The Profound Irony Of David Brooks Sermonizing On Moral Formation In Collapsing America

theatlantic  | A modern vision of how to build character. The old-fashioned models of character-building were hopelessly gendered. Men were supposed to display iron willpower that would help them achieve self-mastery over their unruly passions. Women were to sequester themselves in a world of ladylike gentility in order to not be corrupted by bad influences and base desires. Those formulas are obsolete today.

The best modern approach to building character is described in Iris Murdoch’s book The Sovereignty of Good. Murdoch writes that “nothing in life is of any value except the attempt to be virtuous.” For her, moral life is not defined merely by great deeds of courage or sacrifice in epic moments. Instead, moral life is something that goes on continually—treating people considerately in the complex situations of daily existence. For her, the essential moral act is casting a “just and loving” attention on other people.

Normally, she argues, we go about our days with self-centered, self-serving eyes. We see and judge people in ways that satisfy our own ego. We diminish and stereotype and ignore, reducing other people to bit players in our own all-consuming personal drama. But we become morally better, she continues, as we learn to see others deeply, as we learn to envelop others in the kind of patient, caring regard that makes them feel seen, heard, and understood. This is the kind of attention that implicitly asks, “What are you going through?” and cares about the answer.

I become a better person as I become more curious about those around me, as I become more skilled in seeing from their point of view. As I learn to perceive you with a patient and loving regard, I will tend to treat you well. We can, Murdoch concluded, “grow by looking.”

Mandatory social-skills courses. Murdoch’s character-building formula roots us in the simple act of paying attention: Do I attend to you well? It also emphasizes that character is formed and displayed as we treat others considerately. This requires not just a good heart, but good social skills: how to listen well. How to disagree with respect. How to ask for and offer forgiveness. How to patiently cultivate a friendship. How to sit with someone who is grieving or depressed. How to be a good conversationalist.

These are some of the most important skills a person can have. And yet somehow, we don’t teach them. Our schools spend years prepping students with professional skills—but offer little guidance on how to be an upstanding person in everyday life. If we’re going to build a decent society, elementary schools and high schools should require students to take courses that teach these specific social skills, and thus prepare them for life with one another. We could have courses in how to be a good listener or how to build a friendship. The late feminist philosopher Nel Noddings developed a whole pedagogy around how to effectively care for others.

A new core curriculum. More and more colleges and universities are offering courses in what you might call “How to Live.” Yale has one called “Life Worth Living.” Notre Dame has one called “God and the Good Life.” A first-year honors program in this vein at Valparaiso University, in Indiana, involves not just conducting formal debates on ideas gleaned from the Great Books, but putting on a musical production based on their themes. Many of these courses don’t give students a ready-made formula, but they introduce students to some of the venerated moral traditions—Buddhism, Judeo-Christianity, and Enlightenment rationalism, among others. They introduce students to those thinkers who have thought hard on moral problems, from Aristotle to Desmond Tutu to Martha Nussbaum. They hold up diverse exemplars to serve as models of how to live well. They put the big questions of life firmly on the table: What is the ruling passion of your soul? Whom are you responsible to? What are my moral obligations? What will it take for my life to be meaningful? What does it mean to be a good human in today’s world? What are the central issues we need to engage with concerning new technology and human life?

These questions clash with the ethos of the modern university, which is built around specialization and passing on professional or technical knowledge. But they are the most important courses a college can offer. They shouldn’t be on the margins of academic life. They should be part of the required core curriculum.

Intergenerational service. We spend most of our lives living by the logic of the meritocracy: Life is an individual climb upward toward success. It’s about pursuing self-interest.

There should be at least two periods of life when people have a chance to take a sabbatical from the meritocracy and live by an alternative logic—the logic of service: You have to give to receive. You have to lose yourself in a common cause to find yourself. The deepest human relationships are gift relationships, based on mutual care. (An obvious model for at least some aspects of this is the culture of the U.S. military, which similarly emphasizes honor, service, selflessness, and character in support of a purpose greater than oneself, throwing together Americans of different ages and backgrounds who forge strong social bonds.)

Those sabbaticals could happen at the end of the school years and at the end of the working years. National service programs could bring younger and older people together to work to address community needs.

These programs would allow people to experience other-centered ways of being and develop practical moral habits: how to cooperate with people unlike you. How to show up day after day when progress is slow. How to do work that is generous and hard.

Moral organizations. Most organizations serve two sets of goals—moral goals and instrumental goals. Hospitals heal the sick and also seek to make money. Newspapers and magazines inform the public and also try to generate clicks. Law firms defend clients and also try to maximize billable hours. Nonprofits aim to serve the public good and also raise money.

In our society, the commercial or utilitarian goals tend to eclipse the moral goals. Doctors are pressured by hospital administrators to rush through patients so they can charge more fees. Journalists are incentivized to write stories that confirm reader prejudices in order to climb the most-read lists. Whole companies slip into an optimization mindset, in which everything is done to increase output and efficiency.

Moral renewal won’t come until we have leaders who are explicit, loud, and credible about both sets of goals. Here’s how we’re growing financially, but also Here’s how we’re learning to treat one another with consideration and respect; here’s how we’re going to forgo some financial returns in order to better serve our higher mission.

Early in my career, as a TV pundit at PBS NewsHour, I worked with its host, Jim Lehrer. Every day, with a series of small gestures, he signaled what kind of behavior was valued there and what kind of behavior was unacceptable. In this subtle way, he established a set of norms and practices that still lives on. He and others built a thick and coherent moral ecology, and its way of being was internalized by most of the people who have worked there.

Lots Of Talk About Depopulation Agendas

⚠️Holy shit⚠️

US Congressman @RonJohnsonWI alleges that covid was “pre-planned by an elite group of people. Event 201”.

In reference to the John’s Hopkins Center tabletop exercise with the WEF and the Gates Foundation.

Pretty substantial allegations!pic.twitter.com/IfziWIE3SB

— Clandestine (@WarClandestine) August 11, 2023

merylnass  |  Here is another wonderfully researched and written look into the long morbid history of how the powerful repeatedly sterilize the powerless. Hard to believe, but California was still sterilizing women in prisons until about 20 years ago, that we know of. The Midwestern Doctor has produced another tour de force.

The Forgotten Side of Medicine

How Did We Know That the COVID-19 Vaccines Would Decimate Global Fertility?

When I started this Substack, my goal was to draw attention to the things with the vaccines I felt would create significant problems in the future if something was not done about them. One of the initial topics I decided to cover (on April 2nd 2022) was the history of elitist population control initiatives because I saw a lot of different signs that re…

Read more

15 days ago · 442 likes · 334 comments · A Midwestern Doctor

Michel Chossudofsky discusses actual news reports of meetings on depopulation:

https://www.globalresearch.ca/secret-may-2009-meeting-of-the-good-club-billionaire-club-in-bid-to-curb-overpopulation/5742626

“Billionaires Try to Shrink World’s Population”: Secret Gathering Sponsored by Bill Gates, 2009 Meeting of “The Good Club”

Is Worldwide Depopulation Part of the Billionaire's "Great Reset"

For more than ten years, meetings have been held by billionaires described as philanthropists to Reduce the Size of the World’s Population culminating with the 2020-2022 Covid crisis.

Recent developments suggest that “Depopulation” is an integral part of the so-called Covid mandates including the lockdown policies and the mRNA “vaccine”. 

Flash back to 2009. According to the Wall Street Journal: “Billionaires Try to Shrink World’s Population”.

In May 2009, the Billionaire philanthropists met behind closed doors at the home of the president of The Rockefeller University in Manhattan.

This Secret Gathering was sponsored by Bill Gates. They called themselves “The Good Club”. 

Among the participants were the late David Rockefeller, Warren Buffett, George Soros, Michael Bloomberg  Ted Turner, Oprah Winfrey and many more. 

In May 2009, the WSJ as well as the Sunday Times reported: (John Harlow, Los Angeles) that

“Some of America’s leading billionaires have met secretly to consider how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world’s population and speed up improvements in health and education.”

The emphasis was not on population growth (i.e Planned Parenthood) but on “Depopulation”, i.e,. the reduction in the absolute size of the World’s population.

To read complete WSJ article click here—and I have a subscription so have reproduced the full text at the bottom of the page—Meryl

The Class Factor In Journalism

caitlinjohnstone  |  Iraq war cheerleader David Brooks has an article in The New York Times titled “What if We’re the Bad Guys Here?“, another one of those tired old think pieces we’ve been seeing for the last eight years that asks “golly gosh could we coastal elites have played some role in the rise of Trumpism?” like it’s the first time anyone has ever considered that obvious point (the answer is yes, duh, you soft-handed silver spoon-fed ivory tower bubble boy).

One worthwhile paragraph about the media stands out though:

“Over the last decades we’ve taken over whole professions and locked everybody else out. When I began my journalism career in Chicago in the 1980s, there were still some old crusty working-class guys around the newsroom. Now we’re not only a college-dominated profession, we’re an elite-college-dominated profession. Only 0.8 percent of all college students graduate from the super elite 12 schools (the Ivy League colleges, plus Stanford, M.I.T., Duke and the University of Chicago). A 2018 study found that more than 50 percent of the staff writers at the beloved New York Times and The Wall Street Journal attended one of the 29 most elite universities in the nation.”

Brooks is not the first to make this observation about the drastic shift in the socioeconomic makeup of news reporters that has taken place from previous generations to now.

“The class factor in journalism gets overlooked,” journalist Glenn Greenwald said on the Jimmy Dore Show in 2021. “Thirty or forty years ago, fifty years ago, journalists really were outsiders. That’s why they all had unions; they made shit money, they came from like working class families. They hated the elite. They hated bankers and politicians. It was kind of like a boss-employee relationship — they hated them and wanted to throw rocks at them and take them down pegs.”

“If I were to list the twenty richest people I’ve ever met in my entire life, I think like seven or eight of them are people I met because they work at The Intercept — people from like the richest fucking families on the planet,” Greenwald added.

Journalist Matt Taibbi, whose father worked for NBC, made similar observations on the Dark Horse podcast back in 2020.

“Reporters when I was growing up, they came from a different class of people than they do today,” Taibbi said. “A lot of them were kind of more working class — their parents were more likely to be plumbers or electricians than they were to be doctors or lawyers. Like this thing where the journalist is an Ivy League grad, that’s a relatively new thing that I think came about in the seventies and eighties with my generation. But reporters just instinctively hated rich people, they hated powerful people. Like if you put up a poster of a politician in a newsroom it was defaced instantaneously, like there were darts on it. Reporters saw it as their job to stick it to the man.”

“Mostly the job is different now,” Taibbi said. “The fantasy among reporters in the nineties about politicians started to be, I want to be the person that hangs out with the candidate after the speech and has a beer and is sort of close to power. And that’s kind of the model, that’s where we’re at right now. That’s kind of the problem is that basically people in the business want to be behind the rope line with people of influence. And it’s going to be a problem to get us back to that other adversarial posture of the past.”

 

UFO Secrecy And The Fall of J. Robert Oppenheimer

The ultra slow motion X-Ray footage of the object taken out by Bluegill Triple Prime high altitude nuclear explosion appears to show it executing a high-speed turn and flight recovery manoeuvre
by u/Harry_is_white_hot in UFOB

amazon  |   How was it possible that J. Robert Oppenheimer - national hero, director of the Manhattan Project, brilliant physicist, sometimes impatient and abrasive personality - summarily lost his security clearance in 1954? How could this anything-but-secret leftist have been trusted by his government with the celebrated "Q-clearance" for more than a decade, from 1942 to 1954, granting him access to the highest levels of top secret information regarding nuclear weapons, then have his clearance summarily stripped from him because his loyalty came suddenly into doubt?

The traditional historical explanation is too facile to be believed. It holds that, first, the fact that Oppenheimer was a leftist student at Berkeley in the Thirties was not seen as particularly important in 1942 when he was hired to become (as he later did) "Father of the Atomic Bomb." After all, who hadn't been a leftist intellectual during those years? Then we are required to believe that in 1954 the government, armed now with insights acquired from Joe McCarthy and others, could see clearly the danger to the Republic these former college kids represented. No matter that Oppenheimer actually led - and successfully protected - arguably one of the greatest secrets of the Twentieth Century. Oppenheimer (as he was called) had to be humiliated. He had been a leftist in the Thirties!

Here's why that explanation doesn't hold: It is an undisputed fact that Oppenheimer had been called back into government service many times after 1945, and continued to enjoy the the access provided by his Top Secret clearance. The reasons for his having been called may still be shrouded in official government secrecy, but we know he was called often during the years 1945 to 1954. Therefore the questions about his loyalty didn't evolve with changing American sensibilities; they came suddenly, and without warning.

In UFO Secrecy and the Fall of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Dr. Burleson constructs and defends a surprising hypothesis to explain Oppenheimer's fall from grace. It boils down to two parts: First, that he was involved in more than one UFO retrieval effort between 1947 and 1954; then, that in 1954 he was in fact being punished by others in the select circle of those with access to classified information about UFOs.

Burleson makes an effective case to link and then support the two parts of his hypothesis. In order to do this, however, he must first work a kind of magic: He needs to put Oppenheimer conclusively on the scene of at least one government-sponsored UFO retrieval project. It doesn't matter if you're a UFO skeptic or not; that's a tall order! The government, after all, has picked up lots of debris, but denies to this day the existence of any retrievals still classified as UFOs. So how does Burleson prove the government is not being truthful?

I really don't want to tell you because I don't want to risk detracting from Dr. Burleson's detailed recital of the facts. But all right. Suffice it to say Burleson does not benefit from anyone's betrayal of government secrecy, nor does he make any tenuous inferential claims. His information comes directly from a Canadian source pertaining to a specific 1947 crash and retrieval effort - information shared at the time by both governments. The memorandum in question was declassified by the Canadian government in 1978 (for shame!) and has been in the public domain since that time. In short, Burleson makes the essential connection by relying on a skill that is sadly wanting among historians and journalists today: Pure scholarship.

Burleson is able to lay out all the subsequent known facts into a far more compelling historical narrative than any of the conventional accounts we have seen to date. He details the historical record of people now known to be connected to Oppenheimer through their connections to the event. This leads in turn to a far more plausible historical account of events leading up to Oppenheimer's clearance hearing in 1954. It puts Oppenheimer in touch, unfortunately, with people well known for their skill at backbiting, bureaucratic infighting, and the shallow envy of those who were simply not in in a league with Oppenheimer.

Whether you come to the book as a believer in UFOs with extraterrestrial origins or not, you will have to concede that Dr. Burleson defends his Oppenheimer-UFO hypothesis with outstanding success. He cuts into the shell of secrecy by providing by far the best and most plausible explanation for a set of facts that themselves are not seriously in dispute. Consider Burleson's Oppenheimer-UFO hypothesis, therefore, confirmed.

Consensus Reality Baby..., (REDUX 10/31/07)

REALITY IS A SHARED HALLUCINATION

The artificial construction of reality was to play a key role in the new form of global intelligence which would soon emerge among human beings. If the group brain's "psyche" were a beach with shifting dunes and hollows, individual perception would be that beach's grains of sand. However this image has a hidden snag - pure individual perception does not exist.

Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see, the thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We've agreed to be part of a collective perception. Don DeLillo

A central rule of large-scale organization goes like this: the greater the spryness of a massive enterprise, the more internal communication it takes to support the teamwork of the parts. For example, in all but the simplest plants and animals only 5% of DNA is dedicated to DNA's "real job," manufacturing proteins. The remaining 95% is preoccupied with organization and administration, supervising the maintenance of bodily procedures, or even merely interpreting the corporate rule book "printed" in a string of genes.

In an effective learning machine, the connections between internal elements far outnumber windows to the outside world. Take the cerebral cortex, roughly 80% of whose nerves connect with each other, not with sensory input from the eyes or ears. No wonder in human society individuals spend most of their time communicating with each other, not exploring beasts and plants which could make an untraditional dish. This cabling for "bureaucratic maintenance" has a far greater impact on what we "see" and "hear" than most psychological researchers suspect. For it puts us in the hands of a conformity enforcer whose power and subtlety are almost beyond belief.

In our previous episode we mentioned that the brain's emotional center - the limbic system - decides which swatches of experience to "notice" and store in memory. Memory is the core of what we call reality. Think about it for a second. What do you actually hear and see right now? This article. The walls and furnishings of the room in which you sit. Perhaps some music or some background noise. Yet you know sure as those walls. You are certain that your home, if you are away from it, is still there. You can sense each room, remember where most of your things are placed. You know the building where you work - its colors, layout, and the feel of it. Then there are the companions who enrich your life - family, the folks at the office, neighbors, friends, and even people you are fond of whom you haven't talked to in a year or more - few of whom, if any, are in the room with you. You also know we sit on a planet called the earth, circling an incandescent ball of sun, buried in one of many galaxies. At this instant, reading by yourself, where do these realities reside? Inside your mind. Memory in a very real sense is reality. What the limbic system decides to "see" and store away becomes an interior universe pretending to stretch so far outside that it can brush the edges of infinity.

We are accustomed to use our eyes only with the memory of what other people before us have thought about the object we are looking at. Guy de Maupassant

 

From Whence Came Humanity's Ancient Helpers?

I know someone that works for NOAA. The disclosure rumors are 100% true, and the species in question is aquatic. I don't expect anyone to believe me, and that's fine. I know a lot of bs gets posted here for shits and giggles. I'm just sharing a story from a few weeks ago, that I feel is relevant due to all the disclosure talk.

I have a college friend that landed a job working for NOAA in a pretty high capacity. I won't say more than that to protect their privacy. Around the holidays, me and said friend were catching up, and they shifted the topic to aliens. This friend is very level-headed, and we usually don't talk about stuff like that. It's mostly family talk, and work.

They asked if I believed in aliens, to which I replied that "I'd like to, but we simply don't have enough evidence." Their expression perked up, and they said "I'm going to tell you something, and I want you to take me absolutely serious."

Ok, where is this going I thought. They never seemed so intense in a conversation before, so I braced for some kind of huge personal reveal or something... But they started talking about the Russian submarine incident that happened not too long ago, where supposedly a fire broke out onboard a Nuclear-powered Russian sub, and killed everyone onboard.

They said that was a cover story that Putin came up with for what really happened. The sub was apparently investigating an underwater base that is controlled by non-human entities. They got too close, and the sub was destroyed by these beings. My friend went on to detail how most world governments are aware of their presence, yet keep it undisclosed because of the ramifications to society it may have. Also, because we can't do anything to stop, or forcefully reveal them.

They told me that NOAA has had thousands of "incidents of contact" with these underwater beings, and that it's fairly common knowledge amongst certain departments and roles in the organization. They said they have witnessed video, audio, and physical evidence of these beings residing under our oceans, but it is kept under tight wraps by senior officials, and whatever government sector controls NOAA.

The friend said that the recent disclosure buzz is legit, and had been carefully planned. They said they don't know exactly what details will be provided to the public, but that in general, it will be made known that there are other beings occupying our planet, and that they are not from another planet, but have been here, long before us.

They also said these beings actively keep us out of certain parts of the oceans. Apparently, their technology is advanced beyond anything we could come up with to withstand/negate the insurmountable pressures at extreme ocean depths. They are able to freely enter/exit the water in their craft, without displacing or disturbing it physically. They've been captured innumerable times on SONAR, traveling at speeds underwater that are impossible as far as human technology, or marine biology is concerned.

They also mentioned a place called Lake Vostok, and said a very large base was discovered there under the ice, and that Russians have control over the operation there.

My friend also detailed that they have been witnessed outside of any craft, swimming in the ocean freely, by submersible, divers, and cameras at the bottom of oil rig platforms. They are humanoid, and resemble what most people would call the typical "gray alien". Oversized head/large dark eyes, no visible ears, small mouths. It's not known how they breathe, and move underwater.

That's pretty much most of what I was told. They didn't give a date, they just said it will definitely be this year according to what they have been hearing. Apparently this is going to be a worldwide disclosure, not a US specific thing.

What's The Point Of Fighting For The Right To Feel Like What You Can't Be?

jonathanturley  |  We have previously discussed how comedians have been objecting that woke activists are killing comedy. The complaint is that a group of perpetually pissed off, humorless people are remaking the world in their own image. It began with college campuses which comedians are now saying are dead as venues since you cannot safely make any joke that insults any group other than white straight males or Christians or conservatives. Others have objected to hate speech laws limiting comedians, particularly after some comedians have been prosecuted for “malicious communications” or insulting groups or religious figures. Six out of ten students view offensive jokes as hate speech. This week, however, activists appear to have met their match in a legend of comedy who has opposed the cutting of  a scene from the movie The Life of Brian. No, activists are not upset with the endless jokes about Italians, Christians, and Jews. It is the scene involving a man who wants to become a women and have a child. John Cleese is refusing to yield.

In The Life of Brian, the scene involves “Stan” who announces that he wants to be a woman named Loretta and have babies.  Activists objected that it made fun of transgender people and demanded that it be cut from the film.

The scene shows Stan declaring “I want to be a woman… It’s my right as a man. I want to have babies… It’s every man’s right to have babies if he wants them.” After Cleese’s protest, the character snaps, “Don’t you oppress me!”

Some reported that Cleese had agreed to cut the scene. However, Cleese tweeted out a correction of the “misreporting.”

Democracy Was Anathema To Disney's Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow

Slate  | In the 1960s, after realizing his spatial limitations in Anaheim, California, Disney began to develop plans for another empire, this time in central Florida. (Disney was said to have hated some of the development that surrounded his California park.) At the time, Florida hadn’t yet exploded, population-wise, into the state we know today. The greater Los Angeles area had more people than every Florida county combined.

As a result, Disney was able to make big upfront demands of the state—and reasonably expected the eager local government to give in. His grand plan wasn’t just about sprawling resorts. He wanted to build an experimental planned city, a utopian company town that would serve as a “blueprint for the future,” where residents would test out new products, no one would be unemployed, and the city’s climate-controlled center would cater to pedestrians who could be ferried about by monorail. Disney called this plan the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. To ensure he could enact his vision without a lot of red tape, he stipulated all kinds of rights to the land without knowing if he’d ever need them, aware that he would never again have greater negotiating power.

This Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow—EPCOT for short—is not the Epcot park we know today, though the amusement park shares the idealized planned city’s (now nostalgic) futurism. The EPCOT that was never built was meant to be a real town—and for that to become realized, the Walt Disney Company needed the authority to develop and run a town. So, Florida granted Disney the right to do everything it needed to make that happen, including controlling zoning and regulations and offering public services. Walt Disney’s death is cited as the reason the city never came to be, but the Disney Company’s hold on zoning, regulations, and public services remained.

That’s Disney’s story, anyway. Richard Foglesong, a former professor at Rollins College and author of Married to the Mouse: Walt Disney World and Orlando, says it’s a fabrication.

Disney’s self-governing district, with all its associated resorts and water parks and sports fields and shopping centers, eventually grew to an enormous size.  And though it never developed any cities of the future, the area held on to its self-governing privileges.

While Foglesong was reporting his 2001 book, which traces Disney’s use of its government immunities and relationship with the surrounding area, he dug into Disney’s archives, poring over company documents and memos. Instead of evidence of serious plans for the development of an idealized city, he found a warning from a lawyer that such a development could threaten Disney’s control of the land. If there were real residents, they would be able to elect a local government and establish the external control that Disney feared.

Cop City: A Timeline Of The Atlanta Way

scalawag  |  Cop City is the Atlanta ruling class' chosen solution to a set of interrelated crises produced by decades of organized abandonment in the city. As Gilmore explains, crisis means "instability that can be fixed only through radical measures, which include developing new relationships and new or renovated institutions out of what already exists." These crises included the threat and reality of mass uprisings against police violence, extreme and racialized income inequality and displacement, corporate media narratives in the wake of the 2020 uprisings that threatened the image of the city as a safe place for capital investment and development, and a municipal secession movement that threatened to rob the city of nearly half of its tax revenue following the uprisings.

Designed and propelled by a mix of state, corporate, and nonprofit actors, Cop City would address the overlapping crises facing Atlanta in three ways. First, it would provide a material investment in police capacity on the heels of the uprisings, a project to prepare for and prevent future rebellion. Second, it would represent an ideological investment in the image of Atlanta, signaling to corporations and those attracted by the influx of tech and other high-paying jobs that Atlanta is a stable, securitized city that will protect their interests. And third, Cop City would constitute a geographical investment—one that refashions publicly-owned land in a disinvested area into something new while opening up new opportunities for development. In other words, to borrow from Gilmore, Cop City is a partially geographical solution to a set of crises facing and generated by the city—a means through which a coalition of state and corporate actors have chosen to address years of organized abandonment and its outcomes. 

When thousands of Atlantans took to the streets during the nationwide uprisings of 2020, they were responding to more than the recent police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Rayshard Brooks. They were responding to decades of social disinvestment, displacement, and police expansion—and calling for a reversal of these dynamics.

Twenty-first-century Atlanta has featured rapid, publicly-subsidized development and gentrification, the further disintegration of the social safety net, the expansion of surveillance and policing, and rising inequality. Since 1990, the share of the city's Black population has decreased from 67 percent to 48 percent, while the median family income and the share of adults with a college degree in the city doubled. Investment firms have gobbled up the housing stock, with bulk buyers accumulating over 65,000 single-family homes throughout the Atlanta metro area in the past decade. As the city has attracted major tech companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Honeywell—and along with them, more middle and upper-class white people—the city has pushed its Black and working class further out of the city. Choices by policymakers have made Atlanta a lucrative place for big business, but a difficult place to live for the rest of residents. In 2022, for example, Atlanta was named by Money as the best place to live and was identified by Realtor Magazine as the top real estate market in the country. The same year, Atlanta was proclaimed the most unequal city in the country; relatedly, Atlanta is the most surveilled city in the U.S.

How did we get here? Atlanta has long been home to what is known as "the Atlanta Way"—the strategic partnership between Black political leadership and white economic elites that work in service of corporations and upper-class white communities and to the detriment of lower-income Black and working-class communities. While historians such as Maurice Hobson, Adira Drake Rodriguez, and Dan Immergluck have documented the long history of the Atlanta Way throughout the 1900s, we can begin with the leadup to the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta as a key accelerant of the Atlanta Way. As Immergluck notes, the decisions made in preparation for the Games "effectively set the stage for long-term gentrification and exclusion in the city, focusing primarily on making the city more attractive to a more affluent set of prospective citizens."

The Solution To Black On Black Gun Violence (REDUX Originally Posted 2/12/15)

AmericanThinker |  Sociology, which is sometimes defined as the painful and tedious explication of the obvious, occasionally comes up with useful insights, or at least proof that some useful insights are true. That seems to be the case with a study by Yale sociologist Andrew Papachristos, published in the academic journal Social Science & Medicine, and featured in the Chicago Sun-Times.

It turns out that being arrested with someone else is the best predictor of who will get shot in Chicago. No, not by the police, as the Al Sharptons of the world would like to claim. Shot by another civilian, in the epidemic of shootings that have made Chicago at some times more dangerous than Baghdad.

If you and another person get arrested together in Chicago, you’re both part of a loose network of people with a high risk of getting shot in the future, Yale University researchers say in a newly published study.
Only 6 percent of the people in Chicago between 2006 and 2012 were listed on arrest reports as co-offenders in crimes, the study says. But those people became the victims of 70 percent of the nonfatal shootings in the city over the same period.

The logic is pretty simple: if you are the type of person who goes out and commits crimes with others, you are probably connected to people who commit crimes with some frequency.  And that puts you at risk of getting shot, because people who commit crimes sometimes shoot others who become inconvenient, or who just get in the way.

The study is done with social network analysis, studying who knows who and how they interact, and drawing up networks that reveal the clustering that results from various commonalities.

 The latest Yale University study was built on Papachristos’ previous social-network research into murders on the West Side. He had studied killings between 2005 and 2010 in West Garfield Park and North Lawndale. About 70 percent of the killings occurred in what Papachristos found was a social network of only about 1,600 people — out of a population of about 80,000 in those neighborhoods. Inside that social network, the risk of being killed was 30 out of 1,000. For the others in those neighborhoods, the risk of getting murdered was less than one in 1,000.

These statistics demonstrate the wisdom of the old adage, “Lie down with dogs, wake up with fleas.” They also show that it is not per se that is related to the higher incidence of violence in some black communities…

For every 100,000 people, an average of one white person, 28 Hispanics and 113 blacks became victims of nonfatal shootings every year in Chicago over the six-year study period.

… but rather the existence of networks of people who engage in violence and reinforce each other in patters of violent behavior.

There are some useful implications for policing in Chicago IF the race demagogues don’t start calling it profiling: Fist tap Big Don.

UMKC |  An ongoing law enforcement effort to rethink strategies to reduce violent crime in the Kansas City area has its own secret weapon: UMKC.

The University of Missouri-Kansas City’s Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, part of the university’s College of Arts and Sciences, is intimately involved in the Kansas City No Violence Alliance (NoVA). NoVA is a 2-year-old multi-agency effort to reduce gun-related violence.

Chancellor Leo E. Morton serves on NoVA’s governing board, and UMKC faculty members and graduate students are embedded in NoVA’s effort to implement a crime-prevention approach known as “focused deterrence,” which helps police look beyond individual criminals to the criminals’ entire social networks.

The International Association of Chiefs of Police this month called out UMKC’s relationship with the Kansas City, Missouri, Police Department through NoVA when it awarded the department its 2014 bronze medal for Excellence in Law Enforcement Research Award. The award recognizes law enforcement agencies that demonstrate excellence in conducting and using research to improve police operations and public safety.

UMKC became involved with NoVA at the very beginning. In 2012, Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker came to Ken Novak, chair of the Criminal Justice and Criminology Department, to ask how UMKC could help curb a rising tide of violence on Kansas City-area streets. She’d heard about focused deterrence and its success in other cities and wanted to try it here. It just so happened that Andrew Fox had just taken a job as a professor in UMKC’s criminology department, and Fox happened to have experience with focused deterrence.

An In-Depth Interview With Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

tablet  |   Anyone who hung around Kennedy political circles knew that in the collective opinion of the various longtime family friends, and speechwriters, and political consultants, and other hangers-on, who in one way or another saw themselves as custodians of the family brand, there was one member of the third generation of Kennedys who was said to have “it”—the family’s electric brand of political magic. Not Joe, the eldest of RFK’s children, who was dull and plodding; not Kathleen, a dedicated public servant who lacked personal charisma; not Caroline, who took after her mother; not John-John, who was a playboy; not Teddy Jr., who battled cancer and lost a leg; or Patrick, who was honest and sweet-natured but inherited his father’s problems with substance abuse and spoken language.

The heir to the family’s political mantle in the third generation of Kennedys was always Bobby. It was Bobby who became the leader of his tribe of orphaned brothers and sisters after their father’s death, trying and failing to make up for the absence of a charismatic father and the near-total absence of adult supervision. A friend who was close to the family in those years recalls visits to their home in Hickory Hill, Virginia, as like visiting a zoo—quite literally, with live sea mammals in the swimming pool, and animals of all shapes and sizes, frequently untamed, roaming freely throughout the house. Bobby’s hawks nested in the eaves and children climbed in and out of windows. Eventually, the friend’s mother forbade further visits, on account of it being too physically dangerous.

If the Kennedys were a kind of American royalty, then Bobby was their Prince Hal—charismatic and beloved, yet also dangerous and frequently out of control, a fatherless child who was trying to emulate the adult father figures who had been taken from him before he could truly understand who they were or what their brand of world-shaping masculinity meant. In 1983, Bobby was found nodding off in an airplane bathroom, and then pleaded guilty to heroin possession. The death of his brother David, who worshipped Bobby, a year later from a heroin overdose, made an uphill climb back to respectability seem even more unlikely, even after he got clean, and his decades of hard work as an environmental lawyer for Riverkeeper and the NRDC established him as one of the most effective environmental activists in the country.

During the 1990s and early 2000s, Bobby kept his name alive in political circles through a familiar striptease dance with the New York press, which was no doubt orchestrated in part by his best friend from college, Peter Kaplan, the sharp-eyed editor of The New York Observer: A dutiful accounting of his environmental good works ridding New York’s waterways of deadly toxins, a dash of Kennedy fairy dust, a tour of his falcons—falconry being a lifelong hobby, pursued with characteristic dedication—and a tantalizing hint of a possible future race for some political office that would re-up his star power and help promote his advocacy. Of course, he never ran—which prevented the publication of the inevitable attack articles ripping him to pieces. Running would have been messy. His sister Kerry was married to the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo—heir to another political dynasty whose name meant more in New York state than the name Kennedy did.

Then it all came apart. In 2005, Kerry and Andrew Cuomo divorced. In 2010, Bobby separated from his wife, Mary Richardson, who had been Kerry’s college roommate at Brown and appeared to be suffering from substance abuse issues; a judge awarded temporary full custody of their four children to Bobby. In 2012, Mary Richardson hung herself. In 2013, Peter Kaplan died of cancer.

Meanwhile, Bobby Kennedy Jr. found success as an environmentally friendly venture capitalist along with a new cause: vaccines. In 2005, Kennedy wrote a blockbuster Rolling Stone magazine article titled “Deadly Immunity,” which presented compelling evidence of an ongoing vaccine safety cover-up led by U.S. national health bureaucrats, including transcripts of a 2000 CDC conference in Norcross, Georgia, where researchers presented information linking the mercury compound thimerosol with neurological problems in children. At its root, the case Kennedy made in his article was no more or less plausible and empirically grounded than the cases that he and dozens of other environmental advocates had been making for decades against large chemical companies for spewing toxins into America’s air, water, and soil, and then lying about it.

Yet the resulting journalistic-bureaucratic firestorm proved that vaccines were different. It also offered a preview of the COVID wars, with pressure campaigns by vaccine believers attacking five fact-checking errors in the article—a number that was hardly unusual for a long and complex reported article in a venue like Rolling Stone. The campaigns led to various emendations of the article by its online publisher, Salon, which eventually retracted the article in 2011. In that year, Kennedy founded the World Mercury Project, which would be renamed the Children’s Health Defense, to keep pressing his assertions about empirical links between vaccinations and the explosion of neurological issues in children. For anyone who knew Kennedy, his family, and his own record as an environmental advocate, the fact that he would sink his teeth in rather than let go was pretty much a foregone conclusion.

And so began the strangest and in many ways also the most promising chapter of Bobby Kennedy’s life. Stripped of the protection that the Kennedy name had once offered him, he was no longer the future secretary of something in some future Democratic presidential administration; he was a leper, banned from social media platforms, including Twitter and Facebook, repeatedly attacked by network television personalities and by members of his own family as an “embarrassment” and a “moron.” Meanwhile, his book attacking Anthony Fauci, the high priest of the COVID order, became an Amazon bestseller.

It is therefore easy to welcome the news that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an heir to the political dynasty that sprinkled fairy dust on the 20th-century Democratic Party, is running for president. The collision he’s about to cause between the world of official group-think and the world of normal-speak—where most Americans weigh what might be best for themselves and their children—can only be good for American democracy, and for the American language.

 

If You Don't Like The Status Quo You Have No One To Vote For - Just People To Vote Against

neuburger  |  To answer that question seriously, consider the following premises. I think the first four accurately describe the thinking of mainstream Democratic leaders since the humiliating presidential loss of 2016:

1. Modern Republicans (leaders, media, and crucially, their voters as well) represent the worst threat to the American Republic since the Civil War.

   1. Or possibly since the Founding. Southern Confederates didn’t wish to institute Hitlerian reforms that would eliminate democracy from the governance of the state.

2. Any act by any individual or organization that advances the overall Republican Project, inadvertently or not, is as dangerous as the Project itself.

3. Because the Republican Project is evil, its supporters are evil — or in the most generous cases, deeply stupid.

4. Stopping the Republican Project means stopping all supporters and adherents, be they willing or not.

5. (Taibbi addendum 1) Matt Taibbi is a supporter, willingly or not, and therefore must be stopped.

6. (Taibbi addendum 2) Because his support is probably not inadvertent — Seder’s hosts and the Democratic committee members are certain his motive is money, a sell-out to advance Elon Musk — destruction of his entire career is a reasonable response. After all, the whole of American democracy is at risk; literally all.

I don’t think any of those statements, stark as they are, misrepresent the Democratic Party position. Everything I’ve observed since November 2016 confirms them all.

The Problem in a Nutshell

Statement 1 could well be true. I believe it myself, though about the leadership only. (I have other thoughts about Republican voters.)

But does the rest follow from that? Does it justify the destruction of free speech, to take one example, in order to preserve it? (If you doubt that’s what’s on offer, click the link.)

And even if it does, even if the means are justified by the end, the problem is that this Democratic Party response — this hate-Republicans-at-all-costs messaging (while party leaders themselves cut deals with them) — is not going to work. It won't blast them past their electoral opponents at near the speed it ought to, given their opponent's obvious and fatal flaws.

Mainstream Democrats run roughly even with Republicans except in protected districts. They certainly ran roughly even with Donald Trump in the only venue that counts, the Electoral College. And Democratic leaders are the reason that this is so. Will all this vitriol make them more attractive, or less?

If you don’t like the status quo, you have no one to vote for, just people to vote against.

What do you think would happen if Democrats ran a candidate of Real Rebellion, a Bernie Sanders, say, à la 2016, against the candidate of Pretending to Care what happens to suffering voters? Would real rebellion against predatory rule by the rich “trump” fake rebellion financed by the rich?

Of course it would. Sanders would have beaten Trump soundly, had he had the chance, in the 2016 race. All the momentum was his, and he won almost every head-to-head primary contest in states with open, same-day primary voting.

But Democrats, the other party of the rich, won’t take that course. Which leaves them only one pitch. In Taibbi’s language from the start of this piece:

It’s always “Vote for us or you’re a right-wing insurrectionist Putin-lover,” which is the opposite of persuasive.

This is the Democrats’ constant closing argument, and the worst they could advance. It makes them, not just wrong, but ugly as well, the “opposite of persuasive.” Yet this is all they have, if they can’t themselves attack the people’s real enemy, and this time actually mean it. Sad for us. Sad for them as well.

 

Valodya Talm'Wit His People About Educating The Russian People

kremlin.ru  |   Another basic area is the training of qualified engineers, technicians and workers. We have been short of these people for many years and we need to make cardinal changes and achieve tangible results in this respect. The goals facing the industry and the economy as a whole will not be achieved by themselves. They are achieved by the people, the specialists working at the companies.

By and large, we have determined the areas for developing vocational education. We must update academic programmes and the material, technical and laboratory facilities of universities, colleges, technical and vocational schools. I have just discussed this with Mr Levitin. Obviously, we must double-check their departmental affiliation. We need to find out whether everything meets the latest requirements and if the regions are able to run college education effectively in certain areas. Possibly, we should consider a vertical organisational structure for this – in the framework of certain production sectors – as we did in the past.

Industry badly needs highly qualified workers now. They study at secondary special education institutions, which are the responsibility of the regions, as I have said. I think we should return to the discussion of departmental affiliation. We have already developed good practices in this respect. I would like to ask the regional governors to share their experience, monitor these issues and resolve them in close contact with the relevant departments and ministries.

I know that at yesterday’s seminar you discussed in detail, with Government representatives, the measures I mentioned and the

regional governors’ initiatives, and mapped out specific proposals and steps. Let us analyse all of these again. I would like to ask you to tell me about the course of your discussions and the proposals and ideas that you came up with in the process.

Mr Dyomin, you have the floor, please.....

.....And the fifth question, which you also touched upon, and of course, it is also the main one, is personnel. The shortage of engineering personnel arises due to various reasons - we all know them.

There are not enough applicants who enter technical universities. The nature of these problems begins at school. The reason lies both in the shortage of teachers of mathematics and physics in schools - this is a problem that can be solved, as well as in the fear of the students themselves to fill up this subject at the Unified State Examination. Because when a student gets attached to mathematics and physics and starts preparing for the Unified State Examination, [he] perfectly understands that it is easier to pass this exam in the humanities and moves on to the humanities.

Vladimir Putin:  It happens in different ways.

Alexander Dyumin:  As a result, the number of applicants who can become engineers is significantly reduced. There are statistics, Vladimir Vladimirovich.

Vladimir Putin:  Clearly, yes. I understand.

Andrei Dyumin:  Even at school, students choose the humanities instead of specialized mathematics and physics. This problem must be solved comprehensively: to strengthen the training of teachers of these subjects, to motivate schoolchildren with interesting curricula.

One of the proposals that is being discussed within the framework of the commission - this issue was discussed yesterday, I just want to draw attention, if not, then some other option - one of the proposals: to give the right to universities that train students in technical specialties, accept children not only for the Unified State Examination, but also for entrance exams in their specialized disciplines. If not, then in a different way.

Vladimir Putin:  You can, Alexei Gennadyevich.

I met with entrepreneurs, they saw, probably, they also said that it is easier to pass in the humanities, especially for girls, but in the natural sciences, in mathematics it is more difficult. It depends on how to interest the person.

I'll tell you later, I know a girl who graduated from a higher educational institution in the humanities, studying foreign languages ​​as well. Then she became interested in other disciplines and defended her Ph.D. thesis in higher mathematics. It depends on how the person is motivated.

Alexei Dyumin:  This is an asterisk.

Vladimir Putin:  These "stars" are created by teachers and those people who work on a person's professional orientation.

Alexei Dyumin:  Mr Putin, the tasks you have set require not stars, but starfall.

Vladimir Putin:  All right, all right.

Alexei Dyumin:  Mr Putin, and another important issue, which is understandable, is housing, which is relevant in every industry. An effective mechanism, which was adopted by the Government of Russia, was preferential mortgages for the IT sector.

It is proposed to consider: let's consider the possibility of extending this measure to the industry and, of course, primarily to the rocket industry. We can talk about both federal and regional backbone enterprises. And of course, we are well aware that this is a serious additional incentive for our young people to choose the profession and follow the profession that is in demand and necessary for the state. I ask the Government to instruct to study this issue and pay attention to it.

Vladimir Vladimirovich, and, of course, after all that has been said - perhaps even some kind of irony, but this is not irony - while communicating and being at his post in a developed industrial region: chemistry, metallurgy, defense industry, engineers, designers, technologists, even teachers of technical universities, flagship universities - everyone is asking to return drafting to school. This is the beginning of the basics of engineering knowledge.

It is clear that now there is a lot of software that draws, rotates, creates and so on in 3D, but this is not my opinion - this is what designers, young engineers, technologists from all areas of all industries say: please return drawing to school education. I would like to ask you to consider this issue at a high level and make an appropriate decision.

Vladimir Vladimirovich, thank you for your attention. The report is finished.

Vladimir Putin:  Thank you very much.

The Social Cost Of Using AI In Human Conversation

phys.org  |  People have more efficient conversations, use more positive language and perceive each other more positively when using an artificial intelligence-enabled chat tool, a group of Cornell researchers has found.

Postdoctoral researcher Jess Hohenstein is lead author of "Artificial Intelligence in Communication Impacts Language and Social Relationships," published in Scientific Reports.

Co-authors include Malte Jung, associate professor of information science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science (Cornell Bowers CIS), and Rene Kizilcec, assistant professor of information science (Cornell Bowers CIS).

Generative AI is poised to impact all aspects of society, communication and work. Every day brings new evidence of the technical capabilities of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and GPT-4, but the social consequences of integrating these technologies into our daily lives are still poorly understood.

AI tools have potential to improve efficiency, but they may have negative social side effects. Hohenstein and colleagues examined how the use of AI in conversations impacts the way that people express themselves and view each other.

"Technology companies tend to emphasize the utility of AI tools to accomplish tasks faster and better, but they ignore the social dimension," Jung said. "We do not live and work in isolation, and the systems we use impact our interactions with others."

In addition to greater efficiency and positivity, the group found that when participants think their partner is using more AI-suggested responses, they perceive that partner as less cooperative, and feel less affiliation toward them.

"I was surprised to find that people tend to evaluate you more negatively simply because they suspect that you're using AI to help you compose text, regardless of whether you actually are," Hohenstein said. "This illustrates the persistent overall suspicion that people seem to have around AI."

For their first experiment, co-author Dominic DiFranzo, a former postdoctoral researcher in the Cornell Robots and Groups Lab and now an assistant professor at Lehigh University, developed a smart-reply platform the group called "Moshi" (Japanese for "hello"), patterned after the now-defunct Google "Allo" (French for "hello"), the first smart-reply platform, unveiled in 2016. Smart replies are generated from LLMs to predict plausible next responses in chat-based interactions.

A total of 219 pairs of participants were asked to talk about a policy issue and assigned to one of three conditions: both participants can use smart replies; only one participant can use smart replies; or neither participant can use smart replies.

The researchers found that using smart replies increased communication efficiency, positive emotional language and positive evaluations by communication partners. On average, smart replies accounted for 14.3% of sent messages (1 in 7).

But participants who their partners suspected of responding with smart replies were evaluated more negatively than those who were thought to have typed their own responses, consistent with common assumptions about the negative implications of AI.

Why Poverty Persists In America

NYTimes  | A fair amount of government aid earmarked for the poor never reaches them. But this does not fully solve the puzzle of why poverty has been so stubbornly persistent, because many of the country’s largest social-welfare programs distribute funds directly to people. Roughly 85 percent of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program budget is dedicated to funding food stamps themselves, and almost 93 percent of Medicaid dollars flow directly to beneficiaries.

There are, it would seem, deeper structural forces at play, ones that have to do with the way the American poor are routinely taken advantage of. The primary reason for our stalled progress on poverty reduction has to do with the fact that we have not confronted the unrelenting exploitation of the poor in the labor, housing and financial markets.

As a theory of poverty, “exploitation” elicits a muddled response, causing us to think of course and but, no in the same instant. The word carries a moral charge, but social scientists have a fairly coolheaded way to measure exploitation: When we are underpaid relative to the value of what we produce, we experience labor exploitation; when we are overcharged relative to the value of something we purchase, we experience consumer exploitation. For example, if a family paid $1,000 a month to rent an apartment with a market value of $20,000, that family would experience a higher level of renter exploitation than a family who paid the same amount for an apartment with a market valuation of $100,000. When we don’t own property or can’t access credit, we become dependent on people who do and can, which in turn invites exploitation, because a bad deal for you is a good deal for me.

Our vulnerability to exploitation grows as our liberty shrinks. Because undocumented workers are not protected by labor laws, more than a third are paid below minimum wage, and nearly 85 percent are not paid overtime. Many of us who are U.S. citizens, or who crossed borders through official checkpoints, would not work for these wages. We don’t have to. If they migrate here as adults, those undocumented workers choose the terms of their arrangement. But just because desperate people accept and even seek out exploitative conditions doesn’t make those conditions any less exploitative. Sometimes exploitation is simply the best bad option.

Consider how many employers now get one over on American workers. The United States offers some of the lowest wages in the industrialized world. A larger share of workers in the United States make “low pay” — earning less than two-thirds of median wages — than in any other country belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. According to the group, nearly 23 percent of American workers labor in low-paying jobs, compared with roughly 17 percent in Britain, 11 percent in Japan and 5 percent in Italy. Poverty wages have swollen the ranks of the American working poor, most of whom are 35 or older.

One popular theory for the loss of good jobs is deindustrialization, which caused the shuttering of factories and the hollowing out of communities that had sprung up around them. Such a passive word, “deindustrialization” — leaving the impression that it just happened somehow, as if the country got deindustrialization the way a forest gets infested by bark beetles. But economic forces framed as inexorable, like deindustrialization and the acceleration of global trade, are often helped along by policy decisions like the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, which made it easier for companies to move their factories to Mexico and contributed to the loss of hundreds of thousands of American jobs. The world has changed, but it has changed for other economies as well. Yet Belgium and Canada and many other countries haven’t experienced the kind of wage stagnation and surge in income inequality that the United States has.

Those countries managed to keep their unions. We didn’t. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, nearly a third of all U.S. workers carried union cards. These were the days of the United Automobile Workers, led by Walter Reuther, once savagely beaten by Ford’s brass-knuckle boys, and of the mighty American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations that together represented around 15 million workers, more than the population of California at the time.

In their heyday, unions put up a fight. In 1970 alone, 2.4 million union members participated in work stoppages, wildcat strikes and tense standoffs with company heads. The labor movement fought for better pay and safer working conditions and supported antipoverty policies. Their efforts paid off for both unionized and nonunionized workers, as companies like Eastman Kodak were compelled to provide generous compensation and benefits to their workers to prevent them from organizing. By one estimate, the wages of nonunionized men without a college degree would be 8 percent higher today if union strength remained what it was in the late 1970s, a time when worker pay climbed, chief-executive compensation was reined in and the country experienced the most economically equitable period in modern history.

It is important to note that Old Labor was often a white man’s refuge. In the 1930s, many unions outwardly discriminated against Black workers or segregated them into Jim Crow local chapters. In the 1960s, unions like the Brotherhood of Railway and Steamship Clerks and the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America enforced segregation within their ranks. Unions harmed themselves through their self-defeating racism and were further weakened by a changing economy. But organized labor was also attacked by political adversaries. As unions flagged, business interests sensed an opportunity. Corporate lobbyists made deep inroads in both political parties, beginning a public-relations campaign that pressured policymakers to roll back worker protections.

A national litmus test arrived in 1981, when 13,000 unionized air traffic controllers left their posts after contract negotiations with the Federal Aviation Administration broke down. When the workers refused to return, Reagan fired all of them. The public’s response was muted, and corporate America learned that it could crush unions with minimal blowback. And so it went, in one industry after another.

Today almost all private-sector employees (94 percent) are without a union, though roughly half of nonunion workers say they would organize if given the chance. They rarely are. Employers have at their disposal an arsenal of tactics designed to prevent collective bargaining, from hiring union-busting firms to telling employees that they could lose their jobs if they vote yes. Those strategies are legal, but companies also make illegal moves to block unions, like disciplining workers for trying to organize or threatening to close facilities. In 2016 and 2017, the National Labor Relations Board charged 42 percent of employers with violating federal law during union campaigns. In nearly a third of cases, this involved illegally firing workers for organizing.