal government to local agencies, and the
pretense that something is being done.
In other words, fertile ground for a false flag event. Or, maybe, just making lemonade out of lemons.
There is little to no mention of recommendations and action items
that will most quickly and efficiently improve the situation, for
example:
Eliminate all laws regarding victimless crimes;
Ensure everyone is equal under the law – having a badge confers no special privilege;
Eliminate minimum wage laws;
Eliminate federal and state programs that subsidize behavior
destructive toward personal responsibility and the family as the
fundamental building block of a civilized society.
Of course, each of these would reduce government power, so they won’t be found in the report (with one tepid exception).
This is it. This is the big one. Obama is about to make his move. Martial law, you betcha, FEMA death camps and secret tunnels under Wal-Mart. Oh they warned us, they did, the powdered wig wearing Patriots of the Tea Party, they warned us. Grab the wimen’ folk, load yer guns, hoist the Confederate Battle Flag! To the bunkers! To the bunkers!
"Just because you're paranoid," said Ted Cruz, "doesn't mean they're not out to get you."
Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
Right.
And just because you have the word "Senator" in front of your name doesn't mean you're sane, rational, qualified to run the country, or have an IQ higher than that of a sea cucumber.
Seriously, somebody help me out here: what the fuck happened to Texas?
What the fuck happened to Texas?
There’s just no polite, no non-profane way to ask. What. The. Fuck. Happened to Texas?
NYTimes | Lagging
wages — actually declining in real terms for half of working men — and
work instability have been followed by sharp declines in marriage,
rising births out of wedlock, and more.
As
Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution writes: “Blacks have faced,
and will continue to face, unique challenges. But when we look for the
reasons why less skilled blacks are failing to marry and join the middle
class, it is largely for the same reasons that marriage and a
middle-class lifestyle is eluding a growing number of whites as well.”
So
it is, as I said, disheartening still to see commentators suggesting
that the poor are causing their own poverty, and could easily escape if
only they acted like members of the upper middle class.
And
it’s also disheartening to see commentators still purveying another
debunked myth, that we’ve spent vast sums fighting poverty to no avail
(because of values, you see.)
In
reality, federal spending on means-tested programs other than Medicaid
has fluctuated between 1 and 2 percent of G.D.P. for decades, going up
in recessions and down in recoveries. That’s not a lot of money — it’s
far less than other advanced countries spend — and not all of it goes to
families below the poverty line.
Despite
this, measures that correct well-known flaws in the statistics show
that we have made some real progress against poverty. And we would make a
lot more progress if we were even a fraction as generous toward the
needy as we imagine ourselves to be.
The
point is that there is no excuse for fatalism as we contemplate the
evils of poverty in America.
Shrugging your shoulders as you attribute
it all to values is an act of malign neglect. The poor don’t need
lectures on morality, they need more resources — which we can afford to
provide — and better economic opportunities, which we can also afford to
provide through everything from training and subsidies to higher
minimum wages. Baltimore, and America, don’t have to be as unjust as
they are.
americanprospect |Everything about Crystal’s life
was ordinary, except for her death. She is one of a demographic—white
women who don’t graduate from high school—whose life expectancy has
declined dramatically over the past 18 years. These women can now expect
to die five years earlier than the generation before them. It is an
unheard-of drop for a wealthy country in the age of modern medicine.
Throughout history, technological and scientific innovation have put
death off longer and longer, but the benefits of those advances have not
been shared equally, especially across the race and class divides that
characterize 21st--century America. Lack of access to education, medical
care, good wages, and healthy food isn’t just leaving the worst-off
Americans behind. It’s killing them.
The journal Health Affairs reported the
five-year drop last August. The article’s lead author, Jay Olshansky,
who studies human longevity at the University of Illinois at Chicago,
with a team of researchers looked at death rates for different groups
from 1990 to 2008. White men without high-school diplomas had lost three
years of life expectancy, but it was the decline for women like Crystal
that made the study news. Previous studies had shown that the
least-educated whites began dying younger in the 2000s, but only by
about a year. Olshansky and his colleagues did something the other
studies hadn’t: They isolated high-school dropouts and measured their
outcomes instead of lumping them in with high-school graduates who did
not go to college.
The last time researchers found a change of this magnitude, Russian
men had lost seven years after the fall of the Soviet Union, when they
began drinking more and taking on other risky behaviors. Although women
generally outlive men in the U.S., such a large decline in the average
age of death, from almost 79 to a little more than 73, suggests that an
increasing number of women are dying in their twenties, thirties, and
forties. “We actually don’t know the exact reasons why it’s happened,”
Olshansky says. “I wish we did.”
Most Americans, including high-school dropouts of other races, are
gaining life expectancy, just at different speeds. Absent a war,
genocide, pandemic, or massive governmental collapse, drops in life
expectancy are rare. “If you look at the history of longevity in the
United States, there have been no dramatic negative or positive shocks,”
Olshansky says. “With the exception of the 1918 influenza pandemic,
everything has been relatively steady, slow changes. This is a five-year
drop in an 18-year time period. That’s dramatic.”
theatlantic |In the late 1980s and early 1990s, when
crime rates hit their peak, the issue enjoyed a salience in American
politics that is hard to comprehend today. And for Democrats, the
consequences of appearing soft were devastating. In 1988, the George
H.W. Bush campaign’s most effective (and notorious) ad slammed Michael Dukakis for furloughing murderers in Massachusetts. (A separate ad, by a pro-Bush PAC, made African American furloughed murderer Willie Horton a household name).
The
most important moment in that year’s debates came when Dukakis, after
being asked how he would react if his wife was raped and murdered, gave a
bloodless, and politically catastrophic, answer.In January 1994, 37 percent of Americans said crime was the most important issue facing the country.And
that fall, Mario Cuomo lost the governorship of New York State to a
little-known Republican, George Pataki, who had made Cuomo’s opposition
to the death penalty central to his campaign.
In 1992, Bill Clinton faced a far tougher
electorate than Hillary will this time around. African Americans,
Hispanics, and Asians, who constituted
almost 25 percent of the voters in 2012, and Millennials, who also lean
disproportionately left on cultural issues, were either in school or in
diapers. There’s a reason Clinton reminded voters that year that his
nickname was “Bubba.” It’s because in 1992, far more than today, a
Democrat who didn’t appeal to Bubbas couldn’t win. And in 1992, being
“tough on crime” was critical to getting most Bubbas to give a Democrat a
second look.
Was electing Bill Clinton worth it? It’s
the kind of question that separates reformist, “pragmatic” progressives
from their more revolutionary, anti-establishment brethren. It can’t be
answered empirically. It depends on your worldview.
Free To A Good Home
-
I know what gooning is same as I know what felching is but I don't care to
remind myself all that often about it. The Internet just keeps exposing the
ni...
If Free Will Is False, Destiny Is True
-
Free will is like God: perhaps dead, its absence having something to say
about morality (what Nietzsche meant by “Gott ist tot” was that the
Christian God ...
FREE BOOK: On Nonviolence
-
“Michael Barker’s interrogation of nonviolent protest tactics and regime
change is both timely and important. Drawing on cases ranging from American
democr...
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...
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 ...
-
(Damn, has it been THAT long? I don't even know which prompts to use to
post this)
SeeNew
Can't get on your site because you've gone 'invite only'?
Man, ...
First Member of Chumph Cartel Goes to Jail
-
With the profligate racism of the Chumph Cartel, I don’t imagine any of
them convicted and jailed is going to do too much better than your run of
the mill ...
