Let's Talk About Pretty Privileges...,

glamour  |  GLAMOUR spoke to author and body-positive activist Emily Lauren Dick on the impact of pretty privilege, its' dangers, and why we need to be talking about it.

How does pretty privilege impact us?

“[Pretty people] are perceived to be happier, healthier, more confident, and successful. It’s a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy because those perceptions are why attractive people actually become those things. An attractive person is more likely to be confident because of their socially accepted looks, so they present well in interviews and stand out.”

Is pretty privilege dangerous?

“I think that any form of privilege can be dangerous if gone unchecked. The fact that a whole group of people can be treated poorly simply because they don’t look a certain way is extremely harmful to a person’s self-esteem and self-worth. Everyone is worthy of love, respect, and kindness.”

“It’s disappointing that anyone would be treated differently than someone more attractive, but it’s downright irresponsible when companies and marketers are upholding this concept by purposefully using it as a strategy to sell more of their products or services.”

Never afraid to use her voice, Leigh-Anne knows how to call out the BS!

"When companies provide free products to ONLY attractive people (not just high follower accounts) to amplify their brand, they actively exclude people who support them. Marketers must stop indirectly and directly telling their customers that they should be like “pretty people” to get them to buy their products.”

“Beauty and diet businesses have created a multi-billion-dollar industry that is built upon the lie that people need to change how they look to be accepted. It’s irresponsible to continue utilising marketing strategies that purposely leave people out and make them feel bad about themselves.”

What can we do?

“It’s up to all of us to challenge internalised biases about privileged people, especially if we are one of the privileged. We must actively challenge our inner thoughts about how unattractive people are less worthy than attractive people. We must ensure that everyone is on a level playing field, especially when they are not. This is inclusion!"

We must ensure that everyone is on a level playing field, especially when they are not. This is inclusion!"

"How is this possible? Question your beliefs, speak up when someone speaks badly about someone who is considered unattractive, recognise your own privilege, hold public officials accountable, and determine other ways to challenge systems of privilege.”

It's about time we all take some notes.

Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah.., ARE YOU SEXUALLY DESIRABLE - OR NOT!!!

coveteur |  Every so often, I’ll receive the occasional you’re so lucky comment from a fellow trans woman. The sentiment is usually in reference to my body or my looks and their proximity and similarities to that of a cisgender woman. In other words, it’s usually in reference to my ability to “pass” in a cisgender world. At first, that comment, you’re so lucky, made me viscerally uncomfortable. It was easy for me to comprehend how passing privilege is a gateway to survival for many trans people, and while it isn’t a privilege afforded to all of us, words like “lucky” or “easy” left me thinking. Thoughts would race in my mind, a feeling of guilt would weigh on my heart, and I would wonder if my attractiveness or “passability” negates how difficult it is to exist as a trans woman in a cis-normative society. To counter my discomfort, I would often reply to such comments with a self-deprecating joke, as if to minimize the existence of my attractiveness as a privilege. A privilege I did not earn nor work for.

I suppose you can say the word “lucky” had become a sore spot for a while. Uncomfortable with looking at the ways in which I benefit from my looks, I was adamant to prove how I wasn’t lucky. After all, at the end of the day, I will always be transgender and that comes with its own prejudice and discrimination, right? To acknowledge the unearned advantages of physical attractiveness felt as if it would undermine everything I had to overcome to get to where I am. I mean, how lucky could I actually be?

In my search to validate how I was feeling, I stumbled across the opposite: Pretty privilege.

Pretty privilege is the concept that pretty people benefit in life from being perceived as beautiful. Studies have shown that pretty people will more than likely receive higher earnings or better grades. But what is beautiful? Like the saying beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, what we find attractive is often thought to be subjective. However, society inherently bases value on certain attributes over others. Those attributes are often based on whiteness, able bodiedness, leanness, straightness, and cisness, to mention just a few. Pretty privilege is much like how being white or being male provides people with unearned advantages in society.

Pretty privilege benefits and hurts all types of people, both cis and trans, across all races and sexualities. The intersectionality of our existence must be addressed when speaking to the topic. Kelsey Yonce refers to intersectionality perfectly in their 2014 thesis, “Attractiveness Privilege: the unearned advantages of physical attractiveness.” Yonce states “intersectionality refers to the idea that different areas of privilege and oppression do not exist in isolation from one another; instead, they overlap and interact with each other in ways that create unique experiences of privilege and oppression for each individual.” For example, the privilege and oppression experienced by a trans woman of color will look very different from the privilege and oppression experienced by a white trans woman, despite both experiencing the stigmatization and oppression of being transgender because of the inherent societal hierarchy towards race.

When speaking to pretty privilege in the context of cisness, it could be argued that the barrier for entry to such a privilege is more difficult for a transgender person because that hurdle is our very sex assigned at birth, my “maleness.” It’s the belief that in order to achieve such a standing in society it would require a distancing from, squandering of, and rejection of our transness as a whole. This reinforces the false reality that in society, a transition is deemed “successful” only when one is conventionally beautiful by cisgender standards. When in actuality we all know the real value a transition can bring to one’s life is more than mere aesthetics or looks, but rather living more fully and freely. Suddenly, it began to feel like not addressing my own pretty privilege head-on would be disadvantageous to what my mission is, and that's to uplift and advocate for all transwomen.

Having defined it, it has become shockingly easy to see how I benefit from such a privilege. In hindsight, pretty privilege in the context of cisness wasn’t something I was always presented with and might be why it has felt so obvious. I haven’t always existed in the world looking like this. While I can acknowledge how I’ve always benefitted from certain privileges like whiteness, able bodiedness, and leanness, benefitting from my “cisness” was a very foreign thing for me. I started my transition 21 months ago, and only two years ago started hormone replacement therapy, followed by a recent facial feminization surgery. As my body and features began to change and become more cis-passing, I had started to witness peoples’ treatment of me change—it was almost as if one day people saw me differently, they started smiling at me as they walked by, doors were held open, and drinks were being bought for me from those who simply wanted my attention. These are only a few small examples, but at first it all seemed unnatural and uncomfortable because my experience in the world had been different for nearly 30 years. The exact moment where it changed is hard to pinpoint, but looking at my transition in its totality, it’s jarring and impossible for me to not see the difference. It is now my responsibility to swallow my guilt and acknowledge that such experiences are not afforded to everyone and I have benefitted from the unearned privilege of assimilating into a cisgender society because of my pretty privilege. This has, in fact, made my transition easier than most but not without its own challenges.

 

Since A Good Childhood Is Key To Everything In Life: Matthew 25:40-45 - Or Nah?

annehelen  |  The vast majority of societies on this planet still understand family as their primary, most cherished bond. Blood relation or not, there is an understanding that forsaking these bonds is a form of unforgivable treachery, understandable only in circumstances of abject trauma. Within this paradigm, all parties should do whatever possible to maintain the bonds of family, even if those bonds require continued suffering.

In some societies, this understanding is changing. There are several, overlapping reasons for this change — related to mobility, LGBTQ rights and visibility, access to therapy, and more — yet for people who are estranged, the experience can still feel incredibly solitary. Most people who aren’t estranged are very, very bad at talking about it; in society at large, estrangement remains something to be “sorry” about: a regret, a sorrow, a throbbing absence.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. There are so many reasons why people cut off contact with close and distant family. Some are immediately legible in description, others are not, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that contact became unendurable, damaging, or, in my case, brought out the very worst in who I was. As you’ll see in the answers below, it is rarely swift. It is rarely without pain. But that doesn’t mean it’s not necessary.

While putting together these responses, I was reading Rin Reczek and Emmy Bosley-Smith’s Families We Keep, forthcoming this May, which surveys the various negotiations of LGBTQ people who’ve chosen to maintain or cut off ties to family members. It’s a difficult book, filled with rejection and compromise intercut by flashes of stability and support. And their conclusions are bracing: they argue that “compulsory kinship,” in which we work to sustain bonds to family irregardless of the harm those bonds have caused, is at once insidious and deeply damaging.

“The compulsory relationship between parents and children might sound like a great deal to some—especially those with healthy parent-child ties,” Reczek and Bosley-Smith write. “Of course, the parent–adult child tie can result in a life full of positivity, love, and kindness. But for many people this is not the case. We believe if parent-adult child relationships aren’t good for everyone, then parents’ primacy in our social structure and in adult children’s social identities must be questioned. Even though there are some “good” parents, the fact that “bad” ones have so much power should provoke us to radically rethink our societal reliance on this kinship institution.”

Reczek and Bosley-Smith invite us to consider what an “ethic of care” might look like, in which all people, no matter their age or their existing family, could experience “a sense of belong and identity, alongside emotional, practical, and financial help.” That sense can come from community, but it should also come from the safety nets we put in place as a society. Put differently, your safety and nourishment as a child, as a young adult, as a parent, as someone with specific medical or emotional needs, as an aging person — none of it should be wholly contingent on the luck (truly!) of being born into a family that is financially or emotionally able to provide them for you.

All of these stories, as one of the respondents put it, are “beautifully complex.” If you’re estranged, I hope they make you feel less alone in some way. If you’re not, I hope they offer some insight into how to talk with and support those who are estranged — but more importantly, that they push you to think about what’s lost when we rely so fully on family as our primary source of support.

Controlavirus Lockdowns, Broke-Assed Mules, Breaking Bad And OD Explosions...,

NYTimes  |  While traffickers have also continued to try to push drugs through ports of entry, the American authorities have detected at least one particularly dramatic shift in tactics in the profile of smugglers caught at those border crossings.

Before the pandemic, the cartels would frequently hire foreign-born smugglers who would cross the border from Mexico into the United States under the pretense of tourism or a shopping trip.

But because the pandemic-related border restrictions have blocked entry to many foreign visitors, the trafficking groups have been recruiting a greater number of American citizens and Green Card holders, who are not bound by the restrictions, to smuggle drugs into the United States, American officials said. These smugglers are most often discovered with the narcotics hidden inside their bodies, officials said.

Guadalupe Ramírez Jr., director of field operations for Customs and Border Protection in Arizona, recalled that when he was director of the ports of entry in Nogales from 2009 to 2016, “internal carriers,” as such smugglers are known by border officials, were rare.

“Now it seems like almost on a daily basis we’re getting internal carriers,” and most are American citizens or permanent residents, Mr. Ramírez said.

The challenges of getting drugs into the United States also appears to have spurred the development of clandestine laboratories in the United States for the production of synthetic drugs, said Celina Realuyo, professor at the William J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies at the National Defense University in Washington.

And law enforcement agencies around the world have also detected an acceleration in the use of cryptocurrency and the so-called dark web for drug transactions and money laundering during the pandemic, she said.

“They’re adjusting,” Ms. Realuyo said of the drug trafficking groups. “They already had kind of a wherewithal, and what they’re doing is they’re just adapting quicker to their context.”

 

How Come A Small Minority CULTURALLY Promotes And Profits Off Hoodrats But Not Walmartians?

advancingtime  |   We need a new demographic category: WALMARTIANS.

They are almost always overweight, usually functionally illiterate, often incapable of all but the most basic personal hygiene, not merely unemployed but also unemployable, addicted to corn syrup junk food and TV they were force-fed as children, convinced that nothing is their fault because they've never heard otherwise and physically aggressive whenever there is no prospect of immediate punishment. 

Such types were rare when I was a lad but now they are 10 to 20 percent of the population and increasing.

It's not their fault but it's time to cull the herd.

It should be noted that I started witting this article in December of 2019 but dropped it onto the back burner because of its questionable nature. At times, it seems deviant and dysfunctional behavior overlap. On occasion I have found myself, surprised, shocked, amazed, and even appalled at just how much the shape of the human body can be distorted by obesity or a lack of exercise. Widening the scope to people "deviating from the norm," at times it appears these often atypical humans are in a race to present us with the most bizarre. Some of these folks are not just offbeat or unusual but seem to be making an over the top effort to give new meaning to the term freaky.

An article by Ralph Nader that appeared on Common Dreams explored the idea that if you want to see where a country’s priorities lie you should look at the direction its culture is moving. The article which is linked above exhibits a very strong bit of a "leftist tinge," however, some of the points he makes seem valid. Nader writes, Plutocrats like to control the range of permissible public dialogue. Plutocrats also like to shape what society values. If you want to see where a country’s priorities lie, look at how it allocates its money. He contends that while teachers and nurses earn comparatively little for performing critical jobs, corporate bosses including those who pollute our planet and bankrupt defenseless families, make millions.

It may be simplistic to label this or that, good or bad but it could be argued our culture and society is geared much like the caste system. Today we are seeing inequality soar and it can be argued this tends to reduce the ability of individuals to move up the social ladder. The question is just how much of this is by design and due to the culturally elite putting their foot on the head of those below them.

Circling back to the subjects of weirdos, diversity, and individuality could it be this is all being encouraged to weaken and divide the power of the masses? For years Japan has been pointed to as a society that functions with little friction. Much of the credit is attributed to their culture and its homogeneous nature. Japan has a strong sense of group and national identity and little or no ethnic or racial diversity. Another unique aspect of Japanese society has a highly structured approach to managing and resolving these differences. 

Corporations Fund Police Foundations

littlesis |  As calls to defund the police gain traction, bloated police budgets are coming under scrutiny for siphoning public resources away from black and brown communities. While police budgets are typically public documents that must be approved by elected officials, there are other institutions in place with the sole purpose of funneling even more resources toward law enforcement.

Police foundations across the country are partnering with corporations to raise money to supplement police budgets by funding programs and purchasing tech and weaponry for law enforcement with little public oversight. Annual fundraising events and parties like the St. Paul Police Foundation’s “Blue Nite Gala” and the Chicago Police Foundation’s “True Blue” event are huge moneymakers. The NYC Police Foundation reported that it raised $5.5 million from its annual benefit in 2019.

If police departments already have massive budgets – averaging 20% to 45% of a municipal budget – why do these organizations exist? Police foundations offer a few unique benefits to law enforcement.

First, these foundations can purchase equipment and weapons with little public input or oversight.

The Houston Police Foundation has an entire page on its website showcasing the equipment it purchased for the police department, including SWAT equipment, LRAD sound equipment, and dogs for the K-9 unit. The Philadelphia Police Foundation purchased long guns, drones, and ballistic helmets. The Atlanta Police Foundation helped fund a major surveillance network of over 12,000 cameras.

In Los Angeles, the police used foundation funding to purchase controversial surveillance software from Palantir. If the LAPD purchased this technology through its public budget, it would have been required to hold public meetings and gain approval from the city council. By having the foundation purchase it for them, the LAPD was able to bypass that oversight.

Second, these foundations provide a public-private structure wherein the corporate elite can overtly support police departments through direct donations, sponsorships, special programs, and by serving as directors on foundations’ boards. The ongoing protests have emphasized that police exist to enforce a racist social order that protects corporations, capital, and buildings rather than black and brown lives. Police foundations are a key space for orchestrating, normalizing, and celebrating the collaboration between corporate power and the police.

The corporate interests backing police foundations across the country cover a wide range of industries. We profile some of these industries and corporate actors below.

What You Call Meritocracy Probably Really Isn't...,

ipsnews |  Since the 1960s, many institutions, the world over, have embraced the notion of meritocracy. With post-Cold War neoliberal ideologies enabling growing wealth concentration, the rich, the privileged and their apologists invoke variants of ‘meritocracy’ to legitimize economic inequality. 

Instead, corporations and other social institutions, which used to be run by hereditary elites, increasingly recruit and promote on the bases of qualifications, ability, competence and performance. Meritocracy is thus supposed to democratize and level society. 

Ironically, British sociologist Michael Young pejoratively coined the term meritocracy in his 1958 dystopian satire, The Rise of the Meritocracy. With his intended criticism rejected as no longer relevant, the term is now used in the English language without the negative connotations Young intended. 

It has been uncritically embraced by supporters of a social philosophy of meritocracy in which influence is supposedly distributed according to the intellectual ability and achievement of individuals. 

Many appreciate meritocracy’s two core virtues. First, the meritocratic elite is presumed to be more capable and effective as their status, income and wealth are due to their ability, rather than their family connections. 

Second, ‘opening up’ the elite supposedly on the bases of individual capacities and capabilities is believed to be consistent with and complementary to ‘fair competition’. They may claim the moral high ground by invoking ‘equality of opportunity’, but are usually careful to stress that ‘equality of outcome’ is to be eschewed at all cost. 

As Yale Law School Professor Daniel Markovits argues in The Meritocracy Trap, unlike the hereditary elites preceding them, meritocratic elites must often work long and hard, e.g., in medicine, finance or consulting, to enhance their own privileges, and to pass them on to their children, siblings and other close relatives, friends and allies.

Gaming meritocracy
Meritocracy is supposed to function best when an insecure ‘middle class’ constantly strives to secure, preserve and augment their income, status and other privileges by maximizing returns to their exclusive education. But access to elite education – that enables a few of modest circumstances to climb the social ladder – waxes and wanes. 

Most middle class families cannot afford the privileged education that wealth can buy, while most ordinary, government financed and run schools have fallen further behind exclusive elite schools, including some funded with public money. In recent decades, the resources gap between better and poorer public schools has also been growing. 

Elite universities and private schools still provide training and socialization, mainly to children of the wealthy, privileged and connected. Huge endowments, obscure admissions policies and tax exemption allow elite US private universities to spend much more than publicly funded institutions.

Meanwhile, technological and social changes have transformed the labour force and economies greatly increasing economic returns to the cognitive, ascriptive and other attributes as well as credentials of ‘the best’ institutions, especially universities and professional guilds, which effectively remain exclusive and elitist.

As ‘meritocrats’ captured growing shares of the education pies, the purported value of ‘schooling’ increased, legitimized by the bogus notion of ‘human capital’. While meritocracy transformed elites over time, it has also increasingly inhibited, not promoted social mobility.

How Racial Disparity Does Not Help Make Sense of Patterns of Police Violence

nonsite |  But, when we step away from focus on racial disproportions, the glaring fact is that whites are roughly half or nearly half of all those killed annually by police. And the demand that we focus on the racial disparity is simultaneously a demand that we disattend from other possibly causal disparities. Zaid Jilani found, for example, that ninety-five percent of police killings occurred in neighborhoods with median family income of less than $100,00 and that the median family income in neighborhoods where police killed was $52,907.

….

What the pattern in those states with high rates of police killings suggests is what might have been the focal point of critical discussion of police violence all along, that it is the product of an approach to policing that emerges from an imperative to contain and suppress the pockets of economically marginal and sub-employed working class populations produced by revanchist capitalism.

There is no need here to go into the evolution of this dangerous regime of policing—from bogus “broken windows” and “zero tolerance” theories of the sort that academics always seem to have at the ready to rationalize intensified application of bourgeois class power, to anti-terrorism hysteria and finally assertion of a common sense understanding that any cop has unassailable authority to override constitutional protections and to turn an expired inspection sticker or a refusal to respond to an arbitrary order or warrantless search into a capital offense. And the shrill insistence that we begin and end with the claim that blacks are victimized worst of all and give ritual obeisance to the liturgy of empty slogans is—for all the militant posturing by McKesson, Garza, Tometi, Cullors et al.—in substance a demand that we not pay attention to the deeper roots of the pattern of police violence in enforcement of the neoliberal regime of sharply regressive upward redistribution and its social entailments. 

I’m not much given to autobiographical writing, least of all as a mechanism for establishing interpretive authority, even though I recognize that that pre-Enlightenment ploy has become coin of the realm for the “public intellectual” and blogosphere bloviator stratum.
——-
I’m still not going to natter on about my racial bona fides; I’ll leave that domain to the likes of Mychal Denzel Smith and Ta-Nehisi Coates, for whom every sideways glance from a random white person while waiting on line for a latté becomes an occasion for navel-gazing lament and another paycheck. (A historian friend has indicated his resolve, when white colleagues enthuse to him about Coates’s wisdom and truth-telling, to ask which white college dropouts they consult to get their deep truths about white people.) I just wanted to anticipate the reaction and make clear that I recognize it for the cheesy move that it is.

Keep Your Stinking Experts, Their Strategies, And Your Vaccines....,

HBR |  For those who believe that a vaccine for Covid-19 will end or largely contain this pandemic or who hope that new drugs will be discovered to combat its effects, there is plenty cause for concern. Instead of working together to craft and implement a global strategy, a growing number of countries are taking a “my nation first” approach to developing and distributing potential vaccines or other pharmaceutical treatments.

This “vaccine nationalism” is not only morally reprehensible, it is the wrong way to reduce transmission globally. And global transmission matters: If countries with a large number of cases lag in obtaining the vaccine and other medicines, the disease will continue to disrupt global supply chains and, as a result, economies around the world.

In the midst of this global pandemic, we must leverage our global governance bodies to allocate, distribute, and verify the delivery of the Covid 19 vaccine. We need the science — not politics — to inform the global strategy.

 Experts in epidemiology, virology, and the social sciences — not politicians — should take the lead in devising and implementing science-based strategies to reduce the risks that Covid-19 poses to the most vulnerable across the globe and to reduce transmission of this novel virus for all of us. To avoid ineffective nationalistic responses, we need a centralized, trusted governance system to ensure the appropriate flow of capital, information, and supplies.

Comments Stay Free Off-Guardian Discusses EU Vaccination Passports

off-guardian |  A  report published by the European Commission in late 2019 reveals that the EU has been looking to increase the scope and power of vaccination programmes since well before the current “pandemic”.

The endpoint of the Roadmap is, among many other things, to introduce a “common vaccination card/passport” for all EU citizens. 

This proposal will be appearing before the commission in 2022, with a “feasibility study” set to run from 2019 through 2021 (meaning, as of now, it’s about halfway through).

To underline the point: The “vaccination roadmap” is not an improvised response to the Covid19 pandemic, but rather an ongoing plan with roots going back to 2018, when the EU released a survey of the public’s attitude toward vaccines titled “2018 State of Vaccine Confidence”

 

On the back of this research, the EU then commissioned a technical report titled “Designing and implementing an immunisation information system”, on – among other things – the plausibility of an EU-wide vaccination monitoring system.

In the 3rd quarter of 2019 these reports were all combined into the latest version of the the “Vaccination Roadmap”, a long-term policy plan to spread vaccine “awareness and understanding” whilst counteracting “vaccine myths” and combatting “vaccine hesitancy”.

You can read the entire report here, but below are some of the more concerning highlights [emphasis throughout is ours]:

Comments Not Free Guardian Frets Over EU Anti-Vaxxer Coalitions

Guardian |  In front of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate a politically incongruous crowd of protesters gathered on Saturday. They wore flowers in their hair, hazmat suits emblazoned with the letter Q, badges displaying the old German imperial flag or T-shirts reading “Gates, My Ass” – a reference to the US software billionaire Bill Gates.

Around the globe, millions are counting the days until a Covid-19 vaccine is discovered. These people, however, were protesting for the right not to be inoculated – and they weren’t the only ones.

For the ninth week running, thousands gathered in European cities to vent their anger at social distancing restrictions they believe to be a draconian ploy to suspend basic civil rights and pave the way for “enforced vaccinations” that will do more harm than the Covid-19 virus itself.

Walking towards the focal point of the protests down the Straße des 17. Juni boulevard, one woman said she believed the Covid-19 pandemic to be a hoax thought up by the pharmaceutical industry.

“I’d never let myself be vaccinated,” said the woman, who would give her name only as Riot Granny. “I didn’t get a jab for the flu either, and I am still alive.”

The alliance of anti-vaxxers, neo-Nazi rabble-rousers and esoteric hippies, which has in recent weeks been filling town squares in cities such as Berlin, Vienna and Zurich is starting to trouble governments as they map out scenarios for re-booting their economies and tackling the coronavirus long term.

Even before an effective vaccine against Covid-19 has been developed, national leaders face a dilemma: should they aim to immunise as large a part of the population as possible as quickly as possible, or does compulsory vaccination risk boosting a street movement already prone to conspiracy theories about “big pharma” and its government’s authoritarian tendencies?

This Phase Of The Plan Failed Because Not All Palestinians Will Cooperate

benjaminstudebaker |  All around us, the quarantine is beginning to die. In the United States, the Southern states are slowly abandoning it and many Midwestern states are planning to follow. But it’s not just Republicans. The European states are bailing too. If you ask Democrats why states are beginning to defect, they will tell you it comes down to greed and stupidity. They’ll tell you the rich Republicans are greedy and the poor Republicans are stupid. But this policy was never a good fit for either the American or European political systems. To work, it needed a lot of economic support from regional authorities, and it never got that support.

For most of the last century, the social pact in America has been pretty simple. If you’re willing to work, you get healthcare and housing. If you’re not willing to work, you lose both. If there are no jobs available, the government promises to create them, and to take care of your healthcare and housing in the interim. Full employment protects against precarity. The quarantine violates this pact by deliberately annihilating millions of jobs. It intentionally sets about destroying full employment.

If we’re to end full employment, there needs to be an alternative way to provide healthcare and housing. These things will have to be guaranteed to us regardless of employment status. That’s really expensive. Individual US states don’t have the tax revenue to pay for that. The European Union’s fiscal rules would ordinarily prohibit that kind of spending. To get it, we’d need action from the federal government and from the EU.

But nobody consulted political economists. Public health officials conceived of the quarantine policy in a deeply naive way. For them, the only goal was to save lives. They pursued that goal at the expense of the social pact, with no plan to replace it. For weeks, they dismissed any discussion of the economy as indicative of greed or stupidity, ignoring the immense cost of their policy and the political consequences of the cost. Any attempt to introduce complexity into the public discussion was equated with denying the threat of the virus. Because of this, the quarantine is going to end, and when it ends the virus will take off again. Through their absolutism, the advocates of the quarantine have guaranteed the very result they sought to avoid.

You Are ALL Palestinians Now...,

gilad.online |  One may wonder what drives this new alliance that divides nearly every Western society? The left’s betrayal is hardly a surprise, yet, the crucial question is  why, and out of the blue, did those who had been so successful in locating their filthy hands in our pockets go along with  the current destruction of the economy? Surely, suicidal they aren’t.

It occurs to me that what we may be seeing is a controlled demolition all over again. This time it isn’t a building in NYC. It isn’t the destruction of a single industry or even a single class as we have seen before. This time,  our understanding of Being as a productive and meaningful adventure is embattled. As things stand, our entire sense of livelihood  is at risk.

It doesn’t take a financial expert to realise that in the last few years the world economy in general and western economies in particular have become a fat bubble ready to burst. When economic bubbles burst the outcome is unexpected even though often the culprit or  trigger for the crash can be identified. What is unique in the current controlled demolition is the willingness  of our compromised political class, the media and in particular  Left/Progressive networks to participate in the destruction.

The alliance is wide and inclusive. The WHO, greatly funded by Bill Gates, sets the measures by which we are locked down, the Left and the Progressives fuel the apocalyptic phantasies to keep us  hiding in our global attics, Dershowitz tries to rewrite the constitution , big Pharma’s agenda shapes our future and we also hear that Moderna and its leading Israeli doctor  is ready to “fix” our genes.  Meanwhile we  learn that  our governments are gearing up to stick a needle in our arms. Throughout this time, the Dow Jones has continued to rise. Maybe in this final stage of capitalism, we the people aren’t needed even as consumers. We can be left to rot at home, our governments seemingly willing to fund this new form of detention. 

No Country For Old Palestinians

unz |  The previous shift of such magnitude occurred in late 18^th century; it is called the Industrial Revolution. Then the factory owners had begun to replace their skilled labour with inexpensive machines, and the workers were losing their jobs, livelihoods and self-esteem. In 1811, the workers formed the Luddite movement. The Luddites would break into factories and smash textile machines. It lasted until 1816, when the movement ran out of steam. The workers were defeated, (a lot of them escaped to America), and the British bourgeoisie prospered. It took many years until the workers regained some of their previous positions in society, mainly due to the threat of Communist revolution.

Now we are coming to the new Digital Revolution, with workers being replaced by smart computers and an AI future. Millions of office workers already function as a human interface to the computer. You may have noticed this as you talk with them: they are trained to avoid making decisions; they say sentences that were scripted for them, and the decisions are made by the computer that was programmed to do their master’s will. As lockdown had forced millions to communicate with computers directly, a lot of workers became superfluous.

The process of shedding millions of workers in the existing economic system is likely to be painful for the unemployed. The virus-blamed lockdown and digital control allows the owners of the digital companies to carry out the revolution with minimal risks for them. What would need an army and police involvement against riotous unemployed workers, can be achieved with greater ease under threat of the pandemic. The economy will be modernized and made more efficient. Alas, for us this script presages the fate of highly qualified weavers in 18^th century England, even if we shall avoid the total AI takeover Terminator-style.

Probably the scariest piece of news is not about the numbers of “infected”. It is a meaningless word, for there are persistent carriers who do not succumb to disease; the vast majority of the “infected” are asymptomatic, meaning they aren’t sick and aren’t infectious; the number of “infected” is in direct proportion to the number of tests; the tests are dubious at best, and none is verified by the methods accepted in pre-corona medicine, while the methodology approved and enforced by the WHO can’t be described as scientific. It is not about deaths, for we do not experience more deaths than in 2018. Moreover, in many countries, notably in France and in Norway there are 30% fewer deaths in certain weeks of April and May in this year than in the last year.

The scariest piece of news is that Zoom is worth more than the seven biggest airlines. These airlines with their accumulated labour (millions of working hours, hundreds of thousands of employees, highly trained pilots, masses of sophisticated equipment) just can’t be worth as much as a job done in a month by a few programmers and which can be done anew in a month. Money and stock market prices are useful tools if they measure human efforts; they do not that anymore. What began with bankers earning more money in a day than a hundred qualified workers and engineers in their lifetime, ended with the hi-tech lords earning more than a million workers in their lifetime. It means that Money had banked on the Digital Economy, a Union made in Hell, while the real economy came up for grabs. Money decided that we won’t fly anymore. They, the new masters, will fly in their private jets; the era of mass access is over. You will get satisfied with Zoom and PornHub, instead of the real thing.

Added to this the negative oil future price and the emission centres issuing more and more money, trying to smother the fire with gasoline, and you will get a picture of the coming world. There is probably no place for you and me in this world.

America Has NO Mechanism For Coping With Its Unemployment Crisis

NYTimes | Covid-19 has killed more Americans than died in the Vietnam War and led to unemployment numbers that are likely worse than those during the Great Depression. Implicit in Joe Biden’s campaign was a promise of a return to normalcy. That may have always been illusory, but now it’s been revealed as an impossibility.

As we approach this year’s election, we’re looking at an abyss. The question is what will fill it. Societal disaster can have horrific political consequences: Around the world, despots are using the pandemic as an excuse to grab ever more power. But the need to rebuild the country comes with opportunities.

At this point, even many Republicans acknowledge that the era of small government is over. (“Big-Government Conservatives Mount Takeover of G.O.P.,” said a recent Politico headline.) In such an environment, ambitious progressive ideas that once seemed implausible, at least in the short term, start to become more imaginable.

“I do think there’s an F.D.R. moment,” said Senator Edward Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts and co-author of the Green New Deal resolution, which calls for a huge new public works program to build environmentally sustainable infrastructure. “Like 1933 — which would be 2021 — we can see that it is now time to discuss universal child care, universal sick leave and a guaranteed income for everyone in our society.”

Unsurprisingly, mass unemployment — a particular catastrophe in a system in which most people’s health insurance is tied to their jobs — seems to have made Americans more supportive of New Deal-like policies. Figures from the left-leaning polling firm Data for Progress show that support for a Green New Deal has risen from 48 percent last May to 59 percent this spring. Backing for “Medicare for all” went from 47 percent in November to 53 percent in March, when coronavirus layoffs were just starting.

“I’ve had people in my district, Silicon Valley, tech professionals who’ve lost their jobs,” Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, told me. “People who were doing well at small businesses who have either lost their jobs or faced extraordinary hardship, and suddenly they are now having to confront the difficulties of being uninsured. They’re having to confront the challenges of the private health system.” Khanna sees a much broader awareness “of how uncertain economic life can be,” he said, which creates a bigger coalition for progressive ideas to improve the social safety net.

NSCAI: Military Backed Computational Cultural Darwinism

thelastamericanvagabond |  Last year, a U.S. government body dedicated to examining how artificial intelligence can “address the national security and defense needs of the United States” discussed in detail the “structural” changes that the American economy and society must undergo in order to ensure a technological advantage over China, according to a recent document acquired through a FOIA request. This document suggests that the U.S. follow China’s lead and even surpass them in many aspects related to AI-driven technologies, particularly their use of mass surveillance. This perspective clearly clashes with the public rhetoric of prominent U.S. government officials and politicians on China, who have labeled the Chinese government’s technology investments and export of its surveillance systems and other technologies as a major “threat” to Americans’ “way of life.”

In addition, many of the steps for the implementation of such a program in the U.S., as laid out in this newly available document, are currently being promoted and implemented as part of the government’s response to the current coronavirus (Covid-19) crisis. This likely due to the fact that many members of this same body have considerable overlap with the taskforces and advisors currently guiding the government’s plans to “re-open the economy” and efforts to use technology to respond to the current crisis.

The FOIA document, obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), was produced by a little-known U.S. government organization called the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI). It was created by the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and its official purpose is “to consider the methods and means necessary to advance the development of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and associated technologies to comprehensively address the national security and defense needs of the United States.” 

The NSCAI is a key part of the government’s response to what is often referred to as the coming “fourth industrial revolution,” which has been described as “a revolution characterized by discontinuous technological development in areas like artificial intelligence (AI), big data, fifth-generation telecommunications networking (5G), nanotechnology and biotechnology, robotics, the Internet of Things (IoT), and quantum computing.”

However, their main focus is ensuring that “the United States … maintain a technological advantage in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other associated technologies related to national security and defense.” The vice-chair of NSCAI, Robert Work – former Deputy Secretary of Defense and senior fellow at the hawkish Center for a New American Security (CNAS), described the commission’s purpose as determining “how the U.S. national security apparatus should approach artificial intelligence, including a focus on how the government can work with industry to compete with China’s ‘civil-military fusion’ concept.” 

The recently released NSCAI document is a May 2019 presentation entitled “Chinese Tech Landscape Overview.” Throughout the presentation, the NSCAI promotes the overhaul of the U.S. economy and way of life as necessary for allowing the U.S. to ensure it holds a considerable technological advantage over China, as losing this advantage is currently deemed a major “national security” issue by the U.S. national security apparatus. This concern about maintaining a technological advantage can be seen in several other U.S. military documents and think tank reports, several of which have warned that the U.S.’ technological advantage is quickly eroding.

America Is The Most Extravagant Cornucopia Of Two-Piece-and-a-Biscuit Diversity EVER!!!

tomdispatch |  Today, more than 38 million people officially live below the federal poverty line and, in truth, that figure should have shocked the nation into action before the coronavirus even arrived here. No such luck and here’s the real story anyway: the official measure of poverty, developed in 1964, doesn’t even take into account household expenses like health care, child care, housing, and transportation, not to speak of other costs that have burgeoned in recent decades. The world has undergone profound economic transformations over the last 66 years and yet this out-of-date measure, based on three times a family’s food budget, continues to shape policymaking at every level of government as well as the contours of the American political and moral imagination.

Two years ago, the Poor People’s Campaign (which I co-chair alongside Reverend William Barber II) and the Institute for Policy Studies released an audit of America. Its centerpiece was a far more realistic assessment of poverty and economic precariousness in this country. Using the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure as a baseline, which, among other things, measures family income after taxes and out-of-pocket expenses for food, clothing, housing, and utilities, there are at least 140 million people who are poor -- or just a $400 emergency from that state. (Of that, there are now untold examples in this pandemic moment.)

As poverty has grown and spread, one of the great political weapons of politicians and the ruling elite over the past decades (only emphasized in the age of Trump) has been to minimize, dismiss, and racialize it. In the 1970s, President Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” coded it into Republican national politics; in the 1980s, in the years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the fabricated image of “the welfare queen” gained symbolic prominence. In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton’s welfare “reforms” enshrined such thinking in the arguments of both parties. Today, given the outright racism and xenophobia that has become the hallmark of Donald Trump’s presidency, "poor" has become a curse word.

It is, of course, true that, among the 140 million poor people in the U.S., a disproportionate number are indeed people of color. The inheritance of slavery, Jim Crow, never-ending discrimination, and the mass incarceration of black men in particular, as well as a generational disinvestment in such populations, could have resulted in nothing less. And yet the reality of poverty stretches deep into every community in this country. According to that audit of America, the poor or low-income today consist of 24 million blacks, 38 million Latinos, eight million Asian-Americans, two million Native peoples, and 66 million whites.

Those staggering numbers, already a deadweight for the nation, are likely to prove a grotestque underestimate in the coronaviral world we now inhabit and yet none of this should be a surprise. Although we couldn’t have predicted the exact circumstances of this pandemic, social theorists remind us that conditions were ripe for just this kind of economic dislocation.

Thank You Rich People For All Your Many Gifts

NYTimes | About 50 guests gathered on March 5 at a home in the stately suburb of Westport, Conn., to toast the hostess on her 40th birthday and greet old friends, including one visiting from South Africa. They shared reminiscences, a lavish buffet and, unknown to anyone, the coronavirus.

Then they scattered.

The Westport soirée — Party Zero in southwestern Connecticut and beyond — is a story of how, in the Gilded Age of money, social connectedness and air travel, a pandemic has spread at lightning speed. The partygoers — more than half of whom are now infected — left that evening for Johannesburg, New York City and other parts of Connecticut and the United States, all seeding infections on the way.

Westport, a town of 28,000 on the Long Island Sound, did not have a single known case of the coronavirus on the day of the party. It had 85 on Monday, up more than 40-fold in 11 days.

Worry, rumors and recriminations engulfed the town. Political leaders fielded hundreds of emails and phone calls from residents terrified that their children or vulnerable family members had been exposed. Who threw the party, and who attended? They wanted to know. Rumors flew that some residents were telling health officials they had attended the party so they could obtain a scarce test.

Officials refused to disclose the names of the hosts or any guests, citing federal and state privacy rules. Mr. Marpe posted a videotaped statement to the town website on March 20. “The fact of the matter is that this could have been any one of us, and rumor-mongering and vilification of individuals is not who we are as a civil community,” he said.

As the disease spread, many residents kept mum, worried about being ostracized by their neighbors and that their children would be kicked off coveted sports teams or miss school events.

One local woman compared going public with a Covid-19 diagnosis to “having an S.T.D.”

“I don’t think that’s a crazy comparison,” said Will Haskell, the state senator who represents Westport. He has been fielding frantic phone calls from constituents.

Most residents were exercising recommended vigilance, Mr. Haskell said, but one call that stuck out to him was from a woman awaiting test results whose entire family had been exposed to the virus. “She wanted to know whether or not to tell her friends and social network,” he said, because she was worried about “social stigma.”

Rich Mexicans FUBAR'd Poor Mexicans - All Around The World The Same Song...,

LATimes |  Each winter, some of Mexico’s wealthiest residents flock to the snowy slopes of Colorado to ski, shop and socialize.

This year, at least 14 — and probably many more — came home infected with the coronavirus.

In a country that has not yet been hard hit by the pandemic, the travelers have become a focal point of efforts to prevent the virus from spreading widely.

Several of Mexico’s most prominent business leaders — including a banking executive, the chairman of Mexico’s stock exchange and the chief executive of the company that makes Jose Cuervo tequila — tested positive for the virus after traveling to Vail, a ski resort west of Denver.

Public health authorities are now scrambling to find others who recently returned from the resort, including an estimated 400 people who flew on two charter planes from Colorado to the state of Jalisco. 

“We need these people to understand that they have a very high probability of having acquired the virus and are a potential risk,” Jalisco Gov. Enrique Alfaro said in a video on Facebook in which he implored those who made the trip to contact health authorities. 

“We don’t want this to be the start of a major coronavirus spread,” added Fernando Petersen, Jalisco’s top health official. 

The state’s health department said that it has already contacted 73 passengers on those flights and that roughly 40% of them report coronavirus-like symptoms but have not yet been tested.

Of Jalisco’s 27 confirmed coronavirus patients, 11 had been in Vail in recent weeks, the department said. 

The frantic effort to find the ski trip participants has highlighted an uncomfortable fact: It is people wealthy enough to travel outside the country who have brought the coronavirus back to mostly poor Mexico. Yet if the disease spreads, it is those with the least who will probably suffer the most. 

As of Friday, Mexico had confirmed just one coronavirus death, that of a 41-year-old man who had recently traveled to the United States and — to the dismay of health authorities — later attended a rock concert at a stadium in Mexico City.

St. Louis Fed Calls For $2.5 Trillion Fiat Stimulus To Offset Controlavirus Lockdown

bloomberg |  Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard predicted the U.S. unemployment rate may hit 30% in the second quarter because of shutdowns to combat the coronavirus, with an unprecedented 50% drop in gross domestic product.

Bullard called for a powerful fiscal response to replace the $2.5 trillion in lost income that quarter to ensure a strong eventual U.S. recovery, adding the Fed would be poised to do more to ensure markets function during a period of high volatility.

“Everything is on the table” for the Fed as far as additional lending programs, Bullard said in a telephone interview Sunday from St. Louis. “There is more that we can do if necessary” with existing emergency authority. “There is probably much more in the months ahead depending on where Congress wants to go.”

Bullard’s grave assessment of the world’s largest economy underscores the critical need for Congress and the White House to quickly find agreement on a massive aid program. The Fed last week restarted financial crisis-era programs to help the commercial paper and money markets, after cutting interest rates to near zero and pledging to boost its holdings of Treasuries by at least $500 billion and of mortgage securities by at least $200 billion.

 “This is a planned, organized partial shutdown of the U.S. economy in the second quarter,” Bullard said. “The overall goal is to keep everyone, households and businesses, whole” with government support. “It is a huge shock and we are trying to cope with it and keep it under control.”

The U.S. central bank bought $272 billion of government debt last week, of the more than $500 billion authorized, which Bullard emphasized should not be seen as a limit.