swprs | Largely unbeknownst to the general public, executives and top
journalists of almost all major US news outlets have long been members
of the influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).
Established in 1921 as a private, bipartisan organization to “awaken America to its worldwide responsibilities”,
the CFR and its close to 5000 elite members have for decades shaped
U.S. foreign policy and public discourse about it. As a well-known
Council member once explained, the goal has indeed been to establish a global Empire, albeit a “benevolent” one.
Based on official membership rosters, the following illustration for
the first time depicts the extensive media network of the CFR and its
two main international affiliate organizations: the Bilderberg Group (covering mainly the U.S. and Europe) and the Trilateral Commission (covering North America, Europe and East Asia), both established by Council leaders to foster elite cooperation at the international level.
In a column entitled “Ruling Class Journalists”, former Washington Post
senior editor and ombudsman Richard Harwood once described the Council
and its members approvingly as “the nearest thing we have to a ruling
establishment in the United States”.
sciencefriday |Giant jellyfish and mussels. Pallid
shrimp, fish, and sea cucumbers. Never-before-seen octopus species. All
these and more dwell in the deep sea, 200 meters (over 650 feet) and
deeper beneath the ocean surface. It’s the largest habitat on Earth, but
it’s also one of the least understood.
As mining companies eye the mineral
resources of the deep sea—from oil and gas, to metal deposits—marine
biologists like London’s Natural History Museum’s Diva Amon
are working to discover and describe as much of the deep sea as they
can. Amon has been on dozens of expeditions to sea, where she’s helped
characterize ecosystems and discover new species all over the world. And
she says we still don’t know enough about deep sea ecology to know how
to protect these species, the ones we’ve found and the ones we haven’t
yet, from mining.
But accessing the deep ocean is
expensive; it can cost anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000 a day to run a
research ship. So roboticists and artificial intelligence designers are
developing underwater drones to map and sniff out the secrets of the
deep with the help of sophisticated chemical sensors. These robotic
explorers could someday hunt down sunken ships or planes, hydrothermal
vents, and biological spectacles such as rare species or a whale fall,
at a cost significantly cheaper than today. Nine teams of roboticists
designing these underwater crafts are now in a race to win the Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE.
In this segment, Amon and XPRIZE’s
Jyotika Virmani join Ira to talk about the future of deep ocean
exploration—and what we might find there. And Martin Brooke, team leader
of Blue Devil Ocean Engineering at Duke University, will discuss his
team’s plan for mapping the deep ocean: aerial drones that drop
sonar-sounding pods into the seas, then reel them up and move them to
the next target.
tomdispatch | For almost 20 years, U.S. drone warfare was largely
one-sided. Unlike Afghans and Yemenis, Iraqis and Somalis, Americans
never had to worry about lethal robots hovering overhead and raining
down missiles. Until, that is, one appeared in the skies above Florida.
But that’s a story for later. For now, let’s focus on a 2017 executive order issued by President Trump, part of his second attempt
at a travel ban directed primarily at citizens of Muslim-majority
nations. It begins: “It is the policy of the United States to protect
its citizens from terrorist attacks.”
That sentence would be repeated in a January report from
the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Department of Homeland Security
(DHS), “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the
United States.” Meant to strengthen the president’s case for the travel
ban, it was panned for its methodological flaws, pilloried for its inaccuracies,
and would even spur a lawsuit by the civil rights organization, Muslim
Advocates, and the watchdog group, Democracy Forward Foundation. In
their complaint,
those groups contend that the report was “biased, misleading, and
incomplete” and “manipulates information to support its anti-immigrant
and anti-Muslim conclusions.”
To bolster the president’s arguments for restricting the entry of
foreigners into the United States, the DOJ/DHS analysis contained a
collection of case summaries. Examples included: the Sudanese national
who, in 2016, “pleaded guilty to attempting to provide material support
to ISIS”; the Uzbek who “posted a threat on an Uzbek-language website to
kill President Obama in an act of martyrdom on behalf of ISIS”; the
Syrian who, in a plea agreement, “admitted that he knew a member of ISIS
and that while in Syria he participated in a battle against the Syrian
regime, including shooting at others, in coordination with Al Nusrah,”
an al-Qaeda offshoot.
Such cases cited in the report, hardly spectacular terror incidents,
were evidently calculated to sow fears by offering a list of convicted
suspects with Muslim-sounding names. But the authors of the report
simply looked in the wrong places. They could have found startling
summaries of truly audacious attacks against the homeland in a
collection of U.S. military documents from 2016 obtained by TomDispatch via
the Freedom of Information Act. Those files detail a plethora of
shocking acts of terrorism across the United States including mass
poisonings, the use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), and that
“People’s Armed Liberation (PAL) attack on U.S. Central Command
(USCENTCOM) headquarters in Tampa, Florida, [by] a drone-launched
missile.”
That’s right! A drone-launched missile attack! On CENTCOM’s Florida headquarters! By a terrorist group known as PAL!
Wondering how you missed the resulting 24/7 media bonanza, the screaming front page headlines in the New York Times, the hysterics on Fox & Friends, the president’s hurricane of tweets?
Well, there’s a simple explanation. That attack doesn’t actually
happen until May 2020. Or so says the summary of the 33rd annual Joint
Land, Air, and Sea Strategic Special Program (JLASS-SP), an elaborate
war game carried out in 2016 by students and faculty from the U.S.
military’s war colleges, the training grounds for its future generals
and admirals.
consortiumnews |With
the news that a Cambridge academic-cum-spy named Stefan Halper
infiltrated the Trump campaign, the role of the intelligence agencies in
shaping the great Russiagate saga is at last coming into focus.
It’s
looking more and more massive. The intelligence agencies initiated
reports that Donald Trump was colluding with Russia, they nurtured them
and helped them grow, and then they spread the word to the press and key
government officials. Reportedly, they even tried to use these reports
to force Trump to step down prior to his inauguration. Although the
corporate press accuses Trump of conspiring with Russia to stop Hillary
Clinton, the reverse now seems to be the case: the Obama administration
intelligence agencies worked with Clinton to block “Siberian candidate” Trump.
The template was provided by ex-MI6 Director Richard Dearlove, Halper’s friend and business partner. Sitting in winged chairs in London’s venerable Garrick Club, according toThe Washington Post, Dearlove told fellow
MI6 veteran Christopher Steele, author of the famous “golden showers”
opposition research dossier, that Trump “reminded him of
a predicament he had faced years earlier, when he was chief of station
for British intelligence in Washington and alerted US authorities to
British information that a vice presidential hopeful had once been in
communication with the Kremlin.”
Apparently,
one word from the Brits was enough to make the candidate in question
step down. When that didn’t work with Trump, Dearlove and his
colleagues ratcheted up the pressure to make him see the light. A major
scandal was thus born – or, rather, a very questionable scandal.
Besides Dearlove, Steele, and Halper, a bon-vivant known as “The Walrus” for his impressive girth, other participants include:
Robert Hannigan, former director Government Communications Headquarters, GCHQ, UK equivalent of the NSA.
Alexander Downer, top Australian diplomat.
Andrew Wood, ex-British ambassador to Moscow.
Joseph Mifsud, Maltese academic.
James Clapper, ex-US Director of National Intelligence.
John Brennan, former CIA Director (and now NBC News analyst).
In-Bred
A
few things stand out about this august group. One is its in-bred
quality. After helping to run an annual confab known as the Cambridge
Intelligence Seminar, Dearlove and Halper are now partners in a private
venture calling itself “The Cambridge Security Initiative.” Both are
connected to another London-based intelligence firm known as Hakluyt
& Co. Halper is also connected via two books he wrote with Hakluyt
representative Jonathan Clarke and Dearlove has a close personal friendship with Hakluyt founder Mike Reynolds, yet another MI6 vet. Alexander Downer served a
half-dozen years on Hakluyt’s international advisory board, while
Andrew Wood is linked to Steele via Orbis Business Intelligence, the
private research firm that Steele helped found, and which produced the
anti-Trump dossier, and where Wood now serves as an unpaidadvisor.
NationalReview | Gowdy’s fire truck pulled into Fox News Tuesday night for an interview by Martha MacCallum.
An able lawyer, the congressman is suddenly on a mission to protect the
Justice Department and the FBI from further criticism. So, when Ms.
MacCallum posed the question about the FBI spying on the Trump campaign,
Gowdy deftly changed the subject: Rather than address the campaign, he repeatedly insisted that Donald Trump personally was never the “target” of the FBI’s investigation. The only “target,” Gowdy maintains, was Russia.
This is a dodge on at least two levels.
First, to repeat, the question raised by the FBI’s use of an informant is whether the bureau was investigating the Trump campaign.
We’ll come momentarily to the closely connected question of whether
Trump can be airbrushed out of his own campaign — I suspect the
impossibility of this feat is why Gowdy is resistant to discussing the
Trump campaign at all.
It is a diversion for Gowdy to prattle on about how Trump himself was
not a “target” of the Russia investigation. As we’ve repeatedly
observed (and as Gowdy acknowledged in the interview), the Trump-Russia
probe is a counterintelligence investigation. An accomplished prosecutor, Gowdy well knows that “target” is a term of art in criminal investigations,
denoting a suspect who is likely to be indicted. The term is inapposite
to counterintelligence investigations, which are not about building
criminal cases but about divining and thwarting the provocative schemes
of hostile foreign powers. In that sense, and in no other, the foreign
power at issue — here, Russia — is always the “target” of a
counterintelligence probe; but it is never a “target” in the technical
criminal-investigation sense in which Gowdy used the term . . . unless
you think we are going to indict a country.
Moreover, even if we stick to the criminal-investigation sense of
“target,” Gowdy knows it is misleading to emphasize that Trump is not
one. Just a few short weeks ago, Gowdy was heard pooh-poohing as “meaningless”
media reporting that Trump had been advised he was not a “target” of
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe (which is the current iteration
of the Russia investigation). As the congressman quite correctly pointed
out, if Trump is a subject of the investigation — another
criminal-law term of art, denoting a person whose conduct is under
scrutiny, but who may or may not be indicted — it should be of little
comfort that he is not a “target”; depending on how the evidence shakes
out, a subject can become a target in the blink of an eye.
So, apart from the fact that Gowdy is dodging the question about
whether the Trump campaign was being investigated, his digression about
“targets” is gibberish. Since the Obama administration was using its
counterintelligence powers (FISA surveillance, national-security
letters, unmasking identities in intelligence reporting, all bolstered
by the use of at least one covert informant), the political-spying issue
boils down to whether the Trump campaign was being monitored.
Whether Trump himself was apt to be indicted, and whether threats posed
by Russia were the FBI’s focus, are beside the point; in a
counterintelligence case, an indictment is never the objective, and a
foreign power is always the focus.
medium | Valerie Jarrett will never be stopped or profiled, she will never be
seen as a Black woman and I’m sure she’s traded on that most of her
life, if not all of it. However, her blending in and out of colorism
when it suits her is not her real crime but the exploitation and robbing
of poor Black people in Chicago is. It was insulting when Jarrett was
chosen as the face of all things Black by Obama, between she and Al
Sharpton, that should have signaled to all Black people his lack of
seriousness in dealing with Black issues. So before you all start
marching in support of Valerie Jarrett, you may want to at least ask the
people of Chicago, since clearly doing any form of research about her
corrupt history, evades you.
Grove
Parc and several other prominent failures were developed and managed by
Obama’s close friends and political supporters. Those people profited
from the subsidies even as many of Obama’s constituents suffered.
Tenants lost their homes; surrounding neighborhoods were blighted.
Some
of the residents of Grove Parc say they are angry that Obama did not
notice their plight. The development straddles the boundary of Obama’s
state Senate district. Many of the tenants have been his constituents
for more than a decade. “No
one should have to live like this, and no one did anything about it,”
said Cynthia Ashley, who has lived at Grove Parc since 1994.
Valerie
Jarrett, a senior adviser to Obama’s presidential campaign and a member
of his finance committee. Jarrett is the chief executive of Habitat
Co., which managed Grove Parc Plaza from 2001 until this winter and
co-managed an even larger subsidized complex in Chicago that was seized
by the federal government in 2006, after city inspectors found
widespread problems.
Jarrett’s
involvement in Chicago real estate development between 1992 and 2009
was marred with controversy, much of which centered on Habitat’s role as
the sole developer for “family public housing,” a status granted under a
district court ruling in 1987.
Under
Jarrett’s leadership, Habitat oversaw the development of a number of
public housing projects, one of which, in the Cabrini Green
neighborhood, was dubbed a “national symbol of urban despair.” Others became so run-down the city had to ask the federal government to intervene.
A 2003 Harvard Law Review article
cited the decline of the Cabrini Green development as an embodiment of
the negative consequence associated with the “privatization of public
housing.”
Valerie Jarrett and her construction company have overseen the complete decimation and gentrification all over Chicago (many labeling her Slum Queen),
no Black person should be shedding a tear for her. As for Roseanne
Barr, ABC and everyone else knew who she was before they chose to reboot
her show. One of the issues ABC was having, is that a show that caters
to poor Whites and the alt-right, had somehow surpassed all of the
ratings of shows like those of Shonda Rhimes and others they were
lauding to be the face of liberal television viewership. The other issue
is that, the Obama’s were not going to allow their friend Jarrett to be
insulted, no different than when Obama, broke his neck to defend Henry
Louis Gates, his old elitist Harvard professor and friend. Black people
were quick to praise and laud Channing Dungey, the Black woman and CEO
of ABC’s parent company, Disney. However, Channing was the same woman
who refused to air a show on Blackish that protested police
violence/murders and discussed why Colin Kaepernick kneeled. However, we
should already know by Obama’s fecklessness and inaction in going
against the police that Neolibs have no desire of ever changing a system
that works so well for them…until of course, someone like Roseanne
reminds them that they’re still seen as a n*gga, or in this case an ape,
or like Henry Louis Gates was profiled at his own home.
NationalReview | If I might be permitted to address the would-be benefactors of the
white underclass from the southerly side of the class line: Ain’t nobody
asked you to speak for us.
One of the intellectual failings of conservative social critics is
our tendency to take external forces, economic and otherwsie, into
greater account in the case of struggling rural and small-town whites
than in the case of struggling urban blacks.
Of course there are external forces, economic and otherwise, that act
on poor people and poor communities, and one of the intellectual
failings of conservative social critics is our tendency to take those
into considerably greater account in the case of struggling rural and
small-town whites than in the case of struggling urban blacks. “Get off
welfare and get a job!” has been replaced by solicitous talk about
“globalization.” Likewise, the reaction to the crack-cocaine plague of
the 1980s and 1990s was very different from the reaction to the opioid
epidemic of the moment, in part because of who is involved — or
perceived to be involved. And this isn’t the first time we’ve seen a
rash of deaths from opioid overdoses. As Dr. Peter DeBlieux of
University Medical Center in New Orleans put it, heroin addiction was,
for a long time, treated in the same way AIDS was in its early days: as a
problem for deviants. Nobody cared about AIDS when it was a problem for
prostitutes, drug addicts, and those with excessively adventurous sex
lives. The previous big epidemic of heroin overdoses involved largely
non-white drug users. The current fentanyl-driven heroin episode and the
growth of prescription-killer abuse involve more white users and more
middle-class users.
But there are internal forces as well. People really do make
decisions, and, whether they intend it or not, they contribute to the
sometimes difficult conditions in which those decisions have to be made.
Consider the case of how I became homeless.
I wasn’t homeless in the sense of sleeping in the park — most of the
people we’re talking about when we’re talking about homelessness aren’t.
The people who are sleeping on the streets are mainly addicts and
people with other severe mental-health issues. I was homeless in the way
the Department of Health and Human Services means:
in “an unstable or non-permanent situation . . . forced to stay with a
series of friends and/or extended family members.” (As a matter of
policy, these two kinds of homelessness should not be conflated, which
they intentionally are by those who wish for political reasons to
pretend that our mental-health crisis is an economic problem.) Like many
underclass families, mine lived very much paycheck-to-paycheck, and was
always one setback away from economic catastrophe. That came when my
mother, who for various reasons had a weakened immune system, got
scratched by her poodle, Pepe, and nearly lost her right arm to the
subsequent infection. A long hospitalization combined with fairly
radical surgery and a series of skin grafts left her right arm and hand
partially paralyzed, a serious problem for a woman who typed for a
living. (She’d later learn to type well over 100 words per minute with
only partial use of her right hand; she was a Rachmaninoff of the IBM
Selectric.) I am sure that there were severe financial stresses
associated with her illness, but I ended up being shuffled around
between various neighbors — strangers to me — for mainly non-economic
reasons. My parents had two houses between them, but at that time had
just gone through a very ugly divorce. My mother was living with a
mentally disturbed alcoholic who’d had a hard time in Vietnam (and well
before that, I am certain; his grandfather had once shot him in the ass
with a load of rock-salt for making unauthorized use of a watermelon
from the family farm) and it was decided that it would be unsafe to
leave children alone in his care, which it certainly would have been. He
was very precise, in funny ways, and would stack his Coors Lite cans in
perfect silver pyramids until he ran out of beer, at which point he
would start drinking shots of Mexican vanilla, which is about 70 proof.
Lubbock was a dry city then, and buying more booze would have meant a
trip past the city limits, hence the resort to baking ingredients and,
occasionally, to mouthwash. I am afraid the old realtors’ trick of
filling the house with the aroma of baked cookies has the opposite of
the desired effect on me.
Our mortgage then was $285 a month, which was a little less than my
father paid in child support, so housing was, in effect, paid for. And
thus I found myself in the strange position of being temporarily without
a home while rotating between neighbors within sight, about 60 feet
away, of the paid-up house to which I could not safely return. I was in
kindergarten at the time.
Capitalism didn’t do that, and neither did illegal immigrants or
Chinese competition to the Texas Instruments factory on the other side
of town. Culture didn’t do it, either, and neither did poverty: We had
enough money to secure comfortable housing in a nice neighborhood with
good schools. In the last years of her life, my mother asked me to help
her sort out some financial issues, and I was shocked to learn how much
money she and her fourth and final husband were earning: They’d both
ended their careers as government employees, and had pretty decent
pensions and excellent health benefits. They were, in fact, making about
as much in retirement in Lubbock as I was making editing newspapers in
Philadelphia. Of course they were almost dead broke — their bingo and
cigarette outlays alone were crushing, and they’d bought a Cadillac and
paid for it with a credit card.
KAKE | A 14-year-old boy says he was arrested at the Warren Theatre in east Wichita because his pants were sagging.
Alonzo Taylor Jr says he went to the East Warren 20 with a group of friends when the manager approached him about his pants.
"A couple
of seconds after leaving the concessions counter, the manager walked up
and said to pull up your pants or you'll be escorted," Taylor said.
He says he couldn't find a belt to wear and his pants began sagging while he was carrying a drink and popcorn.
"I was by the counter and he said that, 'You're going to have to leave. I don't care what you did. You're trespassing.'"
Taylor says
he followed all of the manager's commands but was still
arrested. He believes the manager targeted him because he is black.
Taylor's
mother, Ruth Dennis, says her son is a good kid who never gets into
trouble. She's not mad at police for handcuffing her son. She's mad at
the theater.
"I just don't want my son's record to be messed up over sagging and to be labeled as a trespasser," she said.
Taylor is still shocked by what happened and now doesn't feel welcome at the East Warren 20.
twitter | After more than 6 months of watching people get scammed by the #QAnon
phenomena, I'm going to make the below thread to explain to you exactly
why it is an intelligence agency-backed psyop, what techniques are
being used, and why you need to stop people falling for it.
slate | One of the nice things about Occupy Wall Street was that it
provided a tidy shorthand to describe the problem of income inequality
at a moment when the world didn’t really have one. Today, it’s a cliche:
the 99 percent vs. the 1 percent. But at the time, that brief
phrase awakened many people to the idea that America’s riches were
distributed more unevenly than they thought, and that an increasingly
outrageous share was being concentrated at the very top. The winners in
this story were corporate executives, business owners, and highly paid
professionals—especially bankers. The losers were just about everybody
else. Like all shorthand, this tale was a bit oversimplified. But in the
wake of a financial crisis brought on by the greed and recklessness of
those 1 percenters, it felt apt.
Back then, the people who took issue with framing America’s
economy as a tug of war between the ultrarich and the rest of us
generally fell into two camps. They were either inequality skeptics,
who insisted unconvincingly that research showing the rise of the 1
percent was flawed, or inequality apologists, who argued that letting
some people get exorbitantly wealthy was good for the economy, since it
rewarded hustle and entrepreneurship (basically, Paul Ryan during his
peak makers-vs.-takers period).
Lately, though, a few writers have tried to play down the idea
of the 1 percent for a different reason: They say it’s making us miss
the real story of class and inequality in America. Last year, a
Brookings Institution scholar named Richard Reeves published a book
titled Dream Hoarders,
in which he argues that America’s upper-middle class is rigging the
economy in its own favor. Our national focus on the very rich, he
suggests, is blinding us to the reality of how well-off soccer moms and
dads in places like Arlington, Virginia, are killing the American dream
for everyone but their own kids. “Too often, the rhetoric of inequality
points to a ‘top 1 percent’ problem, as if the ‘bottom’ 99 percent is in
a similarly dire situation,” he writes. “This obsession with the upper
class allows the upper middle class to convince ourselves we are in the
same boat as the rest of America; but it is not true.”\
Reeves’ book received a brief burst of national attention
after David Brooks used it as a launching point for a weird and widely pilloried New York Times column,
in which he recounted a story about seeing his friend get flustered by
the selection of Italian cold cuts at a sandwich shop. (He assumed this
was because she only had a high school education, since you apparently
need a philosophy degree to be familiar with soppressata.) But this
week, the Atlantic published a long feature more or less rehashing most of Dream Hoarders’ arguments.
In “The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy,” writer Matthew
Stewart argues that aside from a small sliver of true plutocrats who can
actually afford to buy an election or two, the top 10 percent of
wealthiest Americans are all essentially part of the same highly
educated and privileged group—the “meritocratic class”—which has
“mastered the old trick of consolidating wealth and passing privilege
along at the expense of other people’s children.”
Reeves and Stewart are both attempting to give us a new
shorthand for who is ruining the economy. Instead of the 1 percent, they
would like us to talk about the dream hoarders, or the 9.9 percent. But
in the end, both authors fail by lumping together large groups of
Americans who haven’t really benefited equally from our winner-take-all
economy. As a result, their stories about how the country has changed,
and who has gained, just don’t track.
NewYorker | Elijah Anderson, a professor of sociology and African-American
studies at Yale, has spent much of his career exploring the dynamics of
African-American life in mostly black urban environments. Three years
ago, however, he published a paper, titled “The White Space,” which
looked at the racial complexities of mostly white urban environments.
“The city’s public spaces, workplaces and neighborhoods may now be
conceptualized as a mosaic of white spaces, black spaces and
cosmopolitan spaces,” Anderson wrote. The white spaces are an
environment in which blacks are “typically absent, not expected, or
marginalized.”
Academics are commonly dogged by questions of how
their research applies to the real world. Anderson has faced the
opposite: a scroll of headlines and social-media posts that, like a mad
data set liberated from its spreadsheet, seem intent on confirming the
validity of his argument. The most notable recent case in point occurred
on April 12th, when a white employee of a Starbucks in Philadelphia
called the police on two young black men, Rashon Nelson and Donte
Robinson, who asked to use the rest room before they had ordered
anything. They were arrested on suspicion of trespassing; it turned out
that they had been waiting for a business associate to join them.
The
incident was both disturbing and disturbingly common. A few days later,
an employee at a New Jersey gym called the police, on the suspicion
that two black men using the facility had not paid; they had. A couple
of weeks after that, a woman in California called the police on three
black women whom she thought were behaving suspiciously. They were
actually carrying bags out of a house they had rented on Airbnb. Earlier
this month, a white student at Yale called the police on a black
graduate student for exhibiting behavior that struck her as suspicious:
napping in a common area. Thousands of social-media users have since
shared their experiences as persons of color in a “white space.”
Starbucks
didn’t press charges against the men, but protests followed, along with
the requisite hashtag directive, in this case, #boycottStarbucks. The
men, though, settled with the city for a dollar apiece and a promise to
invest in a program to assist young entrepreneurs.
nakedcapitalism | The results also support our hypothesis about the Starbucks incident,
in which a now-fired manager called the cops on two men whose crime
appeared to be waiting at a Starbucks while black, and using the
restroom. The evidence below indicates this manager was a disaster
waiting to happen and had been calling the police at a vastly higher
frequency than her predecessor.
We had discussed briefly that one Malcolm Gladwell’s books included a
case study of biased policing in the Los Angeles Police Department,
which has a a terrible record in that regard. He found was that a very
few cops were responsible for virtually all the incidents. Gladwell
argued that that meant the conventional approach, of more training for
all the police, was all wet. Those rogue policemen needed to be taken
off the street.
Starbuck’s rush to hold a training program may be good optics, but it
isn’t likely to be the best approach. The coffee chain should require
managers to write an incident report any time they call the police. That
would enable them to see if any managers were making a lot of requests
and they could then look as to whether the calls were warranted or not.
News reports have pointed out that part of the problem is that
Starbucks never gave its store managers any policy on what to do about
people who stay in a Starbucks without buying anything. I’m skeptical
that promulgating rules on a national basis is the right answer. As I
mentioned when I had nearly a week of having to work in Starbucks thanks
to Verizon-induced connectivity woes, there was often one or two
homeless people in an area that was a bit removed from the cash
registers.
There were also plenty of customers back there, most working
solo like me, but also a few groups of two or three people chatting. No
one was bothered by the homeless people sitting nearby. In fact, I
thought it was a good thing that some of the money I spent at Starbucks
was helping the homeless. However, it isn’t hard to think that in an
affluent suburb, the locals would go nuts if a homeless person were to
hang out in a Starbucks, and management would almost be forced to run
them off because customers were certain to make a stink.
BostonGlobe | WHEN WYNTON MARSALIS condemns rap and hip-hop, it’s less of a surprise, and more of a “Mama, it’s that man again” moment.
On a recent episode of a Washington Post podcast,
the renowned jazz musician derided rap as a “pipeline of filth.”
Marsalis compared what he perceives as its deleterious effect on culture
to that of minstrel shows, which, more than a century ago, amplified
racist stereotypes about African-Americans.
“My words are not that
powerful,” Marsalis said. “I started saying in 1985 I don’t think we
should have a music talking about [n-words] and bitches and hoes. It had
no impact. I’ve said it. I’ve repeated it. I still repeat it. To me
that’s more damaging than a statue of Robert E. Lee.”
A few years ago in New Orleans, Marsalis fought for the removal of Lee’s statue. He would like to do the same to some hip-hop.
“At 56, I’m pretty sure I will not be alive when our country and the
world (of all races and persuasions) no longer accepts being entertained
by the pathology of Black Americans and others who choose to publicly
humiliate themselves for the appetites of those who don’t share the same
ongoing history and challenges,” he wrote. “Over the years, I have come
to accept this, but that doesn’t mean I have to like and endorse it. So
I don’t.”
therealnews | So 64 years ago, Brown vs. Board of Education found that separate and
unequal education systems for African Americans was unconstitutional.
You argue that many Virginians initially actually accepted this
decision, but a public campaign was launched to sway public opinion
against it. Can you talk about that? You start off the first chapter of
your book with this history, talking about how students and teachers in
Virginia, led by students, weren’t organized to be part of Brown. And
then the public response against it.
NANCY MACLEAN:Yeah, in the state of Virginia
in 1951 there was an extraordinarily inspiring event that is really, in
a way, a precursor to some of what we’re seeing now with the teachers
strikes, and student and teacher mobilizations for good public
education. In that strike in 1951 in Prince Edward County, Virginia, a
young woman named Barbara Rose Johns joined with her favorite teacher,
and the two of them worked together, kind of strategized for a strike, a
student strike, to demand a better high school for the black children
of Prince Edward County. At that point many of the students were taking
classes in tar paper shacks. They did not have indoor plumbing, in many
cases, while the white school was the extraordinary state of the art
facility. And so the 200 students in this high school went out on a 100
percent solid students strike for a better high school.
It was an incredibly inspiring event with the support of over
90 percent of their parents, the local black clergy, and NAACP. And what
they wanted was a chance to learn, to grow, to have the same
opportunities as other children in their cohort and their era and their
community. And they only went back to school when the NAACP agreed to
take their course. I’m sorry, to take their case against discrimination
to the courts. And at that point the students went back to school, and
this case from Prince Edward County became one of the five eventually
folded into Brown vs. Board of Education.
Fast forward a bit, and after the Brown decision was issued by
the court, Virginia’s extremely conservative white elite began in 1955
and ’56 to do everything it could to undermine the success of that
decision, and to deny black children and communities the constitutional
rights that had just been recognized by the court. The way that they did
this was through a program called massive resistance, and they led the
program of massive resistance and goaded the wider white South onto it.
And one element of that massive resistance was state-funded tuition
grants, what we today would call vouchers, to enable white parents to
pull their children from public schools to private schools that would be
beyond the reach of the Federal Court’s ruling that segregation was
unconstitutional.
So that’s actually how I got into this story, and it was a
story that led me to the surprising discovery that essentially the
entire American right, and particularly of interest, this free market
fundamentalist right that was just beginning to get organized in those
years, supported these tax-funded school vouchers. And even, in many
cases, supported the school closures in Prince Edward County to prevent
the Brown decision from being implemented.
So that was fascinating to me. And I discovered that Milton
Friedman, the Chicago school free market economist, had issued his first
manifesto for such vouchers in 1955 in the full knowledge of how it
could be used by the white segregationists of the South. And then I also
stumbled onto a report by this James McGill Buchanan that we were
discussing earlier, who essentially tried to pull the segregationist
chestnuts out of the fire in early 1959, when a massive mobilization of
moderate white parents had come together to try to save the schools from
these school closures, and the bleeding of these tax monies out to
private schools. And after the courts had ruled against school closures
of schools that were planning to desegregate in Virginia. So that’s how
Buchanan got on my radar. But what I realized was that this was a much
deeper story about the right’s radical antipathy to public education
precisely because it was public.
And here I think it’s important to point out that when this
was happening in the late 1950s, American schools were the envy of the
developed world. We lead the world in the efficacy of our public
education system. Our schools were a model for the wider world. And yet
this right was attacking public education even then. And as important,
teachers were not organized then. There were no recognized teachers
unions. There was no collective bargaining structure for teachers in
those years. The right was attacking public education as a monopoly,
saying that it denied choice, all the kinds of things that they say now
against public education, and they were doing this at a time when
teachers had no collective power.
So the antipathy that we see on the right toward teachers
unions today, toward public education, is not really because of any
failing on their part. It is ideological. It is dogmatic. It is an
antipathy to public education precisely because it is public.
nonsite | Black political debate and action through the early 1960s focused on
concrete issues—employment, housing, wages, unionization, discrimination
in specific venues and domains— rather than an abstract “racism.” It
was only in the late 1960s and 1970s, after the legislative victories
that defeated southern apartheid and restored black Americans’ full
citizenship rights, that “racism” was advanced as the default
explanation for inequalities that appear as racial disparities. That
view emerged from Black Power politics and its commitment to a
race-first communitarian ideology that posited the standpoint of an
idealized “black community” as the standard for political judgment,
which Bayard Rustin predicted at the time would ensue only in creation
of a “new black establishment.” It was ratified as a commonsense piety
of racial liberalism by the Report of the Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders—popularly
known as the Kerner Commission, after its chair, Illinois Governor Otto
Kerner—which asserted that “white racism” was the ultimate source of
the manifold inequalities the Report catalogued as well as the pattern of civil disturbances the commission had been empaneled to investigate.
Reduction of black politics to a timeless struggle against
abstractions like racism and white supremacy or for others like freedom
and liberation obscures the extent to which black Americans’ political
activity has evolved and been shaped within broader American political
currents. That view, which oscillates between heroic and tragic,
overlooks the fact that the mundane context out of which racism became a
default explanation, or alternative to explanation, for inequality, was
a national debate over how to guide anti-poverty policy and the
struggle for fair employment practices in the early 1960s.
Left-of-center public attention to poverty and persistent unemployment
at the beginning of the 1960s divided into two camps. One, represented
most visibly by figures like Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz,
Senators Joseph Clark (D-PA) and Hubert H. Humphrey (D-MN), United Auto
Workers President Walter Reuther, and black labor and civil rights
leader A. Philip Randolph, argued that both phenomena stemmed from
structural inadequacies in the postwar economy, largely the consequence
of technological reorganization, especially in manufacturing. From that
perspective, effectively addressing those conditions would require
direct and large scale federal intervention in labor markets, including
substantial investment in public works employment and skills-based,
targeted job-training.
The other camp saw poverty and persistent unemployment as residual
problems resulting from deficiencies of values, attitudes, and human
capital (a notion then only recently popularized) in individuals and
groups that hindered them from participating fully in a dynamic labor
market rather than from inadequacies in overall economic performance. In
that view, addressing poverty and persistent unemployment did not
require major intervention in labor markets. A large tax cut intended to
stimulate aggregate demand would eliminate unacceptably high rates of
unemployment, and anti-poverty policy would center on fixing the
deficiencies within residual populations. Job training would focus on
teaching “job readiness”—attitudes and values—more than specific skills.
Liberals connected to the Ford Foundation and the Kennedy and Johnson
administrations saw chronic poverty as bound up with inadequate senses
of individual and group efficacy rather than economic performance. That
interpretation supported a policy response directed to enhancing the
sense of efficacy among impoverished individuals and communities, partly
through mobilization for civic action. The War on Poverty’s Community
Action program gave that approach a militant or populist patina through
its commitment to “grassroots” mobilization of poor people on their own
behalf. In addition, Community Action Agencies and Model Cities projects
facilitated insurgent black and Latino political mobilization in cities
around the country, which reinforced a general sense of their
radicalism. At the same time, however, those programs reinforced
liberals’ tendencies to separate race from class and inequality from
political economy and to substitute participation or representation for
redistribution.
Both camps assumed that black economic inequality stemmed
significantly from current and past discrimination. A consequential
difference between them, though, was that those who emphasized the need
for robust employment policies contended that much black unemployment
resulted from structural economic factors that were beyond the reach of
anti- discrimination efforts. To that extent, improving black Americans’
circumstances would require broader social-democratic intervention in
the political economy, including significantly expanded social wage
policy. As Randolph observed at the 1963 March on Washington, “Yes, we
want a Fair Employment Practices Act, but what good will it do if
profit-geared automation destroys the jobs of millions of workers, black
and white? We want integrated public schools, but that means we also
want federal aid to education—all forms of education.” The other camp,
in line with then Assistant Secretary of Labor Moynihan’s Negro Family jeremiad,
construed black unemployment and poverty as deriving from an ambiguous
confluence of current discrimination and cultural pathologies produced
by historical racism. For a variety of reasons having to do with both
large politics and small, the latter vision won.
therealnews | Years before he became president, Barack Obama got his start as a
community organizer on the south side of Chicago. Now out of the White
House, Obama is coming back to the south side to build his $500 million
presidential center. But Obama now faces a pushback from the same
community he once organized with. For months, south side residents have
been holding protests. They don’t oppose the center, but they want to
make sure it doesn’t cause gentrification and displacement.
SPEAKER:So we’re here to make this stand, to
say that we don’t want displacement to happen in this community. We
don’t want to see the jobs come from outside, be filled by people from
the outside, the people living here don’t get a chance to work.
AARON MATE:South side residents have formed a
coalition, calling on Obama to sign a community benefits agreement
which, among other things, would help protect low income residents from
eviction and higher rents. Coalition Member Paru Brown outlined their
demands.
PARU BROWN:We are pushing for a city
ordinance that would, one, set aside 30 percent of new and rehab housing
for low-income and working families; two, freeze property taxes for
longtime residents; three, require large developers like the University
of Chicago to invest in new affordable housing; and four, independently
monitor local hiring.
AARON MATE:But Obama and his foundation are refusing to sign a CBA. The former president recently told Chicago residents why.
BARACK OBAMA:And the danger here is that if
we sign an agreement with any one organization, or two organizations, or
five organizations-. I’ve lived on the south side and in Chicago long
enough to know that they’re not representing everybody on the south
side. So now suddenly I’ve got five other organizations to say, hey, how
come, how come you signed with them? What about us? And then you got
10, oh, I just formed an organization. You know what I’m talking about.
And next thing you know you’ve got 40 organizations or 50 organizations,
everybody has their own organization, saying we should get, we should
have say, control, decision-making over who gets the contract, et
cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
AARON MATE:Well, Obama’s plans have now
taken a big step forward. The Obama center has just won approval from
two city commissions and the full City Council, moving the project to
federal review. South side activists are not giving up their fight.
Jawanza Malone is executive director of the Kenwood Oakland Community
Organization, and a member of the Obama library South Side CBA
coalition. Jawanza, welcome. Talk to us first just about the struggle
that you’ve been involved in for many months now, and the state of it
now, and the aftermath of these city votes moving the project forward.
JAWANZA MALONE:Thanks for having me on,
Aaron. For the last two and a half years, actually, the CBA coalition
has been working to craft a community benefits agreement that involves
not just the Obama Foundation but also the University of Chicago and the
City of Chicago. In all the turmoil and excitement around President
Obama himself, people forget that the University of Chicago is actually
the entity that wrote the bill that was awarded to get the Presidential
Center on the south side of Chicago in Jackson Park. And Mayor Rahm
Emanuel had, you know, said two years ago that he was willing to move
heaven and earth to make sure that it happened. And that’s what we’re,
we’re seeing it happen over concerns raised with the city councilmen,
over concerns raised by the community, particularly about where the
money is going to come from for the infrastructure changes that the
foundation has called for.
As you said in your intro, the city council and a
quasi-governmental appointed body has voted to approve the plan moving
forward. What we’ve been asking for is very simple. We’re asking for a
legally binding agreement to ensure that residents are not, do not
continue to get displaced from the area, because we’ve already seen
displacement taking place. And so without a clear community benefits
agreement that protects low-income and working families, who is the
predominant population in that part of town, we’re going to see mass
displacement of people, unfortunately.
medium | Polite
White Supremacy is the notion that whites should remain the ruling class
while denying that they are the ruling class, politely. Affectionately,
it’s called #PWS for short. It has been referred to as the Casual
American Caste System, Delicate Apartheid, Gentle Oppression, or what I
like to call it after a few drinks: Chad Crow, the super chill grandson
of Jim Crow.
No
but seriously, Polite White Supremacy is very real. So why is it that
we must specifically say ‘Polite White Supremacy’ rather than Racism? We
must say Polite White Supremacy for three reasons. First, saying #PWS
puts the responsibility solely on the creators of a systemic problem.
Second, this phrase addresses the subtlety and casualness with which
oppression is administered. Thirdly, it eradicates the all-too-common
confusion between racism and prejudice. It’s important to eradicate this confusion so it can be clear that racism is tied to a power structure and access to resources.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN RACISM AND PREJUDICE
Racism
and prejudice are NOT interchangeable. Racism is the systemic
oppression of one group of people who can be categorized within certain
phenotypical traits over multiple generations that has been, at one
point, sanctioned by a country, the majority and/or ruling class. Racism
is committed only by the ruling class and agents of the ruling class
because they have the power that comes with racism. Racism, in America,
is absolutely the attack dog of the white ruling class. However,
sometimes it’s also a slow poison in that it causes its victims to die
of exhaustion or grief. Again, racism is a kind of prejudice that comes
with power. Racism is the systematic and intentional oppression of group
of people from the ruling class and its agents. In America, the ruling
class is white people…of all classes.
America has been playing a centuries-long game of ‘stop hitting yourself’ while holding the arms of Black America.
Prejudice,
though harmful, is not necessarily systemic and can be committed by
anyone. It simply requires one to pre-judge. It does not require its
user to have any access to the ruling class or status of whiteness.
However, you have to be part of or support the ruling class to wield the
power of racism. Those who are not part of the white ruling class, yet
support white supremacy of any form, are called agents of white
supremacy. They are not white, but benefit in some direct way from
empowering and enforcing white supremacy often times on their own
people. Historically black overseers and house slaves were bestowed more
rights, and ultimately more power during slavery. These were employed
agents of white supremacy who oppressed their fellow blacks. This
employment was a status. It was a form of racist power that white slave
owners gave to black overseers as a way to also instill mistrust within
the black community. Prejudice alone, has no real power without the
system of control and power to support it.
WaPo | Ontario has been hit hard by the ravages of global economic policy and
should be a prime location for emerging, radical action. Instead,
Canada’s most populous province has produced the English-speaking
world’s most controversial, right-wing surrogate dad: Jordan Peterson.
Peterson cloaks his anti-progressive opinions in
folksy, common-sense advice. He is a master at inventing an enemy and
offering young men a solution to various straw men. Peterson has
perfectly tailored his self-help style to the individual, no doubt a
holdover from his days as a clinical psychologist, which he mentions a
lot when he talks.
Self-help alone isn’t
dangerous, but it becomes dangerous in the way that Peterson uses it as
the solution to the myriad problems that young people face. He argues
that the left is dangerous and destructive because of the emphasis it
places on “group identity.” In a trailer for a video called “No Safe Space,”
to be released in 2018, Peterson argues that “group identity” is really
what killed tens of millions of people under Stalin’s Communism and
Hitler’s Nazism and then, remarkably, concludes, “and I’m concerned
because the universities are so overwhelmed by this, that I can’t see
how they can extract themselves from it.”
Therefore, supremacy of the individual is the only way to stop global war and mass murder.
Peterson’s message fits perfectly with the prevailing ideology that has
driven public-policy debates in North America since the 1980s: People
should be able to succeed on their own, without help from the state.
This message intentionally erases systemic barriers that perniciously
remain and instead demonizes anyone who understands that collective
advancement is the key to improvement.
quillette | There’s no reason to think that the definition of racism will stop
expanding any time soon. And there’s no reason to think that
progressives will ever stop demanding institutional reforms to fix
racism—up to and including attempts to reform our subconscious minds
with such things as mandatory implicit bias trainings. In a BBC feature on racism, the acclaimed poet Benjamin Zephaniah
remarked, “laws can control people’s actions, but they can’t control
people’s thoughts. As racism becomes more subtle, we need to keep
pressuring our institutions to change.”
Black political debate and action through the early 1960s
focused on concrete issues—employment, housing, wages, unionization,
discrimination in specific venues and domains—rather than an abstract
“racism.” It was only in the late 1960s and 1970s, after the legislative
victories that defeated southern apartheid and restored black
Americans’ full citizenship rights, that “racism” was advanced as the
default explanation for inequalities that appear as racial disparities.
If the early 1960s were about reaching the mountaintop, then the
modern era is about running on the Treadmill. Coates’s refrain,
“resistance must be its own reward,” has become the watchword of the
movement.13
The War on Racism, though intended to be won by those prosecuting it,
will, in practice, continue indefinitely. This is because the stated
goals of progressives, however sincerely held, are so apocalyptic, so
vague, and so total as to guarantee that they will never be met. One
often hears calls to “end white supremacy,” for instance. But what
“ending white supremacy” would look like in a country where whites are already out-earned by several dark-skinned ethnic groups (Indian-Americans top the list by a large margin) is never explained. I would not be the first to point out the parallels between progressive goals and religious eschatology. Coates, for instance, professes to be an atheist, but tweak a few details and the Rapture becomes Reparations––which he has said will lead to a “spiritual renewal” and a “revolution of the American consciousness.”14
Staying on the Racism Treadmill means denying progress and stoking
ethnic tensions. It means, as Thomas Sowell once warned, moving towards a
society in which “a new born baby enters the world supplied with
prepackaged grievances against other babies born the same day.”[15]
Worse still, it means shutting down the one conversation that stands
the greatest chance of improving outcomes for blacks: the conversation
about culture.
By contrast, getting off the Treadmill means recognizing that group
outcomes will differ even in the absence of systemic bias; it means
treating people as individuals rather than as members of a collective;
it means restoring the naive conception of equal treatment over the
skin-color morality of the far Left; and it means rejecting calls to
burn this or that system to the ground in order to combat forms of
racial oppression that grow ever more abstract by the day. At bottom, it
means acknowledging the fact that racism has declined precipitously,
and perhaps even being grateful that it has.
resilience |It’s time to reclaim the mantle of “Progress” for progressives.
By falsely tethering the concept of progress to free market economics
and centrist values, Steven Pinker has tried to appropriate a great idea
for which he has no rightful claim.
In Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress,
published earlier this year, Steven Pinker argues that the human race
has never had it so good as a result of values he attributes to the
European Enlightenment of the 18th century. He berates those
who focus on what is wrong with the world’s current condition as
pessimists who only help to incite regressive reactionaries. Instead, he
glorifies the dominant neoliberal, technocratic approach to solving the
world’s problems as the only one that has worked in the past and will
continue to lead humanity on its current triumphant path.
His book has incited strong reactions, both positive and negative. On
one hand, Bill Gates has, for example, effervesced that “It’s my new
favorite book of all time.” On the other hand, Pinker has been fiercely
excoriated by a wide range of leading thinkers for writing a simplistic,
incoherent paean to the dominant world order. John Gray, in the New Statesman, calls it “embarrassing” and “feeble”; David Bell, writing in The Nation,
sees it as “a dogmatic book that offers an oversimplified, excessively
optimistic vision of human history”; and George Monbiot, in The Guardian,
laments the “poor scholarship” and “motivated reasoning” that “insults
the Enlightenment principles he claims to defend.” (Full disclosure:
Monbiot recommends my book, The Patterning Instinct, instead.)
In light of all this, you might ask, what is left to add? Having read
his book carefully, I believe it’s crucially important to take Pinker
to task for some dangerously erroneous arguments he makes.
Pinker is,
after all, an intellectual darling of the most powerful echelons of
global society. He spoke to the world’s elite this
year at the World’s Economic Forum in Davos on the perils of what he
calls “political correctness,” and has been named one of Time magazine’s
“100 Most Influential People in the World Today.” Since his work offers
an intellectual rationale for many in the elite to continue practices
that imperil humanity, it needs to be met with a detailed and rigorous
response.
Besides, I agree with much of what Pinker has to say. His book is
stocked with seventy-five charts and graphs that provide
incontrovertible evidence for centuries of progress on many fronts that
should matter to all of us: an inexorable decline in violence of all
sorts along with equally impressive increases in health, longevity,
education, and human rights. It’s precisely because of the validity of
much of Pinker’s narrative that the flaws in his argument are so
dangerous. They’re concealed under such a smooth layer of data and
eloquence that they need to be carefully unraveled. That’s why my
response to Pinker is to meet him on his own turf: in each section, like
him, I rest my case on hard data exemplified in a graph.
This discussion is particularly needed because progress is, in my
view, one of the most important concepts of our time. I see myself, in
common parlance, as a progressive. Progress is what I, and others I’m
close to, care about passionately. Rather than ceding this idea to the
coterie of neoliberal technocrats who constitute Pinker’s primary
audience, I believe we should hold it in our steady gaze, celebrate it
where it exists, understand its true causes, and most importantly,
ensure that it continues in a form that future generations on this earth
can enjoy. I hope this piece helps to do just that.
NewYorker | Locke relished every
titillating contradiction but shrank, still, from political extremes.
Hoping to avoid the charge of radicalism, he changed the title of
McKay’s protest poem from “White House” to “White Houses”—an act of
censorship that severed the two men’s alliance. “No wonder Garvey
remains strong despite his glaring defects,” the affronted poet wrote to
Locke. “When the Negro intellectuals like you take such a weak line!”
Mason was rich, and Locke had
sought her backing for a proposed Harlem Museum of African Art.
Although the project failed (as did his plans for a Harlem Community
Arts Center), Mason remained a meddling, confused presence in his life
until her death, in 1946. During their association, he passed through a
gantlet of prickling degradations. Her vision of Negro culture obviously
didn’t align with his; she demanded to be called Godmother; and she was
prone to angry suspicion, demanding a fastidious accounting of how her
funds were spent. But those funds were indispensable, finally, to the
work of Hughes and, especially, Hurston. Locke, as the erstwhile
“mid-wife” of black modernism, was dispatched to handle the writers—much
to their dismay. He welcomed the authority, swelling into a
supercilious manager (and, to Hughes, a bullying admirer) who handed
down edicts from Godmother while enforcing a few of his own.
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