Implications Of Everyday Mobility For Structural Connectedness

uchicago  |  A longstanding tradition of research linking neighborhood disadvantage to higher rates of violence is based on the characteristics of where people reside. This Essay argues that we need to look beyond residential neighborhoods to consider flows of movement throughout the wider metropolis. Our basic premise is that a neighborhood’s well-being depends not only on its own socioeconomic conditions but also on the conditions of neighborhoods that its residents visit and are visited by—connections that form through networks of everyday urban mobility. Based on the analysis of large-scale urban-mobility data, we find that while residents of both advantaged and disadvantaged neighborhoods in Chicago travel far and wide, their relative isolation by race and class persists. Among large U.S. cities, Chicago’s level of racially segregated mobility is the second highest. Consistent with our major premise, we further show that mobility-based socioeconomic disadvantage predicts rates of violence in Chicago’s neighborhoods beyond their residence-based disadvantage and other neighborhood characteristics, including during recent years that witnessed surges in violence and other broad social changes. Racial disparities in mobility-based disadvantage are pronounced—more so than residential neighborhood disadvantage. We discuss implications of these findings for theories of neighborhood effects on crime and criminal justice contact, collective efficacy, and racial inequality.

Real Revolutionary Thinking Focuses On Social Infrastructure And The Neighborhood Effect

chronicle |  Jacqueline lived in one of the most toxic environments in urban America. If you’ve seen The Wire, HBO’s series about crime and punishment in Baltimore, you can picture daily life in her neighborhood on that city’s West Side. Drug dealers. Junkies. Shootings. Her high-rise housing project felt like a concrete cell. Jacqueline, a single mother with a sick child, was desperate to escape.

Then she got a ticket out. In the mid-1990s, Jacqueline volunteered to participate in a far-reaching social experiment that would shed new light on urban poverty. The federal government gave her and many others housing vouchers to move out of ghettos—with a condition. Jacqueline (a pseudonym used by researchers to protect her privacy) had to use the voucher in an area where at least 90 percent of the residents lived above the federal poverty line.

It’s unlikely that Jacqueline had heard of William Julius Wilson, but the experiment that would change her life traces its intellectual roots in part to the Harvard sociologist’s 1987 book, The Truly Disadvantaged. Wilson upended urban research with his ideas about how cities had transformed in the post-civil-rights period. Writing to explain the rise of concentrated poverty in black inner-city neighborhoods after 1970, he focused on the loss of manufacturing jobs and the flight of black working- and middle-class families, which left ghettos with a greater proportion of poor people. And he examined the effects of extreme poverty and “social isolation” on their lives. The program that transplanted Jacqueline, Moving to Opportunity, was framed as a test of his arguments about “whether neighborhoods matter” in poor people’s lives.

Twenty-five years after its publication, The Truly Disadvantaged is back in the spotlight, thanks to a flurry of high-profile publications and events that address its ideas.

Researchers who have followed families like Jacqueline’s over 15 years are now reporting the long-term results of the mobility experiment. The mixed picture emerging from the project—"one of the nation’s largest attempts to eradicate concentrated poverty,” in the words of the Harvard sociologist Robert J. Sampson—is feeding a broader discussion about how to help the urban underclass.

Families that moved to safer and better-off areas “improved their health in ways that were quite profound,” including reductions in obesity and diabetes, says Lawrence F. Katz, a Harvard economist who is principal investigator of the project’s long-run study. They showed less depression, Katz says, and “very large increases in happiness.” Yet the program failed to improve other key measures, like the earnings and employment rate of adults and the educational achievement of children.

At the same time, two sociologists influenced by Wilson are publishing important new books that mine extensive data to demonstrate the lasting impact of place on people’s lives. The first, published in February by the University of Chicago Press, is Sampson’s Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect. Among his many findings, Sampson shows that exposure to severely disadvantaged areas hampers children’s verbal skills, an effect that persists even if they move to better-off places. That handicap is “roughly equivalent to missing a year of schooling,” according to research he conducted with Stephen Raudenbush and Patrick Sharkey.

The second book, Sharkey’s Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress Toward Racial Equality, forthcoming in January from Chicago, explores how neighborhood inequality spans generations. Sharkey, an associate professor of sociology at New York University, writes that “over 70 percent of African-Americans who live in today’s poorest, most racially segregated neighborhoods are from the same families that lived in the ghettos of the 1970s.” In other words, “the American ghetto appears to be inherited"—a finding with implications for policy.

But as scholars break new ground, is anybody listening? Not since the early 1960s has poverty received so little attention, says Christopher Jencks, a Harvard professor of public policy. Among sociologists, he says, optimism that they will make a political impact has waned.

Social Anatomy of Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Violence

nih  | We analyzed key individual, family, and neighborhood factors to assess competing hypotheses regarding racial/ethnic gaps in perpetrating violence. From 1995 to 2002, we collected 3 waves of data on 2974 participants aged 18 to 25 years living in 180 Chicago neighborhoods, augmented by a separate community survey of 8782 Chicago residents.

The odds of perpetrating violence were 85% higher for Blacks compared with Whites, whereas Latino-perpetrated violence was 10% lower. Yet the majority of the Black–White gap (over 60%) and the entire Latino–White gap were explained primarily by the marital status of parents, immigrant generation, and dimensions of neighborhood social context. The results imply that generic interventions to improve neighborhood conditions and support families may reduce racial gaps in violence.

The public health of the United States has long been compromised by inequality in the burden of personal violence. Blacks are 6 times more likely than Whites to die by homicide,1 a crime that is overwhelmingly intraracial in nature.2 Homicide is the leading cause of death among young Blacks,3 and both police records and self-reported surveys show disproportionate involvement in serious violence among Blacks.4,5 Surprisingly, however, Latinos experience lower rates of violence overall than Blacks despite being generally poorer; Latino rates have been converging with those of Whites in recent years.6

These disparities remain a puzzle because scant empirical evidence bears directly on the explanation of differences in personal violence by race and ethnicity. Aggregate studies based on police statistics show that rates of violent crime are highest in disadvantaged communities that contain large concentrations of minority groups,5 but disparities in official crime may reflect biases in the way criminal justice institutions treat different racial and ethnic groups rather than differences in actual offending.7 More important, aggregate and even multilevel studies typically do not account for correlated family or individual constitutional differences that might explain racial and ethnic disparities in violence.8,9

By contrast, individual-level studies tend to focus on characteristics of the offender while neglecting racial and ethnic differences associated with neighborhood contexts.4,10,11 Individual-level surveys of self-reported violence also underrepresent Latino Americans even though they are now the largest minority group in the United States.12 Blacks residing outside inner-city poverty areas tend to be underrepresented as well, even though there is a thriving and growing middle-class Black population.13

Recognizing these limitations, 2 panels from the National Research Council and other major research groups called for new studies of racial and ethnic disparities in violent crime that integrate individual-level differences with a sample design that captures a variety of socioeconomic conditions and neighborhood contexts.5,14,15 We accomplish this objective in the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN), a multilevel longitudinal cohort study that was conducted between 1995 and 2002. The study drew samples that capture the 3 major racial/ethnic groups in American society today—Whites, Blacks, and Latinos—and that vary across a diverse set of environments, from highly segregated to very integrated neighborhoods. The analysis in this article focuses on violent offending among participants aged 8 to 25 years. We also conducted an independent survey of the respondents’ neighborhoods, which, when supplemented with data from the US Census Bureau and the Chicago Police Department, provide a broad assessment of neighborhood characteristics to complement individual and family predictors.

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COMPETING EXPLANATIONS

Our theoretical framework does not view “race” or “ethnicity” as holding distinct scientific credibility as causes of violence.16 Rather, we argue they are markers for a constellation of external and malleable social contexts that are differentially allocated by racial/ethnic status in American society. We hypothesize that segregation by these social contexts in turn differentially exposes members of racial/ethnic minority groups to key violence-inducing or violence-protecting conditions.17 We adjudicate empirically among 3 major contextual perspectives that we derive from a synthesis of prior research.

First, the higher rate of violence among Blacks is often attributed to a matriarchal pattern of family structure; specifically, the prevalence of single-parent, female-headed families in the Black community.18,19 Some have augmented this view by arguing that female-headed families are a response to structural conditions of poverty, especially the reduced pool of employed Black men that could adequately support a family.20

A second view focuses on racial differences in family socioeconomic context. Many social scientists have posited that socioeconomic inequality—not family structure—is the root cause of violence.21,22 Black female-headed families are spuriously linked to violence, by this logic, because of their lack of financial resources relative to 2-parent families.

A third perspective is that racial and ethnic minority groups in the United States are differentially exposed to salient neighborhood conditions, such as the geographic concentration of poverty and reduced informal community controls, that cannot be explained by personal or family circumstances.17 Prior research indicates that Blacks and, to a lesser extent, Latinos, are highly segregated residentially.23 Although never tested directly, the implication is that neighborhood segregation may explain individual racial/ethnic gaps in violence.24

A prominent alternative to our approach highlights “constitutional” differences between individuals in impulsivity and intelligence (measured as IQ).25–28 Although low IQ and impulsivity may be sturdy predictors of violence,5,26 their potential to explain racial/ ethnic disparities has rarely, if ever, been examined.5,6 We thus assess the constitutional hypothesis that racial/ethnic differences in measured intelligence and impulsivity, more than economic, family, or neighborhood social context, stand as explanations of the observed racial/ethnic gaps in violence.

Collective Efficacy Or Cohesion Is The Predictor Of Violent Crime

NYTimes  |  The largest study ever undertaken of the causes of crime and delinquency has found that there are lower rates of violence in urban neighborhoods with a strong sense of community and values, where most adults discipline children for missing school or scrawling graffiti.

In an article published last week in the journal Science, three leaders of the study team concluded, ''By far the largest predictor of the violent crime rate was collective efficacy,'' a term they use to mean a sense of trust, common values and cohesion in neighborhoods.

Dr. Felton Earls, the director of the study and a professor of psychiatry at the Harvard School of Public Health, said the most important characteristic of ''collective efficacy'' was a ''willingness by residents to intervene in the lives of children.'' Specifically, Dr. Earls said in an interview, this means a willingness to stop acts like truancy, graffiti painting and street-corner ''hanging'' by teen-age gangs.

What creates this sense of cohesion is not necessarily strong personal or kinship ties, as in a traditional village, said Robert Sampson, a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago and a co-author of the study. It does help if many residents in a neighborhood own their homes or have lived there for a long time, Mr. Sampson added.

But cohesion, or efficacy, seems to be still another quality, Mr. Sampson suggested, ''a shared vision, if you will, a fusion of a shared willingness of residents to intervene and social trust, a sense of engagement and ownership of public space.''

The finding is considered significant by experts because it undercuts a prevalent theory that crime is mainly caused by factors like poverty, unemployment, single-parent households or racial discrimination.

These problems do play a role, according to the new study. But some neighborhoods in Chicago are largely black and poor, yet have low crime rates, it found -- so some other explanation is needed for the causes of crime.

The study has been conducted in all areas of Chicago since 1990 as part of a major continuing research program known as the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods. It was financed at first by the MacArthur Foundation and the National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the Justice Department, and now also has financing from the National Institute of Mental Health and the United States Department of Education. The study, which has so far cost about $25 million, is scheduled to continue until 2003.

The research team selected Chicago as a site because its racial, ethnic, social and economic diversity most closely match those of the United States as a whole, Mr. Sampson said. For the study, Chicago was divided into 343 neighborhoods, and 8,872 residents representing all those areas have been interviewed in depth.

Among those neighborhoods with high levels of cohesion, the authors said, are Avalon Park, a largely black neighborhood on the South Side; Hyde Park, a mixed-race area around the University of Chicago, and Norwood Park, a white neighborhood on the Northwest Side.

The study at least indirectly contradicts the highly acclaimed work of William Julius Wilson, a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, who in a series of books, most recently ''When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor'' (Knopf, 1996), traces many of the troubles of poor black families in Northern cities to the disappearance of factory jobs as industries moved to the suburbs or overseas.

Both Dr. Earls and Mr. Sampson said they thought that the results of their study suggested that Mr. Wilson's argument was too narrow and did not account for the differences in crime they found in largely black neighborhoods. Still, Professor Sampson acknowledged, concentrated poverty and joblessness ''make it harder to maintain'' cohesion in a neighborhood.

Analysis Of Large mRNA Neovaccinoid Injury Database

amidwesterndoctor |  Most of the injuries I saw reported here overlapped with the ones I encountered and documented within my own adverse event log. Additionally, there were dozens of respondents (primarily healthcare workers) who had observed a large number of individuals with vaccine injuries; meaning that my experience is not at all unique. The most commonly reported injuries were as follows:

•Strokes and blood clots.
•Fatal heart attacks and less frequently myocarditis or heart failure.
•Cancers that often emerge spontaneously, shock the doctor, and were highly aggressive (frequently killing the individual). 
•Sudden severe cases of COVID-19.
•Cases of sudden death (i.e. a wife heard a thump upstairs, ran up, and found her husband dead on the floor).
•Rapid progression towards dementia in an elder relative (typically resulting in a diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease, although in one case Lewy body dementia occurred).
•Other neurological conditions

One thing I have noticed in reviewing reports of adverse reactions to vaccines is that a large number of them go underreported (even within these reporting surveys) because they represent common diseases people develop rather than something very noteworthy. For example, I believe new autoimmune diseases or exacerbation of pre-existing autoimmune diseases are the most common adverse event that occurs following vaccination, as that seems to be the case for around 20-40% of the patients in many rheumatology practices (see this testimony for example) and this report of a survey conducted by the Israel ministry of health. 

However, despite this being the case, I only saw a few reports of autoimmune conditions resulting from the mRNA vaccines within these survey responses. This is relevant because adverse reactions always distribute on a bell curve and the more extreme ones, therefore, are much rare than the less severe. ones. This means the adverse reactions that are noteworthy enough for someone to notice and share likely only represent the tip of the iceberg for adverse events occurring. A recent article showing there has been a 10% spike in disability within the US population so far is the best dataset I have come across to suggest something very concerning on a more chronic level throughout the population is happening.

Many of these cases were very sad, and it is difficult to even begin to imagine what the survey respondents had gone through during this process. Cancer is a particularly terrible disease given the death process associated with it, and despite coming across numerous cases of this happening, I was a bit surprised at how frequently respondents reported these cases. I likewise can understand why continually seeing these types of reports has motivated Steve Kirsch to spend every waking moment he has to bring attention to this issue.

Other conditions were less commonly reported. I took particular note of the following:

•Seven cases of liver failure (or something similar), along with additional cases of cancers rapidly metastasizing to the liver and causing liver failure.
•Six Reports of Lou Gehrig's disease (also known as ALS)
•Three Reports of Fatal Prion Diseases (two of which were specified to be CJD, the third most likely was as well).
•A few reports of birth defects in vital organs with ACE-2 receptors such as the heart (it is harder to draw a correlation here since those defects sometimes happen otherwise, but given that I know one case where this almost certainly happened, I suspect these may have been linked as well).

I learned a few major lessons from these reports. 

The first is that one respondent made it very clear he and another individual had had a mild Covid infection they were dealing with, but once they became vaccinated, the infection went out of control and rapidly landed them in the hospital. I have been trying to come up with an explanation for a while over why it is so common to see individuals be vaccinated and then rapidly be hospitalized or died from severe Covid. I now suspect that being vaccinated while you are infected alters the immune response and makes COVID much more likely to progress towards being a fatal condition. This is unfortunate because those deaths are often used to justify the urgency of vaccinating.

Russia Thwarted A Large-Scale Ukrainian Military Operation Against Lugansk And Donetsk

thesaker  |  During special military operation, classified documents (https://function.mil.ru/files/morf/dokumentynua.pdf)of the command of the National Guard of Ukraine ended up in the hands of the Russian servicemen. These documents confirm the covert preparation by the Kiev regime of an offensive operation in the Donbass in March 2022.

The Russian Ministry of Defence publishes the original secret order of the commander of the National Guard of Ukraine, Colonel-General Nikolai Balan, dated January 22, 2022.

Order “On organizing the training of a battalion tactical group of the 4th operational brigade to perform combat (special) tasks in the joint forces operation as part of a brigade of the armed forces of Ukraine.”

The document is addressed to the heads of the northern Kiev, southern Odessa and western territorial departments of the National Guard of Ukraine.

The order, brought to the command of the National Guard of Ukraine, explains the plan for preparing one of the shock groups for offensive operations in the so-called “Joint Forces Operation” zone in Donbass.
The document approves the organizational structure of the battalion-tactical group of the 4th operational brigade of the National Guard, the organization of its comprehensive support and reassignment to the 80th separate air assault brigade of Ukraine.

I would like to emphasize that since 2016, this formation of the air assault troops of Ukraine has been trained by American and British instructors under the “NATO standard” training programs in Lvov.

In accordance with the order, the Deputy Commander of the National Guard was tasked with organizing joint combat training of the battalion-tactical group of the National Guard as part of the 80th separate air assault brigade of the armed forces of Ukraine from February 7 to February 28, 2022.

I draw your attention that as many as five paragraphs of 4th paragraph are devoted to the issues of careful selection of personnel, psychologists examination and ensuring their high motivation.

For this reason, the National Guard servicemen are provided with “visual agitation, information and propaganda materials, flags, and printing products.”

The deputy commander of the National Guard for Staffing (personnel) was ordered to organize “an effective system of moral and psychological support for the battalion tactical group of the 4th operational brigade, internal communications of commanders with subordinates, informing.”

At the same time, it is important to provide “an explanation to the personnel of command decisions and the importance of upcoming tasks.”

I draw special attention to the fact that the 12th paragraph of the order prohibits sending National Guard servicemen who showed “unsatisfactory” results of psychological testing according to the criterion of “risk appetite” to the area of joint command training and to the place of “combat special tasks”.

All events of joint combat training of the nationalists are ordered to be completed by February 28 in order to further ensure the fulfillment of combat missions as part of the Ukrainian “Joint Forces Operation” in Donbass.

The document contains the original signatures of the officials of the command of the National Guard of Ukraine responsible for the tasks.

We remember the statements by the leadership of the Kiev regime replicated by the Western media in February, that there were no plans for an armed seizure of Lugansk and Donetsk people’s republics. About their desire to resolve all issues in “political and diplomatic way.”

However, the originals of the secret military documents of the National Guard of Ukraine clearly prove the falsity of these statements.

A special military operation of the Russian Armed Forces, conducted since February 24, thwarted a large-scale offensive operation of Ukrainian troops on the Lugansk and Donetsk people’s republics in March of this year.

Thus, only one question remains unclear so far: how deeply the US leadership and its NATO allies were involved in the planning and preparation of the operation to storm the Donbass by the Ukrainian joint force grouping in early March. All those who care so much about peace in Ukraine today.

Zelenskyy: The Servant Of The People

chesno |   The financial statements from the Servant of the People indicate that the party collected 226 million hryvnias (~$8 million USD) in donations while Zelenskyy and his associates’ election accounts collected 200 million hryvnias (~$7 million USD).

These numbers themselves seem relatively unremarkable, but the sources and types of donations are much more interesting.

Chesno reported that from September 2018 to September 2019 only 94 people donated to Servant of the People. Of the 94 people, most of these were entrepreneurs or sole proprietors. Most of the donations came from Kyiv, followed by donations from Odessa and Dnipro.

Chesno also found that 44 legal entities donated to the Servant of the People and Zelenskyy, with 34 of these entities donating 3 million hryvnias ($105,000 USD), which is just under the 3.3 million hryvnia ($120,000) limit placed on donations. The majority of these donations came from either Kyiv or Odessa.

More than 99% of all donations were more than 100,000 hryvnias ($3,500 USD); only two donations of less than 10,000 hryvnias ($350) were received in this time period.

To contextualize these figures, the minimum wage in Ukraine is 6,000 hryvnias per month ($220 USD) and the median salary in Ukraine is around 21,000 hryvnias ($775 USD).

This means that the majority of donations received by Zelenskyy and Servant of the People were more than what most Ukrainians make over five or six months of full-time work.

Chesno also found that some of the 94 personal donations came from questionable sources. Chesno interviewed Tetyana Staneva, who lives in a village in Odessa and has no business registered in her name. She donated 1.5 million hryvnias ($52,000 USD) to the Servant of the People party, telling Chesno, “It’s not just my money, I just sent it. This is a group of like-minded people, we did it together.” It should be noted that this is against Ukrainian law, which says that individual citizen must make financial contributions to political groups personally, and not as a collective.

Investigators identified one of the 44 entities that donated as Yaroslava Reklama, LLC, registered to a 22-year old cook named Yaroslav Kuzka who works at one of Kyiv’s restaurants. Yaroslava Reklama LLC, transferred the maximum donation of 3.3 million hryvnias ($120,000 USD) to Servant of the People. Upon investigating the address to which Yaroslava Reklama LLC was registered, journalists found that tenants in the area had never heard of the company.

Another company, Prom Import LLC, was registered to a woman named Juliana Kuku. She complained on her social media accounts that business was “not going well”, but at roughly the same time, made a 500,000 hryvnia ($16,000 USD) donation to Servant of the People.

Chesno also found that of the 44 entities that donated to Servant of the People, four of them changed their addresses within two days of one another in December 2018, leading investigators to conclude that many of the donors were likely linked.

It is perhaps remarkable to consider that although only 94 persons and 44 legal entities donated to Servant of the People, that it grew to controlling 254 of 450 seats in the Verkhovna Rada despite not existing less than six months before.

Tulsi's NOT What We Think She Is, But She IS Interesting To Look At!!!

This war and suffering could have easily been avoided if Biden Admin/NATO had simply acknowledged Russia’s legitimate security concerns regarding Ukraine’s becoming a member of NATO, which would mean US/NATO forces right on Russia’s border

— Tulsi Gabbard 🌺 (@TulsiGabbard) February 24, 2022

 

8/ People, hold @TulsiGabbard's feet to the fire on her association with Dark Sith Lord Klaus Schwab and his World Economic Forum. When she makes public statements that seem to be on the side of the people but actually push for more government police powers, she's working evil.

— Evan J (@realevantalks) November 12, 2021

Civil War: Private Family Capitalism vs. Public Corporatism

dissentmagazine |  At this point we need to ask whether the growing militancy of the Republican right can be adequately explained by the triumph of small over big business, as Tea Partiers and Trump himself would have us believe. Even the most sophisticated commentators have taken the Tea Party at its word on this matter. But as Trump’s example reminds us, what is at stake here is less an alliance of the small against the big than it is an insurrection of one form of capitalism against another: the private, unincorporated, and family-based versus the corporate, publicly traded, and shareholder-owned. If most family enterprise was confined to the small business sector in the 1980s—when public corporations accounted for the bulk of big business—this shorthand does not apply today, as more large companies go private and dynastic wealth surges to the forefront of the American economy. The historian Steve Fraser has noted that the “resurgence of what might be called dynastic or family capitalism, as opposed to the more impersonal managerial capitalism many of us grew up with, is changing the nation’s political chemistry.” The family-based capitalism that stormed the White House along with Trump stretches from the smallest of family businesses to the most rambling of dynasties, and crucially depends on the alliance between the two. Without its network of subcontracted family businesses, the dynastic enterprise would collapse as a political and economic force. Meanwhile the many small business owners that gravitate toward Trump are convinced that their own fortunes rise and fall along with his.

It is no accident that Trump’s most significant donors hail from the same world of privately held, unincorporated, and family-based capitalism as he does. In 2020, Forbes named Koch Industries as the largest privately held company in the United States. The Mercers, who did so much to underwrite Trump’s rise to power, owe their wealth to Renaissance Technologies, a privately held hedge fund that was subject to the so-called “small business” tax on pass-through income. Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, was born into a business dynasty that made its fortune through the privately held Prince Corporation. When she married Dick DeVos in 1979, she sealed an alliance between the Prince family and Amway, still one of the largest private companies in the country. Most of Betsy DeVos’s personal income derives from pass-through entities like LLCs and limited partnerships, which means that the Trump tax cuts would have saved her tens of millions of dollars. Amway itself is structured as an S-corporation, a type of pass-through that also would have qualified for Trump’s 40 percent marginal tax cut to small business.

As the scions of private dynastic capital invest the halls of power, they have also inflated the fortunes of their own trade and political associations. Organizations such as the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council and the theocratic Council for National Policy (the latter with its close connections to the DeVos and Prince dynasties) once existed on the far fringes of the American right. Today their progeny—from Americans for Prosperity to FreedomWorks and the Family Research Council—dictate the form of Republican Party politics, while the once all-powerful Business Roundtable and other corporate trade associations watch from the sidelines. The newly ascendant organizations would like to convince us that theirs is the voice of small family business ranged against the vested power of the corporate and bureaucratic elite. More plausibly, however, they represent a shift in the center of gravity of American capitalism, which has elevated the once marginal figure of the family-owned business to a central place in economic life at every scale. If the large publicly listed corporation was still the uncontested reference point for American business at the turn of the millennium, it is now being increasingly challenged by a style of family-based capitalism whose reach extends from the smallest to the most grandiose household production units. The infrastructural basis of today’s far-right resurgence is neither populist nor elitist in any straightforward sense: it is both. The collapse of the public corporation into a thicket of privately contracted commercial relations has weakened the old union-mediated bonds among workers and created real economic intimacies, however fraught, between the small family-owned business and the dynastic enterprise. To prevent the emergence of some more dangerous version of Trump, we would need to build an alternative set of economic and affective solidarities potent enough to dismantle this clientelist symbiosis of households.

Civil War: America's Local Gentry

patrick-wyman  |  Commercial agriculture is a lucrative industry, at least for those who own the orchards, cold storage units, processing facilities, and the large businesses that cater to them. They have a trusted and reasonably well-paid cadre of managers and specialists in law, finance, and the like - members of the educated professional-managerial class that my close classmates and I have joined - but the vast majority of their employees are lower-wage laborers. The owners are mostly white; the laborers are mostly Latino, a significant portion of them undocumented immigrants. Ownership of the real, core assets is where the region’s wealth comes from, and it doesn’t extend down the social hierarchy. Yet this bounty is enough to produce hilltop mansions, a few high-end restaurants, and a staggering array of expensive vacation homes in Hawaii, Palm Springs, and the San Juan Islands.

This class of people exists all over the United States, not just in Yakima. So do mid-sized metropolitan areas, the places where huge numbers of Americans live but which don’t figure prominently in the country’s popular imagination or its political narratives: San Luis Obispo, California; Odessa, Texas; Bloomington, Illinois; Medford, Oregon; Hilo, Hawaii; Dothan, Alabama; Green Bay, Wisconsin. (As an aside, part of the reason I loved Parks and Recreation was because it accurately portrayed life in a place like this: a city that wasn’t small, which served as the hub for a dispersed rural area, but which wasn’t tightly connected to a major metropolitan area.)

This kind of elite’s wealth derives not from their salary - this is what separates them from even extremely prosperous members of the professional-managerial class, like doctors and lawyers - but from their ownership of assets. Those assets vary depending on where in the country we’re talking about; they could be a bunch of McDonald’s franchises in Jackson, Mississippi, a beef-processing plant in Lubbock, Texas, a construction company in Billings, Montana, commercial properties in Portland, Maine, or a car dealership in western North Carolina. Even the less prosperous parts of the United States generate enough surplus to produce a class of wealthy people. Depending on the political culture and institutions of a locality or region, this elite class might wield more or less political power. In some places, they have an effective stranglehold over what gets done; in others, they’re important but not all-powerful.

Wherever they live, their wealth and connections make them influential forces within local society. In the aggregate, through their political donations and positions within their localities and regions, they wield a great deal of political influence. They’re the local gentry of the United States.

We’re not talking about international oligarchs; these folks’ wealth extends into the millions and tens of millions rather than the billions. There are, however, a lot more of them than the global elite that tends to get all of the attention. They’re not the face of instantly recognizable global brands or the subjects of award-winning New York Times profiles; they own warehouses and Applebee’s franchises, concrete companies and chains of movie theaters, hop fields and apartment complexes.

Because their wealth is rooted in the ownership of physical assets, they tend to be more rooted in their places of origin than the cosmopolitan professionals and entrepreneurs of the major metro areas. Mobility between major metros, the characteristic jumping from Seattle to Los Angeles to New York to Austin that’s possible for younger lawyers and creatives and tech folks, is foreign to them. They might really like heading to a vacation home in Bermuda or Maui. They might plan a relatively early retirement to a wealthy enclave in Palm Springs, Scottsdale, or central Florida. Ultimately, however, their money and importance comes from the businesses they own, and those belong in their localities.

Gentry classes are a common feature of a great many social-economic-political regimes throughout history. Pretty much anywhere you have a hierarchical form of social organization and property ownership, a gentry class of some kind emerges: the local civic elites of the Roman Empire, the landlords of later Han China, the numerous lower nobility of late medieval France, the thegns of Anglo-Saxon England, the Prussian Junkers, or the planter class of the antebellum South. The gentry are generally distinct from the highest levels of a regime’s political and economic elite: They’re usually not resident in the political center, they don’t hold major positions in the central administration of the state (whatever that might consist of) and aren’t counted among the wealthiest people in their polity. New national or imperial elites might emerge over time from a gentry class, even rulers - the boundaries between these groups can be more or less porous - but that’s not usually the case.

Gentry are, by definition, local elites. The extent to which they wield power in their localities, and how they do so, is dependent on the structure of their regime. In the early Roman Empire, for example, local civic elites were essential to the functioning of the state. They collected taxes in their home cities, administered justice, and competed with each other for local political offices and seats on the city councils. Their competition was a driving force behind the provision of benefits to the common folk in the form of festivals, games, public buildings, and more basic support, a practice called civic euergetism.

Post Pandemic Stress Disorder

off-guardian  |   Doctors are warning that hundreds of thousands of people in the UK could be at increased risk of heart disease or cardiac events.

Speaking to the Evening Standard, psychological therapist Mark Rayner and vascular surgeon Tahir Hussein said that the UK could see “300,000 new patients with heart issues” in the near future.

What’s to blame? Well, that would be “Post Pandemic Stress Disorder”. A new condition “yet to be recognised”, even though “many experts believe it should be”.

It’s a totally real thing. They didn’t just completely make it up. Don’t be cynical.

You see, all the “pandemic” related anxiety and stress has taken such a toll on the public that doctors are predicting a 5% increase in heart disease, nationwide, and not just in the elderly or infirm.

According to Dr Hussein, he is already seeing…

a big increase in thrombotic-related vascular conditions in my practice. Far younger patients are being admitted and requiring surgical and medical intervention than prior to the pandemic.

Now, some of you demented anti-vaxxers out there might be asking crazy questions like “could this increase in blood clots and heart disease be linked to injecting millions of people with an untested vaccine?”

But that’s absurd. And I told you to stop being cynical.

Yes, fine, in the interests of fairness, we should mention it was recently reported that the Astra Zeneca jab can cause blood clots.

It turns out all the people saying that back in March weren’t just conspiracy theorists spreading misinformation after all. They were totally right. But the clots are only rare, so don’t worry. And they sort of know what causes it now, so future batches might be fine.

And yes, also in the interests of fairness, it’s true that both the Pfizer and Moderna shots can cause heart issues too. Both, according to the CDC, can cause pericarditis and myocarditis, the complications of which include heart attacks, heart failure and strokes.

The UK government has even produced special guidelines for dealing with myocardits, “following Covid19 vaccination”.

But, just like the blood clots, this is very rare. Obviously not so rare you don’t need a special guiding document on how to deal with it, but still very very rare.

…the point is, yes, all the major Covid vaccines are known to have cardiac-related side effects, and yes, some doctors are now predicting a major spike in heart-related health problems, but these are totally unrelated.

Does Walgreen's Theft Of Employee Wages Vastly Exceed Its Losses To Shoplifting?

popular |  In the United States, only certain types of theft are newsworthy. 

For example, on June 14, 2021, a reporter for KGO-TV in San Francisco tweeted a cellphone video of a man in Walgreens filling a garbage bag with stolen items and riding his bicycle out of the store. According to San Francisco's crime database, the value of the merchandise stolen in the incident was between $200 and $950. 

This just happened at the @Walgreens on Gough & Fell Streets in San Francisco. #NoConsequences @chesaboudin pic.twitter.com/uSbnTQQk4J

— Lyanne Melendez (@LyanneMelendez) June 14, 2021

According to an analysis by FAIR, a media watchdog, this single incident generated 309 stories between June 14 and July 12. A search by Popular Information reveals that, since July 12, there have been dozens of additional stories mentioning the incident. The theft has been covered in a slew of major publications including the New York Times, USA Today and CNN.

In most coverage, the video is presented as proof that there are no consequences for shoplifting in San Francisco. But the man in the video, Jean Lugo-Romero, was arrested about a week later and faces 15 charges, including "grand theft, second-degree burglary and shoplifting." He was recently transferred to county jail where he is being held without bond. 

Just a few months earlier, in November 2020, Walgreens paid a $4.5 million settlement to resolve a class-action lawsuit alleging that it stole wages from thousands of its employees in California between 2010 and 2017. The lawsuit alleged that Walgreens "rounded down employees' hours on their timecards, required employees to pass through security checks before and after their shift without compensating them for time worked, and failed to pay premium wages to employees who were denied legally required meal breaks." 

Walgreens' settlement includes attorney's fees and other penalties, but $2,830,000 went to Walgreens employees to compensate them for the wages that the company had stolen. And, because it is a settlement, that amount represents a small fraction of the total liability. According to the order approving the settlement, it represents "approximately 22% of the potential damages."

So this is a story of a corporation that stole millions of dollars from its own employees. How much news coverage did it generate? There was a single 221-word story in Bloomberg Law, an industry publication. And that's it. There has been no coverage in the New York Times, USA Today, CNN, or the dozens of other publications that covered the story of a man stealing a few hundred dollars of merchandise.

 

What Kind Of Crimes Capture "Our" Attention?

darrellowens  |  I don’t really know if there’s a crime wave regardless of the perception that there is one. I don’t trust police statistics besides homicide, home invasion and auto burglaries. I don’t know many people who would make a police report about assault or theft. I worked at a Walgreens with an extensive theft problem and know first hand only extreme cases were reported to the police. In San Francisco, there’s seven fewer homicides, two hundred more burglaries and fifty more motor thefts than last year. Is that a crime wave? I suppose. The entire country has seen increased crime since the pandemic. The only thing that sticks out about San Francisco is the appalling high drug overdoses last year in which no other Bay Area county came close.

Couldn’t help but notice that the vast majority of mob burglaries happened outside of San Francisco, though. I notice that only crimes in San Francisco require public responses from district attorney Chesa Boudin. Alameda County district attorney Nancy O’Malley is never made to answer for the very clear crime wave in Oakland right now. O’Malley virtually never appears in any publication about the endless homicides, the endless dispensary attacks, or even the freeway shootings that have killed two in the last couple months including a mother and a baby, on top of 80 freeway shootings last year in Alameda County. Nothing about district attorney Diana Becton who bears apparently no responsibility for the numerous homicides in Pittsburg and Antioch, or the burglaries in Walnut Creek. Jeff Rosen, Santa Clara County DA, home of the Lululemon and this recent shoe store mob burglary? Never heard of him.

It’s only Boudin, apparently, who’s expected to give public comment to media about crime. Why? It’s not as if he runs SFPD. He doesn’t make staffing decisions, he doesn’t decide who gets arrested and where beat patrols go. He’s a prosecutor. Because he pointed out that punitive behavior isn’t always warranted in every situation, now he’s become target #1 for all social ills in San Francisco with a recall initiative, despite no real evidence that he’s more lenient on prosecutions than his Bay Area counterparts, or that the crime wave is unique to San Francisco.

What really gets to me though is that there is a clear crime wave happening. Oakland’s at its 127th homicide as of typing this. When I started this substack 2 days ago it was at its 126th. Where’s the faces of the victims? Where’s the twitter videos? Who even are these homicide victims? With exception to the murdered KRON guard Kevin Nishita or baby Jasper Wu, we hardly even know them.

Prior to the pandemic, homicides in Oakland were at all time lows, but now the homicide levels for a second year in a row is reaching 1990s levels of death. But since these are mainly confined to East Oakland and West Oakland, and the victims are mostly Black and Brown, nobody really cares. After all, it’s where murder is expected to happen and to the people it's expected to happen to. When crime happens where it’s not supposed to happen like in suburban Walnut Creek or downtown San Francisco, suddenly it gets hyper media focus.

Louis Vuitton and Nordstrom have become incessantly repeated names as if they’re people, not 15 year old Shamara Young, 34 year old Danny McNary Jr, 41 year old Kanawa Long, 22 year old Devani Aleman Sanchez, 24 year old Suiti Mesui, 33 year old Lindsey Logue, 52 year old Dirk Tillotson, 30 year old Willie Lennon III and the list goes on. What about the numerous unidentified people who were gunned down and had their lives taken from them? The media doesn’t care because they died in the zipcodes where society has deemed it acceptable and not news worthy.

There were three instances of shootings in Oakland the weekend of the Louis Vuitton burglary. Two people—two human beings—died. Shot to death by a gun, bled out on the street with their minds in panic. One a 17 year old boy who spent over 6,000 days being born, raised, having life struggles and successes, having family, going to school — all erased in just a few seconds. No follow up stories by newspapers, no check-ins on the family from journalists. No social media outrage. Nothing.

Just another sex and age description in the homicide weekly wrap up. Public dollars goes not to the therapy for the families who lost their relatives or have been terrorized by crackling bullets, not just in Oakland or Antioch but in Bayview-Hunter’s Point or the troubled areas in downtown San Francisco, but instead to free parking and street closures for suburban Black Friday shoppers.

Watch The Black Godfather To Understand Living Memory And What Happened Here...,

NYTimes |  The police on Thursday announced that they had arrested a suspect in the fatal shooting of Jacqueline Avant, a philanthropist and the wife of the music producer Clarence Avant, one day after she was killed at her home in Beverly Hills, Calif.

About an hour after Ms. Avant, 81, was killed, the suspect, Aariel Maynor, 29, of Los Angeles, was arrested when he accidentally shot himself in the foot while burglarizing a home in Hollywood, about 7 miles from Ms. Avant’s home, Chief Mark Stainbrook of the Beverly Hills Police Department said at a news conference on Thursday.

The police found Mr. Maynor in the backyard of the home in Hollywood after they received a report of a shooting there at 3:30 a.m. on Wednesday, Chief Stainbrook said, adding that they also recovered the rifle Mr. Maynor is believed to have used to shoot Ms. Avant. Mr. Maynor was taken to a hospital, where he remains in custody.

Ms. Avant was found with a gunshot wound after the police received a report of a shooting at her home in Beverly Hills at 2:23 a.m. on Wednesday. Mr. Avant and a private security guard were at the home at the time of the shooting, but were unharmed, the police said.

Surveillance videos, including city cameras, showed Mr. Maynor’s vehicle heading eastbound out of Beverly Hills shortly after Ms. Avant was shot, Chief Stainbrook said.

The evidence indicates that Mr. Maynor acted alone in the shooting, and his motive remains under investigation, Chief Stainbrook said. Mr. Maynor has “an extensive criminal record” and was on parole, Chief Stainbrook said.

“Our deepest gratitude to The City of Beverly Hills, the B.H.P.D. and all law enforcement for their diligence on this matter,” Ms. Avant’s family said in a statement on Thursday after the police announced the arrest. “Now, let justice be served.”

The fatal shooting of Ms. Avant prompted an outpouring of grief and condolences from prominent figures in the arts, sports and politics, including former President Bill Clinton, former Vice President Al Gore and the former Los Angeles Lakers star Magic Johnson.

A onetime model who was married to Mr. Avant for more than 50 years, Ms. Avant was a past president of the Neighbors of Watts, a charitable organization that threw star-studded benefits to support child care and other needs. She was also an elementary school tutor and an avid collector of Japanese lacquered boxes.

Mr. Avant started Sussex Records in 1969 and signed Bill Withers, releasing some of his best-known songs, including “Ain’t No Sunshine,” “Use Me” and “Lean on Me.” Over the years, he also worked with Jimmy Jam, Terry Lewis and Babyface. He helped promote Michael Jackson’s “Bad” world tour in 1987, and was chairman of the board of Motown Records.

Mr. Avant was the subject of a 2019 Netflix documentary, “The Black Godfather,” which featured testimonials from Mr. Clinton, former President Barack Obama and Vice President Kamala Harris, who was then a presidential candidate.

The couple’s daughter, Nicole A. Avant, a former U.S. ambassador to the Bahamas, was a producer of “The Black Godfather,” and is married to Ted Sarandos, a co-chief executive of Netflix.

One Unadvertised Scheme - AMONG MANY - For Shaking Down "Middle-Class" Peasants

@seangotcher #housing ♬ San Tropez - Illect Recordings

msn |  In a video that’s garnered more than 2.4 million views on TikTok, Nevada real-estate agent Sean Gotcher criticizes the “iBuying” business model, in which companies buy and sell homes for a profit. In the video, he proposes that a nameless company has a website where many people search for homes “when they’re bored,” and he says that same company “uses that information to go into that ZIP code and start purchasing houses.”

In other words, he’s suggesting that companies such as Zillow are using the data they glean from people’s perusal of home listings on their sites to make decisions about which houses to buy as iBuyers.

Gotcher later argues that the company will buy 30 homes at one price, and then purchase a 31st home at a higher price. “What that just did is create a new comp,” Gotcher says, referring to comparable prices on nearby properties, which appraisers use to determine the value of a home for sale. He then says the company can turn around and sell the other homes at that new, higher price.

In subsequent videos, Gotcher takes on Zillow and Redfin more directly, criticizing their respective business practices.

“I’m happy to see the conversation that’s occurring at every printer in every real estate office about data storage, mixed with buying power and recognizable marketing is finally happening outside our office doors so more can participate in the discussion,” Gotcher, who works for Level Up Real Estate in Henderson, Nev., told MarketWatch in an email.

The video subsequently garnered even more attention on Twitter when a person with the username Gladvillain shared it after learning that the user’s mother had sold her home to Zillow. Many users claimed that Zillow was purchasing “all of the homes,” and said they planned to boycott the platform.

Both Zillow and Redfin contradicted the video’s claims. “The internet has empowered millions of consumers with more information, transparency and tools in real estate to help them make smarter real estate decisions, many provided by Zillow for more than a decade,” a Zillow spokesperson told MarketWatch in an email. “Unfortunately, the internet can also sometimes be a source of misinformation and falsehoods — as is this case.”

A Redfin spokesperson added that the company doesn’t “have the share to manipulate the market nor do we have any desire to, because intentionally overpaying for homes would be a terrible business model.”

Real-estate experts debunked many of the points made in the viral video, and argued that other forces are to blame for the country’s competitive, pricey housing market.

“If you could rig the residential housing market that easily, the Realtors would have done it long ago,” said Gilles Duranton, a real-estate professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

 

 

The UnVaccinated Are Not Who You've Been Instructed To Believe They Are

NYTimes |  Then there is the health system’s long-documented mistreatment of Black people (and other minorities) in this country. Black people are less likely to be given pain medication or even treatment for life-threatening emergencies, for instance. I thought of those statistics while reading the poignant story of a Black physician who could not persuade her mother to get vaccinated because her mother’s previous interactions with the medical system included passing out after screaming in agony when a broken arm got manipulated and X-rayed without sufficient care for her pain.

While the racial gap in vaccination has improved over the last year — nonwhite people were more likely to express caution and a desire to wait and see rather than to be committed anti-vaxxers — it’s still there.

In New York, for example, only 42 percent of African Americans of all ages (and 49 percent among adults) are fully vaccinated — the lowest rate among all demographic groups tracked by the city.

This is another area in which the dominant image of the white, QAnon-spouting, Tucker Carlson-watching conspiracist anti-vaxxer dying to own the libs is so damaging. It can lead us to ignore the problem of racialized health inequities with deep historic roots but also ongoing repercussions, and prevent us from understanding that there are different kinds of vaccine hesitancy, which require different approaches.

Just ask Nicki Minaj.

About a month ago, the rap artist made headlines after tweeting that she was worried about vaccines because she had heard from her cousin that a friend of his had swollen testicles after being vaccinated. (Experts pointed out that, even if this had happened, it was most likely caused by a sexually transmitted disease.) She was justifiably denounced for spreading misinformation.

But something else that Minaj said caught my eye. She wrote that she hadn’t done “enough research” yet, but that people should keep safe “in the meantime” by wearing “the mask with 2 strings that grips your head & face. Not that loose one.”

“Wear a good mask while researching vaccines” is not the sentiment of a denier. She seemed genuinely concerned about Covid, even to the point that she seemed to understand that N95s, the high-quality masks that medical professionals wear, which have the “2 strings that grips your head & face,” were much safer.

Lazer said that the Covid States Project’s research showed that unvaccinated people who nonetheless wore masks were, indeed, more likely to be Black women. In contrast, those who were neither vaccinated nor masked were more likely to be Republicans, and more likely to be rural, less educated and white. (Among the vaccinated, Asian Americans were most likely to be still wearing masks.)

 

Racism Like Marriage? Marriage Is A Relation Among Men For Which Women Are The Means

counterpunch |  One learns what it means to be white from other white people. It comes in stories and warnings and descriptions as part of childhood. Most of those stories are about black people. For white racialized consciousness, black or brown people become characters in a system of narratives, anecdotes, and images. In later life, white people relate to black people through those stories. And they relate to other white people who see those stories the same way. They enter into friendships and find social residence in their common understanding language and attitudes of those stories. In effect, it is not black people they relate to as they become white, but the white people who tell them the stories, and to their a white community.

In sum, racism is not a relation between white people and black. It is a relation between white people for which “black people” are the means. (As Simone de Beauvoir used to say in a parallel vein, marriage is a relation between men for which women are the means.) How is a white person to talk about race if they look at it as a black-white relation?

There is no reciprocity with respect to black people. The power, gratuitous hostility, domination, inferiorization, patronizing attitudes, etc. that characterize racism only go in one direction. The stories are just there to teach white people how to do it. Violence also only goes in one direction. White people kill, harass, patronize, and renarrativize black people as part of racializing them. They know they are dealing from the bottom of the deck. It is a power given them by white supremacist institutionalities. Thus, racism provides the terms by which white people can take each for granted.

When black people appear to reciprocate, to fight back, to scorn, to ignore, to placate, those are not gestures of violence but of self-defense and possibly rebellion. When done individually, the deck is stacked against them.

If racism is a form of street-level solidarity among whites, it will often be enforced by various means, even those of violence. The solidarism among segregationists, for instance, can take the form of enlistment to action, sometimes as a racializing project, and sometimes as “behavior modification.” Against the segregationists, the liberals argue that a hard exclusionary stance against black people will only cause trouble and rebellion. The better path is to integrate with its subtle long-range stratifications. Both see themselves looking out for the stability of white society, while preserving different forms of black subordination.

Both segregationists and liberals are fulfilling duties of membership in whiteness. And neither will disown it. Perhaps they refused to hear Kaepernick’s gesture of revolt out of a premonition that it would require them to deny their whiteness. But that is not the question. If one learns one’s whiteness from other white people, from whom could one learn to unlearn it?

In closing, we might mention one great vulnerability in whiteness, the esthetic dimension. It resides in the recognition that the difference in color between people is actually beautiful. The contrast between a white arm and a dark brown one set alongside each other is imminently pleasing if seen in its reality, free of the imposition of “good vs. evil.” The early colonists in Jamestown saw this immediately when the first Africans arrived in 1619. The colony quickly tried three times to outlaw mixed marriages, each time with harsher penalties. And each time it failed miserably. (Cf. Steve Martinot, The Rule of Racialization, Temple UP, 2003, pp 54-57)

The Fraternal Order Of Police: America's Killer-Ape Alternate Reality/Legality

vanityfair |  This is a brotherhood. It abides no law but its own. It scorns the personhood of all but its own brethren. It derides all creatures outside its own clan. And for that reason, the brotherhood is not only a hurdle impeding reform. It is the architecture of an alternate reality, one that seethes and bubbles just beneath the surface of our own. And it’s a reality in which none of us are human.

In May, the Chicago chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police elected John Catanzara as president. According to a 2017 report by the United States Department of Justice, the police department in Chicago “engages in a pattern or practice of using force that is in violation of the Constitution,” where “officers’ force practices unnecessarily endanger themselves,” “a pattern...[which] results from systemic deficiencies in training and accountability.”

And yet, even given the city’s abysmal standard of police conduct, in his 25 years on the force Catanzara has managed to distinguish himself from his peers by being especially awful. According to the Citizens Police Data Project (a database of police misconduct records made public after a lawsuit and Freedom of Information Act requests), Catanzara has been the subject of 50 complaints, putting him in the 96th percentile for allegations. At the time he was elected to lead the FOP, Catanzara was assigned to administrative duty; according to the Chicago Sun-Times, he is the first president to take on the role while stripped of his official police powers.

In June, when asked about the killing of George Floyd, Catanzara referred to Officer Derek Chauvin’s actions as an “improper police tactic.” “Explain to me how race had anything to do with it,” he went on. “There’s no proof or evidence that race had anything to do with it.” Catanzara has said that any lodge members showing support for protesters could face disciplinary action from the FOP, and perhaps expulsion.

Chicago’s Fraternal Order of Police is a local chapter of the larger national organization of the same name. The national FOP boasts more than 2,100 such lodges, representing more than 330,000 members, which makes it, according to its website, “the world’s largest organization of sworn law enforcement officers.”

When Chicago police officer Robert Rialmo killed Quintonio LeGrier and Bettie Jones—a young man having a mental health episode and his neighbor, who answered the door—Rialmo was fired. The vice president of the Chicago FOP called the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, which recommended the firing, “a political witch hunt on police officers. The investigations are unfair and politically motivated.”

When Jason Van Dyke was convicted of second-degree murder for the death of Laquan McDonald, the FOP defended him. When four of the officers accused of aiding in the cover-up were fired, a different FOP vice president used the decision as an occasion to impress upon police board members that they should not “fall to the pressure of the media or the radical police haters.”

These men were sworn officers of the law. But they did not look at Van Dyke as a convicted murderer who had broken that law. They did not look at him and see police—a social category, a profession, a uniform one puts on and can take off. They looked at him and saw their brother. They saw a different type of being, bound by an oath that transcends civilian understanding. And by virtue of Van Dyke’s being, in their eyes, he could do no wrong.

The same logic underlies the phrase “blue lives matter,” which semantically equates the color of a uniform with the nonnegotiable, unshakable fact of Blackness. It’s a phenomenon not unlike the transfiguration that took place behind the eyes of Darren Wilson. “It looks like a demon,” he told the grand jury in describing Michael Brown. Michael Brown: not man, but beast. Jason Van Dyke: not man, but kin. A brother in the pantheon. A demigod among demigods, his actions deemed necessary and virtuous because they were wrought by his hand, and his hand was necessary and virtuous.

Of course, as Catanzara’s comment about support for protesters demonstrates, it’s not that it’s impossible to be cast out from the brotherhood. The unforgivable sin within the brotherhood is to cast aspersions against the only people whom the brotherhood recognizes as human—its own kind. Shoot a boy in the back, and you can still be in the brotherhood. Side with the people who are asking questions, or raise a fist with them, or kneel before them, or talk to them, and you are out.

Maya Angelou had a thing she used to say—When people show you who they are, believe them the first time. Perhaps it’s time for America to heed Angelou’s advice. The Fraternal Order of Police has told us candidly what they are—that they are not a union, but a fraternity. A brotherhood. We ought to believe them.

Simple Hard Men Ought Not Be Making Policy Or Technology Decisions...,

wired |  It's been the better part of a decade since the hacktivist group Anonymous rampaged across the internet, stealing and leaking millions of secret files from dozens of US organizations. Now, amid the global protests following the killing of George Floyd, Anonymous is back—and it's returned with a dump of hundreds of gigabytes of law enforcement files and internal communications. (Blueleaks)

On Friday of last week, the Juneteenth holiday, a leak-focused activist group known as Distributed Denial of Secrets published a 269-gigabyte collection of police data that includes emails, audio, video, and intelligence documents, with more than a million files in total. DDOSecrets founder Emma Best tells WIRED that the hacked files came from Anonymous—or at least a source self-representing as part of that group, given that under Anonymous' loose, leaderless structure anyone can declare themselves a member. Over the weekend, supporters of DDOSecrets, Anonymous, and protesters worldwide began digging through the files to pull out frank internal memos about police efforts to track the activities of protesters. The documents also reveal how law enforcement has described groups like the antifascist movement Antifa.

"It's the largest published hack of American law enforcement agencies," Emma Best, cofounder of DDOSecrets, wrote in a series of text messages. "It provides the closest inside look at the state, local, and federal agencies tasked with protecting the public, including [the] government response to COVID and the BLM protests."

The Hack

The massive internal data trove that DDOSecrets published was originally taken from a web development firm called Netsential, according to a law enforcement memo obtained by Kreb On Security. That memo, issued by the National Fusion Center Association, says that much of the data belonged to law enforcement "fusion centers" across the US that act as information-sharing hubs for federal, state, and local agencies. Netsential did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Best declined to comment on whether the information was taken from Netsential, but noted that "some Twitter users accurately pointed out that a lot of the data corresponded to Netsential systems." As for their source, Best would say only that the person self-represented as "capital A Anonymous," but added cryptically that "people may wind up seeing a familiar name down the line."

"Part of what a lot of the current protests are about is what police do and have done legally."
Emma Best, DDOSecrets

DDOSecrets has published the files in a searchable format on its website, and supporters quickly created the #blueleaks hashtag to collect their findings from the hacked files on social media. Some of the initial discoveries among the documents showed, for instance, that the FBI monitored the social accounts of protesters and sent alerts to local law enforcement about anti-police messages. Other documents detail the FBI tracking bitcoin donations to protest groups, and internal memos warning that white supremacist groups have posed as Antifa to incite violence.