Why We Cain't See The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes?

consortiumnews |  Why is the U.S. mainstream media so frightened of a documentary that debunks the beloved story of how “lawyer” Sergei Magnitsky uncovered massive Russian government corruption and died as a result? If the documentary is as flawed as its critics claim, why won’t they let it be shown to the American public, then lay out its supposed errors, and use it as a case study of how such fakery works?

Instead we – in the land of the free, home of the brave – are protected from seeing this documentary produced by filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov who was known as a fierce critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin but who in this instance found the West’s widely accepted Magnitsky storyline to be a fraud.

Instead, last week, Senate Judiciary Committee members sat in rapt attention as hedge-fund operator William Browder wowed them with a reprise of his Magnitsky tale and suggested that people who have challenged the narrative and those who dared air the documentary one time at Washington’s Newseum last year should be prosecuted for violating the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA).

It appears that Official Washington’s anti-Russia hysteria has reached such proportions that old-time notions about hearing both sides of a story or testing out truth in the marketplace of ideas must be cast aside. The new political/media paradigm is to shield the American people from information that contradicts the prevailing narratives, all the better to get them to line up behind Those Who Know Best.

Nekrasov’s powerful deconstruction of the Magnitsky myth – and the film’s subsequent blacklisting throughout the “free world” – recall other instances in which the West’s propaganda lines don’t stand up to scrutiny, so censorship and ad hominem attacks become the weapons of choice to defend “perception management” narratives in geopolitical hot spots such as Iraq (2002-03), Libya (2011), Syria (2011 to the present), and Ukraine (2013 to the present).

But the Magnitsky myth has a special place as the seminal fabrication of the dangerous New Cold War between the nuclear-armed West and nuclear-armed Russia.

In the United States, Russia-bashing in The New York Times and other “liberal media” also has merged with the visceral hatred of President Trump, causing all normal journalistic standards to be jettisoned.

Browder Another Ahmed Chalabi Type Swindler/Hustler

Telegraph |  Bill Browder has described himself as "Putin's No 1 enemy". Now the Russian president had added weight to that claim by singling out the British investor at his controversial summit with Donald Trump on Monday. 

The UK-based financier appeared to be part of what the US president called an "incredible offer" by Vladimir Putin to assist American investigators in their prosecution of 12 Russian intelligence officers accused of hacking crimes during the 2016 presidential election season.

"He offered to have the people working on the case come and work with their investigators with respect to the 12 people," Mr Trump told reporters during a news conference in Helsinki following his joint summit with Mr Putin.

The special counsel investigating potential coordination between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin charged a dozen Russian military intelligence officers on Friday with hacking the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign and then releasing the stolen communications online as part of a sweeping conspiracy to meddle in the election.

While Mr Trump did not elaborate on the Russian leader's "incredible offer," Mr Putin himself suggested that special counsel Robert Mueller could ask Russian law enforcement agencies to interrogate the suspects. He said US officials could request to be present at such questioning in line with a 1999 agreement on mutual legal assistance in criminal cases.

However, there was a catch: Russia would expect the US to return the favour and cooperate with interrogations of people “who have something to do with illegal actions on the territory of Russia”. Mr Putin highlighted the case of Mr Browder.

"No journalist had asked about me," Mr Browder wrote in Time. "He just brought me up out of the blue ...To my mind, this can only mean that he is seriously rattled."

The American-born Jewish businessman, who has held British citizenship for the past two decades, was last year sentenced by a Russian court to nine years in prison on fraud and tax evasion charges.

More pertinently, he was also the driving force behind The Magnitsky Act, a 2012 US law targeting Russian officials over human rights abuses. It was named after Sergei Magnitsky, his lawyer whose investigations in 2008 uncovered a web of alleged tax fraud and corruption involving 23 companies and $230 million. He later died in Russian custody.

Bill Browder: The Tax-Evading Fugitive From Justice Behind The New Cold War

strategic-culture |  One has to ask why there is a crisis in US-Russia relations since Washington and Moscow have much more in common than not, to include confronting international terrorism, stabilizing Syria and other parts of the world that are in turmoil, and preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons. In spite of all that, the US and Russia are currently locked in a tit-for-tat unfriendly relationship somewhat reminiscent of the Cold War. 

Apart from search for a scapegoat to explain the Hillary Clinton defeat, how did it happen? Israel Shamir, a keen observer of the American-Russian relationship, and celebrated American journalist Robert Parry both think that one man deserves much of the credit for the new Cold War and that man is William Browder, a hedge fund operator who made his fortune in the corrupt 1990s world of Russian commodities trading. 

Browder is also symptomatic of why the United States government is so poorly informed about international developments as he is the source of much of the Congressional “expert testimony” contributing to the current impasse. He has somehow emerged as a trusted source in spite of the fact that he has self-interest in cultivating a certain outcome. Also ignored is his renunciation of American citizenship in 1998, reportedly to avoid taxes. He is now a British citizen. 

Browder is notoriously the man behind the 2012 Magnitsky Act, which exploited Congressional willingness to demonize Russia and has done so much to poison relations between Washington and Moscow. The Act sanctioned individual Russian officials, which Moscow has rightly seen as unwarranted interference in the operation of its judicial system. 

Browder, a media favorite who self-promotes as “Putin’s enemy #1,” portrays himself as a selfless human rights advocate, but is he? He has used his fortune to threaten lawsuits for anyone who challenges his version of events, effectively silencing many critics. He claims that his accountant Sergei Magnitsky was a crusading "lawyer" who discovered a $230 million tax-fraud scheme that involved the Browder business interest Hermitage Capital but was, in fact, engineered by corrupt Russian police officers who arrested Magnitsky and enabled his death in a Russian jail. 

Many have been skeptical of the Browder narrative, suspecting that the fraud was in fact concocted by Browder and his accountant Magnitsky. A Russian court recently supported that alternative narrative, ruling in late December that Browder had deliberately bankrupted his company and engaged in tax evasion. He was sentenced to nine years prison in absentia. 

Browder is again in the news recently in connection with testimony related to Russiagate. On December 16th Senator Diane Feinstein of the Senate Judiciary Committee released the transcript of the testimony provided by Glenn Simpson, founder of Fusion GPS. According to James Carden, Browder was mentioned 50 times, but the repeated citations apparently did not merit inclusion in media coverage of the story by the New York Times, Washington Post and Politico.

.45 Repudiates Deez TOXIC Heaux In The 9.9% Deep State...,

Toxic Femininity

quillette |  Calling good men toxic does everyone a deep disservice. Everyone except those who seek empowerment through victim narratives.

For the record: I am not suggesting that actual victims do not exist, nor that they do not deserve full emotional, physical, legal, medical, and other support. I also do not want to minimize the fact that most women, perhaps even all, have experienced unpleasantness from a subset of men. But not all women are victims. And even among those women who have truly suffered at the hands of men, many—most, I would hazard to guess—do not want their status in the world to be ‘victim.’

All of which leads us directly to a topic not much discussed: toxic femininity.

Sex and gender roles have been formed over hundreds of thousands of years in human evolution, indeed, over hundreds of millions of years in our animal lineage. Aspects of those roles are in rapid flux, but ancient truths still exist. Historical appetites and desires persist. Straight men will look at beautiful women, especially if those women are a) young and hot and b) actively displaying. Display invites attention.

Hotness-amplifying femininity puts on a full display, advertising fertility and urgent sexuality. It invites male attention by, for instance, revealing flesh, or by painting on signals of sexual receptivity. This, I would argue, is inviting trouble. No, I did not just say that she was asking for it. I did, however, just say that she was displaying herself, and of course she was going to get looked at.

The amplification of hotness is not, in and of itself, toxic, although personally, I don’t respect it, and never have. Hotness fades, wisdom grows— wise young women will invest accordingly. Femininity becomes toxic when it cries foul, chastising men for responding to a provocative display.

Where we set our boundaries is a question about which reasonable people might disagree, but two bright-lines are widely agreed upon: Every woman has the right not to be touched if she does not wish to be; and coercive quid pro quo, in which sexual favors are demanded for the possibility of career advancement, is unacceptable. But when women doll themselves up in clothes that highlight sexually-selected anatomy, and put on make-up that hints at impending orgasm, it is toxic—yes, toxic—to demand that men do not look, do not approach, do not query.

Young women have vast sexual power. Everyone who is being honest with themselves knows this: Women in their sexual prime who are anywhere near the beauty-norms for their culture have a kind of power that nobody else has. They are also all but certain to lack the wisdom to manage it. Toxic femininity is an abuse of that power, in which hotness is maximized, and victim status is then claimed when straight men don’t treat them as peers.

Creating hunger in men by actively inviting the male gaze, then demanding that men have no such hunger—that is toxic femininity. Subjugating men, emasculating them when they display strength—physical, intellectual, or other—that is toxic femininity. Insisting that men, simply by virtue of being men, are toxic, and then acting surprised as relationships between men and women become more strained—that is toxic femininity. It is a game, the benefits of which go to a few while the costs are shared by all of us.

Food is a Substitute for the Female Body

QZ |  Original recipes in a cozy home kitchen, intimate details about family life and domestic bliss—and painstakingly arranged food that oozes sexual overtones. These are the features of a successful food blog.

Often referred to as “food porn,” the trendy phenomenon highlights the seeming contradiction between femininity and feminism while also allowing women to shape the possibilities for women’s identities in online spaces. In contemporary social culture, women are encouraged to be feminists and pursue professional ambitions while still maintaining their femininity and domesticity. Their chief value in society is to reproduce and feed their families while denying their own appetites. These blogs reflect the digital identities of women who have been required to embody multiple contradictions—and look delectable while doing so.

In the food blogosphere, some of these sexualized conventions include the overabundance of “oozing” food, including runny egg yolks that are captured dribbling over neat vegetable beds, chocolate lava cakes with molten centers that drizzle over porcelain plates, and frosted cakes depicted with glazes dripping down their tall sides. There is also something sexually tinged about many food blogs’ penchant for “cheeky peeks,” a photographic motif that peers inside the hidden layers of elaborately decorated cakes. Examples of this include cakes stuffed with candy, desserts whose batter is painstakingly dyed and assembled to reveal ombre and checkerboard patterns when sliced open, and an array of gravity-defying layer cakes.

Pornographic imagery is built upon women offering their bodies to the male gaze, but food porn recognizes and appreciates the creative and technical skills of the woman behind the camera. In this way, food is used as a substitute for the female body; food bloggers offer intimate domestic details from their kitchens, rather than their bedrooms. Food porn can therefore be seen as a way of recognizing the active and creative capacities of women’s bodies rather than the more passive and objectified positions of traditional erotica.

Food and Dieting Negotiate Hegemonic Masculinities in American Popular Culture

emilycontois |  The Dudification of Diet: Food Masculinities in Twenty-First-Century America examines how the food, advertising, and media industries have constructed masculinities through food in the twenty-first-century United States, particularly when attempting to create male consumers for products socially perceived as feminine. Employing the tools of critical discourse analysis to examine food, dieting, and cooking, I consider a diverse array of media texts—including advertising campaigns, marketing trade press, magazines, newspapers, industry reports, restaurants, menus, food criticism, blogs, and social media. Case studies include diet sodas (Coke Zero and Dr. Pepper Ten), yogurts (Oikos Triple Zero and Powerful Yogurt), weight loss programs (primarily Weight Watchers), and food television (namely Food Network star, Guy Fieri).

More than just companies jockeying for market share, these food phenomena “for men” marked a moment of heightened gender anxiety and the rise of a new gender discourse—dude masculinity. Partly created by the food marketing industry, dude masculinity sought to create socially acceptable routes into and through the feminized terrain of food and the body. As a gender discourse, it celebrates the “average guy,” while remaining complicit in hegemonic masculinity’s overall structure of social inequality.

Beyond gender performance, dude masculinity articulates apprehension for how consumption reconfigures notions of citizenship, bodily surveillance, and nationhood. Dude masculinity tells a larger story of the United States’ very recent past, one rooted in perceived social chaos, concerned with terrorism, border control, immigration, same-sex marriage, race relations, new media, and neoliberalism. Despite decades of resistance and progress toward gender equality, these recent social shifts have resulted in the reactionary shoring up of gendered categories, a complex and contradictory sociocultural process that I read through dude masculinity, food, and the body.

Previous scholarship has treated these areas of culture separately and considered food and gender largely in terms of femininity, domesticity, and care work. I synthesize feminist studies of media, food, and the body and apply them to masculinities, centering discussions of power. Bridging theory and practice, this dissertation also informs how entities like advertising campaigns, food packaging design, public health programs, and weight loss studies can rewrite gender scripts to promote equality and justice.

What To Make Of Mueller's Hacking Indictment

moonofalabama |  Assessment:

• It is not by chance that this indictment was published now,  a few days before the first summit between Donald Trump and the Russian President Vladimir Putin and shortly before the successful soccer world championship in Russia ends. The release intends to sabotage the talks.
• The indictment describes a wide ranging operation but includes zero proof of anything it alleges.
• Mueller likely hopes that the indictment will never come in front of a court. The alleged stuff would be extremely difficult to prove. Any decent lawyer would ask how the claimed information was gained and how much of it was based on illegal snooping by the NSA. Something the U.S. would hate to reveal.
• It is unlikely that there will ever be a trial of these cases. The indicted persons are all Russians in Russia and none of them is likely to be stupid enough to follow an invitation to Las Vegas or to Disney World.

But who knows?

lawfareblog |   Before turning to what the indictment alleges, and what we can learn from it, it’s worth zooming out to an important macro point about the investigation that led to this action: This was the investigation over which the president of the United States fired James Comey as FBI director.

This is the investigation Comey confirmed on March 20, 2017, when he told Congress, “I have been authorized by the Department of Justice to confirm that the FBI, as part of our counterintelligence mission, is investigating the Russian government's efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.”

This was also the investigation that multiple congressional committees have spent more than a year seeking to discredit—most recently Thursday, when two House panels hauled the former deputy assistant director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Department, Peter Strzok, a career FBI agent who worked on the Russia probe, up to Capitol Hill for 10 hours of public, televised, abusive conspiracy theorizing. When the president of the United States derides the Mueller investigation as a “witch hunt,” and when congressional Republicans scream at FBI agents, this is the investigation they are trying to harass out of existence.

It is, therefore, fitting that this indictment comes less than one day after the astonishing display House Republicans put on in the Strzok hearing. If Mueller had been trying to remind the public of what the investigation is really about and what the stakes are in it, if he had been trying to make a public statement in response to the Strzok hearing, he could not have timed this action better.

The Peter Principle: Top People - Thought Leadership

consortiumnews |  If FBI agent Peter Strzok were not so glib, it would have been easier to feel some sympathy for him during his tough grilling at the House oversight hearing on Thursday, even though his wounds are self-inflicted. The wounds, of course, ooze from the content of his own text message exchange with his lover and alleged co-conspirator, Lisa Page.

 

Strzok was a top FBI counterintelligence official and Page an attorney working for then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.  The Attorney General fired McCabe in March and DOJ has criminally referred McCabe to federal prosecutors for lying to Justice Department investigators.

On Thursday members of the House Judiciary and Oversight/Government Reform Committees questioned Strzok for eight hours on how he led the investigations of Hillary Clinton’s unauthorized emails and Donald Trump’s campaign’s ties with Russia, if any.

Strzok did his best to be sincerely slick.  Even so, he seemed to feel beleaguered — even ambushed — by the questions of Republicans using his own words against him. “Disingenuous” is the word a Republican Congresswoman used to describe his performance.  Nonetheless, he won consistent plaudits from the Democrats. He showed zero regret for the predicament he put himself into, except for regret at his royal screw-up in thinking he and Lisa could “talk about Hillary” (see below) on their FBI cellphones and no one would ever know.  One wag has suggested that Strzok may have been surreptitiously texting, when he should have been listening to the briefing on “Cellphone Security 101.”

In any case, the chickens have now come home to roost.  Most of those chickens, and Strzok’s predicament in general, are demonstrably the result of his own incompetence.  Indeed, Strzok seems the very embodiment of the “Peter Principle.” FBI agents down the line — that is, the non-peter-principle people — are painfully aware of this, and resent the discredit that Strzok and his bosses have brought on the Bureau.  Many are reportedly lining up to testify against what has been going on at the top.

It is always necessary at this point to note that the heads of the FBI, CIA, NSA and even the Department of Justice were operating, as former FBI Director James Comey later put it, in an environment “where Hillary Clinton was going to beat Donald Trump.”  Most of them expected to be able to stay in their key positions and were confident they would receive plaudits — not indictments — for the liberties that they, the most senior U.S. law enforcement officials, took with the law.  In other words, once the reality that Mrs. Clinton was seen by virtually everyone to be a shoo-in is taken into account, the mind boggles a lot less.

Mueller's Harebrained Indictment of Russians Is Pure Political Theater...,

TCTH  |  The indictment is a grand exposition in explaining something without a single citation of factual evidence for how they arrived at the multitude of conclusions.

Consider this takeaway from a left-wing group who love the indictment:

“The indictment is impressive in its detail and the specificity of its allegations. It shows that Mueller has developed extremely good evidence. Where is it coming from?” 

(link)

You see, that’s the rub…. there is not a single piece of information explaining how Robert Mueller’s team arrived at their indictment conclusion.   Just lots of conclusions.

Again, I repeat: the FBI was never allowed access to the DCCC, DNC and Clinton Campaign servers?

Obviously, it helps when the listed names on the indictment will never actually be indicted or come before a U.S. court to challenge the assertions.  It’s very convenient for the DOJ to be able to make claims, knowing: A) no-one in media will demand the source evidence; and B) none of the accused will ever show up to be tried.

This announcement, and the indictment itself, is pure propaganda.

The entire narrative is based on a story; and it is a story; that can never be proved.

The biggest “risk” to the deep state is any entity who focuses on the DOJ and FBI abuse of the NSA and FBI database in 2015 and 2016.  They were conducting political opposition research using FISA-702(16)(17) searches of collected information.

Along with FBI compartmented SCIF’s, the DOJ-NSD was the hub for the corrupt officials doing those illegal searches.  This is not in question.  It happened:

It's Written All Over Your Face - You Don't Have To Say A Word...,

Optimizing the Human Supply Chain

nakedcapitalism |  No, though this is about as good — and as neoliberal — as it gets (even though the phrase “human supply chain” is not used). I don’t agree that “The key to any market correctly operating is information.” For one thing, “correctly” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. For another, the key to the way markets operate is not information, but power. I mean, does Prepscius really believe that “reputational enhancement…, risk mitigation[,] and workforce retention” pose “significant business value” when put beside profit?

All of which brings me to the single, solitary on-point source I was able to find: Fordham’s Jennifer Gordon’s “Regulating the Human Supply Chain,” 446 Iowa Law Review, Vol. 102:445-503 (pdf)[5]. I highly recommend that anybody who has read this far give Gordon a look. From the abstract:

In 2015, the number of migrant workers entering the United States on visas was nearly double that of undocumented arrivals—almost the inverse of just 10 years earlier. Yet notice of this dramatic shift, and examination of its implications for U.S. law and the regulation of employment in particular, has been absent from legal scholarship.

This Article fills that gap, arguing that employers’ recruitment of would-be migrants from other countries, unlike their use of undocumented workers already in the United States, creates
a transnational network of labor intermediaries—the “human supply chain”—whose operation undermines the rule of law in the workplace, benefitting U.S. companies by reducing labor costs while creating distributional harms for U.S. workers, and placing temporary migrant workers in situations of severe subordination. It identifies the human supply chain as a key structure of the global economy, a close analog to the more familiar product supply chains through which U.S. companies manufacture products abroad. The Article highlights a stark governance deficit with regard to human supply chains, analyzing the causes and harmful effects of an effectively unregulated world market for human labor.

That’s the stuff to give the troops! And here is a worked example, from page 472 et seq. I apologize for the length, but it’s lovely because all of the links in the chain are displayed:

B. WHERE HUMAN AND PRODUCT SUPPLY CHAINS MEET: AN EXAMPLE
B. WHERE HUMAN AND PRODUCT SUPPLY CHAINS MEET: AN EXAMPLE
Apple Fresh is a (fictitious) apple cider maker in Washington State…. Like all employers, Apple Fresh is responsible for ensuring that its employees’ wages, benefits, and working conditions comport with legal and contractual minimums. It must also pay social-security premiums on its employees’ behalf and cover their unemployment and workers’ compensation insurance. … As part of its effort to meet those demands, Apple Fresh decides to outsource its apple pressing to one of several food processors in the market, Presser Inc., which can produce the cider more cheaply and efficiently. Once it signs a contract with Presser, Apple Fresh is released from responsibility for the social insurance and many of the working conditions of the workers who press its apples, because it is no longer their employer. Presser now bears those obligations. …
In year two of the contract, Presser decides to try to decrease turnover and increase its profit margin by using temporary migrant workers to staff its plant. Its owner had been contacted not long before by the U.S. agent of a labor-recruitment firm in Mexico City…

Oooh, lookie. Rent-seeking intermediaries!

The Future of Humankind

medium |  Okay, so we’re not talking about entire brain transplants. There’s a joke that the only organ that’s better to donate than to receive is the brain.

No, no, no, just pieces.

Might people add brain tissue for extra IQ points?

For it to be used in healthy people, it has to be exceptionally safe. But I could imagine that being quite safe.

I think doing experiments on humanlike artificial intelligence would be unethical.

Are there applications of these brain organoids to artificial intelligence?

Oh, that’s the fourth category. The human brain is pretty far ahead of any silicon-based computing system, except for very specialized tasks like information retrieval or math or chess. And we do it at 20 watts of power for the brain, relative to, say, 100,000 watts for a computer doing a very specialized task like chess. So, we’re ahead both in the energy category and in versatility and out-of-the-box thinking. Also, Moore’s law is reaching a plateau, while biotechnology is going through super-exponential growth, where it’s improving by factors of 10 per year in cost/benefit.

Currently, computers have a central processing unit (CPU), often accompanied by specialized chips for particular tasks, like a graphical processing unit (GPU). Might a computer someday have an NPU, or neural processing unit — a bit of brain matter plugged into it?

Yeah, it could. Hybrid systems, such as humans using smartphones, are very valuable, because there are specialized tasks that computers are very good at, like retrieval and math. Although even that could change. For example, now there’s a big effort to store information in DNA. It’s about a million times higher-density than current silicon or other inorganic storage media. That could conceivably in the future be something where biological systems could be better than inorganic or even hybrid systems.

At what size should we think about whether lab brains deserve rights?

All of these things will at some point be capable of all kinds of advanced thinking. I think doing experiments on humanlike artificial intelligence would be unethical as well. There’s this growing tendency of computer scientists to want to make them general purpose. Even if they’re what we would call intellectually challenged, they would have some rights. We may want ways of asking them questions, as in a Turing test, but in this case, to make sure we’re not doing something that would cause pain or anxiety.

Will we ever develop into something that calls itself a new species? And could there be branching of the species tree?

It’s a little hard to predict whether we’ll go toward a monoculture or whether we’ll go toward high diversity. Even if we go toward high diversity, they could still be interbreedable. You look at dogs, for example. Very high diversity, but in principle, any breed of dog can mate with any other dog and produce hybrid puppies. My guess is that we will go toward greater diversity and yet greater interoperability. I think that’s kind of the tendency. We want all of our systems to interoperate. If you look into big cities, you’re getting more and more ability to bridge languages, to bridge cultures. I think that will also be true for species.

Do you think your greatest contribution to humanity will be something you’ve done, or something you’ve yet to do?

Well, I hope it’s something I have yet to do. I think I’m just now getting up to speed after 63 years of education. Aging reversal is something that will buy me and many of my colleagues a lot more time to make many more contributions, so you might consider that a meta-level contribution, if we can pull that off. The sort of things we’re doing with brains and new ways of computing could again be a meta thing. In other words, if we can think in new ways or scale up new forms of intelligence, that would lead to a whole new set of enabling technologies.

Survival of the Richest

Grinnell |  Officially, the eugenics movement ended for the most part by the end of the Baby Boom, as proven by the closure of most official eugenics organizations. Unfortunately, the eugenics movement has been replaced by a slightly modified neo-eugenics movement, which also believes that characteristics or traits such as poverty, criminality, and illegitimacy are signs that a person is unfit to reproduce. The difference is that neo-eugenicists believe that these traits are passed on not genetically, but through culture and environment. This movement recognizes that traits like poverty and illegitimacy are not actually included in the genetic code, but it has many of the same effects as the original eugenics movement.

Neo-eugenics developed during the Civil Rights Movement, a time when white privilege was clearly threatened in the United States.[3] These neo-eugenicists were concerned with preserving the white race, which ironically now included southern and eastern Europeans, who had earlier been considered the greatest threat to the purity of white America. Currently, neo-eugenics rarely targets white women, regardless of their socioeconomic status, but instead focuses its attention on recent immigrants, blacks, and Mexicans, among others.

In the 1970s, the eugenics movement began to focus its attention on other underprivileged groups of people. Physicians employed by the Indian Health Service, who were supposed to be providing medical care for Native American women, forcibly sterilized somewhere between 25 and 42 percent of Native American women of childbearing age. At the same time, women on welfare who had an illegitimate child were often punished by forced sterilizations immediately after giving birth. The eugenicists and physicians who performed this procedure justified it by saying that “those who accepted government assistance should submit to government oversight and conform to mainstream, white middle-class values and gender roles.”[4] Anyone who did not follow the social rules of middle-class white men could be subject to forced sterilization.

Unfortunately, the neo-eugenics movement has not disappeared from the American consciousness. Between 2006 and 2010, 148 women incarcerated in California prisons were illegally and forcibly sterilized through the use of tubal ligations.[5] Only since 1979 have forced sterilizations been forbidden in California, and although these women were clearly wronged, there are still many supporters of these practices for women in prison.[6]

Despite the fact that eugenic ideas still permeate much of American society, statistics show that fertility levels are declining in most of the world. If current trends continue, in the near future half of the human population will be at the replacement level of fertility, or 2.1 children per set of parents.[7] If all humans eventually began to reproduce at exactly the replacement level of fertility, the entire world population would stabilize and we would not see the exponential human population growth that we are currently experiencing. The United States is currently at almost exactly the replacement level of 2.1 children per family, and any increases in the national population are due almost exclusively to immigration and higher life expectancies, not incredibly high birth rates.

Also Sprach Zarathustra

jstor |  Eugenics straddles the line between repellent Nazi ideas of racial purity and real knowledge of genetics. Scientists eventually dismissed it as pseudo-scientific racism, but it has never completely faded away. In 1994, the book The Bell Curve generated great controversy when its authors Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein argued that test scores showed black people to be less intelligent than white people. In early 2017, Murray’s public appearance at Middlebury College elicited protests, showing that eugenic ideas still have power and can evoke strong reactions.

But now, these disreputable ideas could be supported by new methods of manipulating human DNA. The revolutionary CRISPR genome-editing technique, called the scientific breakthrough of 2015, makes it relatively simple to alter the genetic code. And 2016 saw the announcement of the “Human Genome Project–write,” an effort to design and build an entire artificial human genome in the lab.

These advances led to calls for a complete moratorium on human genetic experimentation until it has been more fully examined. The moratorium took effect in 2015. In early 2017, however, a report by the National Academies of Sciences and National Academy of Medicine, “Human Genome Editing: Science, Ethics, and Governance,” modified this absolute ban. The report called for further study, but also proposed that clinical trials of embryo editing could be allowed if both parents have a serious disease that could be passed on to the child. Some critics condemned even this first step as vastly premature.

Nevertheless, gene editing potentially provides great benefits in combatting disease and improving human lives and longevity. But could this technology also be pushing us toward a neo-eugenic world?

As ever, science fiction can suggest answers. The year 2017 is the 85th anniversary of Brave New World, Aldous Huxley’s vision of a eugenics-based society and one of the great twentieth-century novels. Likewise, 2017 will bring the 20th anniversary of the release of the sci-fi film Gattaca, written and directed by Andrew Niccol, about a future society based on genetic destiny. NASA has called Gattaca the most plausible science fiction film ever made.

In 1932, Huxley’s novel, written when the eugenics movement still flourished, imagined an advanced biological science. Huxley knew about heredity and eugenics through his own distinguished family: His grandfather Thomas Huxley was the Victorian biologist who defended Darwin’s theory of evolution, and his evolutionary biologist brother Julian was a leading proponent of eugenics.

Brave New World takes place in the year 2540. People are bred to order through artificial fertilization and put into higher or lower classes in order to maintain the dominant World State. The highest castes, the physically and intellectually superior Alphas and Betas, direct and control everything. The lower Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons, many of them clones, are limited in mind and body and exist only to perform necessary menial tasks. To maintain this system, the World State chemically processes human embryos and fetuses to create people with either enlarged or diminished capacities. The latter are kept docile by large doses of propaganda and a powerful pleasure drug, soma.

Like George Orwell’s 1984, reviewers continue to find Huxley’s novel deeply unsettling. To Bob Barr, writing in the Michigan Law Review, it is “a chilling vision” and R. S. Deese, in We Are Amphibians, calls its premise “the mass production of human beings.”

Genetic Analysis Of Social Class Mobility

pnas |  Our analysis suggests three take-home messages. The first take-home message is that genetics research should incorporate information about social origins. For genetics, our findings suggest that estimates of genetic associations with socioeconomic achievement reflect direct genetic effects as well as the effects of social inheritance correlated with genetics. Future genetic studies of social attainment can refine inferences about direct genetic effects by including measures of social origins in their study designs. The same is true for genetic studies of other phenotypes, because childhood socioeconomic circumstances are implicated in the etiology of many different traits and health conditions (54⇓–56). Such analysis will help clarify interpretation of studies that analyzed GWAS data and found evidence of genetic overlap between educational attainment and several biomedical phenotypes (57, 58). The advent of national biobanks and other large genetic datasets is increasing the power of GWAS to map genetic risks. Research to investigate how much of the genetic risk measured from GWAS discoveries arises within a single generation and how much accrues from social inheritance correlated with genetics across successive generations is needed.

The second take-home message is that social science research should incorporate information about genetic inheritance. For the social sciences, our findings provide molecular evidence across birth cohorts and countries of genetic influence on social attainment and social mobility. This evidence supports theory in the social sciences that frames genetics as one mechanism among several through which social position is transmitted across generations (9, 20, 21, 59). These theories imply that genetic factors can confound estimates of social environmental effects. However, because genetics have been difficult to measure, studies addressing these theories have had to estimate genetic contributions to attainment indirectly, while other social science research has simply ignored the problem. Now, genetically informed theories of social attainment and mobility can be revisited, tested, and elaborated using molecular genetic data available in an ever-growing array of genetically informed social surveys and longitudinal cohort studies.

Beyond theory, integration of measured genetic inheritance into research on social mobility can add value in at least three ways. First, genetic controls can improve the precision of estimates of environmental effects (11, 14), e.g., of how features of parents’ social circumstances shape children’s development. Second, genetic measurements can provide a starting point for developmental investigations of pathways to social mobility (16, 60), e.g., to identify skills and behaviors that can serve as targets for environmental interventions to lift children out of poverty. Third, genetic measurements can be used to study gene–environment interplay; e.g., how policies and programs may strengthen or weaken genetic and nongenetic mechanisms of intergenerational transmission (61). In our analysis, modeling effects of social origins attenuated genetic-effect sizes by 10–50%, depending on the outcome and cohort. This variation is consistent with evidence that genetic influences on individual differences may vary across cultures and cohorts and across stages of the life course (62, 63). Research is needed to understand how molecular genetic effects on socioeconomic attainment may operate differently across environmental, historical, or economic contexts and the extent to which they may wax or wane across adult development.

The third take-home message is that genetic analysis of social mobility can inform programs and policies that change children’s environments as a way to promote positive development. The genetics we studied are related to socioeconomic attainment and mobility partly through channels that are policy-malleable. Personal characteristics linked with the attainment-related genetics we studied involve early-emerging cognitive and noncognitive skills, including learning to talk and read, act planfully, delay gratification, and get along with others (10, 16). These skills represent intervention targets in their own right, for example by policies and programs that safeguard perinatal development and provide enriching, stable family and educational environments (64). A significant contribution of our study is that the nongenetic social and material resources children inherit from their parents represent a further mechanism linking genetics and attainment over the life course. Policies and programs cannot change children’s genes, but they can help give them more of the resources that children who inherit more education-linked genetics tend to grow up with. Our findings suggest that such interventions could help close the gap. The next step is to find out precisely what those resources are.

Conclusion

A long-term goal of our sociogenomic research is to use genetics to reveal novel environmental intervention approaches to mitigating socioeconomic disadvantage. The analysis reported here takes one step toward enabling a study design to accomplish this. We found that measured genetics related to patterns of social attainment and mobility, partly through direct influences on individuals and partly through predicting the environments in which they grew up. Specifically, parents’ genetics influence the environments that give children their start in life, while children’s own genetics influence their social mobility across adult life. As we learn more about how genetics discovered in GWAS of education influence processes of human development that generate and maintain wealth and poverty, we can identify specific environments that shape those processes. Ultimately, this research approach can suggest interventions that change children’s environments to promote positive development across the life-course.

California's Number One Citizen Was A White Supremacist

timeline |  Charles M. Goethe invested a lot of money and philanthropy into Northern California. His environmental work earned him a prestigious park in his name, not to mention a school and some shiny plaques. He did good. He also believed white people were the superior race and needed to biologically quarantine themselves from diseased, delinquent Mexicans. If he could prevent brown people from procreating all together, even better.

At the time, this version of white supremacy didn’t stop politicians, educators, and community leaders from singing his praises. In fact, by mid century, Goethe’s name (pronounced “gay-tee”) was everywhere, enshrined in public parks and schools around the state capital. But after his death, and after decades of sanitizing the past, Goethe’s troubling legacy tumbled out.

American eugenics simmered in the early 20th century, then boiled into the 1920s and 1930s. Goethe was a strong force in advancing the conversation. He feared that Nordic people’s historical “contributions to all mankind” were under threat by “the coming of heterogeneity.” Under a guise of protecting this group, who, in California he interpreted as the state’s earliest pioneers, he founded the Immigration Study Commission in the early 1920s. Its target was “low powers,” otherwise known as Mestizos and Mexicans, that were infecting the nation’s “germ plasm,” according to Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (2015).

In 1927, he wrote to the Santa Cruz Sentinel, “The Anglo-Saxon birthrate is low. Peons multiply like rabbits….If race remains absolutely pure, and if an old American-Nordic family averages three children while an incoming Mexican peon family averages seven, by the fifth generation, the proportion of white Nordics to Mexican peons descended from these two families would be as 243 to 16,807.”

Goethe lobbied to close the border and instructed his real-estate brokers not to sell to Mexican people, who he viewed as sub-intelligent criminals.

Eugenics gave “the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable,” according to one of its founders, Francis Galton. Eugenicists inferred that heredity proved humans were inherently unequal, and race was the primary marker of not only inferior and superior genes but also of social supremacy. Leaders in the movement claimed brown and black populations suffered from inferior health due primarily to intrinsically flawed biology. But the wealth and social influence enjoyed by Anglo-Saxon populations was proof of a vast intellectual edge, too. To protect whites from “contamination” was considered, by eugenicists, a noble cause in the purification of the human race.

Already a member of several influential eugenics organizations, in 1933 Goethe organized and funded the Eugenics Society of Northern California. Over two decades, he lectured and lobbied with the goal of “reducing biological illiteracy.” During this time, he invested an estimated $1 million to publish pamphlets on racial superiority, family planning, tantrums against racial diversity, and other topics he considered related. In a 1936 presidential address to the national Eugenics Research Association, Goethe publicly defended Nazi Germany’s “honest yearnings for a better population” and proclaimed the country’s sterilization strategy as “administered wisely, and without racial cruelty.” (Two years earlier, Germany had sterilized roughly 5,000 people per month. Hitler praised America’s forced sterilization campaigns, such as Goethe’s, for the idea.) In his speech, Goethe emphasized the duty of Nordic nations to sterilize the “markedly social inadequate, such as those insane, blind, criminal by inheritance.” Between 1907 and 1940, tens of thousands of mostly poor women were involuntarily sterilized in the U.S. At least 20,000 Californians residing in state prisons and hospitals were sterilized before 1964, with laws supported by Goethe.

What made Goethe unique at the time wasn’t necessarily his white supremacist beliefs; it was the fact that he interwove racial pseudoscience with progressive tentpole issues, such as conservation and public education. Throughout his lifetime, he designated several redwood preserves, built playgrounds, financed an orphanage, established ranger programs, contributed to San Francisco’s Academy of Sciences planetarium, and, with his wife Mimi, was considered the founder of the interpretive parks movement. Each of these he considered a step toward the purification of a safer, cleaner, more wholesome, and white America.

Admit You Don't Like Poor People...,

medium |  In the sociological literature on poverty, there are ample studies and papers about the ways that being poor impacts the brain. Stress, malnutrition, and exposure to the kinds of environmental contaminants that often accompany lower-income neighborhoods (Flint’s lack of clean water or the poor air quality in schools around highways) can have serious neurological impacts on people living on the economic margins.

Less studied, however, is the impact that poverty—seeing it, knowing about it, thinking about it—has on the brains of people who are not poor.

This is also an important area of study, though, particularly as cities and states attempt to maneuver unprecedented wealth inequality and homelessness. Perceptions of poverty (and, as a result, perceptions of scarcity) have substantial impacts on the way we collectively think, act, vote, and legislate.

And often, we don’t bother to examine them.

This is clear in community meetings about new affordable housing or homeless shelters, wherein self-proclaimed “concerned” neighbors begin every testimony with something along the lines of “I care about the homeless! I really do! But…” and then follow their opener with something that expresses an unfounded bias about people living in poverty.

“…I’m worried about increases in crime.”

“…why do we have to pay for their housing?”

“…they’ll just trash it!”

“…how will I explain them to my children?”

These sentiments — which assume that homeless individuals are criminals, that they’re freeloaders, that their very existence is somehow damaging to children — are not based in research, nor do they account for the complexity of socioeconomic status. They are, instead, based on a reaction to poverty and scarcity that is intimately linked to our own survival mechanisms.

Just as humans grapple with implicit biases with regard to race, gender, size, and a host of other differences, it’s clear from the research that does exist, as well as the anecdotal evidence playing out in communities around the country right now, that witnessing poverty and perceiving scarcity creates biases in people who are not poor.

But again, like racial- and gender-based discrimination, cognitive reactions aren’t an excuse for acting on those biases.

Mammy's Little Baby Loves Quesadillas...,

nakedcapitalism |  In our last post on “illegals,” we looked at the odd refusal, by the press, to call the capitalist employers of illegal migrants “illegals.” Today, I want to work out a similar kink in the discourse by looking at the nannies who are employed by the professional class on up (that is, by the 0.1% and the 9.9%). The supply chain and labor market for migrants, illegal or not, is insanely complicated, and so I’m only going to look at nannies, and not at yard men, construction workers, restaurant workers, factory workers, etc. The complexity also makes solid numbers hard to come by. But there are generalizations that we can make, as we shall see. After making those generalizations, we’ll conclude with some telling anecdotes.

“Nannies” were first weaponized in political discourse during the Clinton administration (as retrospectively we might expect, since Clinton represented and embodied the then fresh ascendancy of the professional classes (the 9.9%) in the Democrat Party). “NannyGate” derailed Clinton’s nominations of corporate lawyer Zoë Baird and Federal Judge Kimba Wood for Attorney General, Baird because she employed an illegal migrant after it was illegal to employ them and didn’t pay the nanny’s taxes, Wood because she employed an illegal migrant even though when she did it was legal to do so. “The Nannygate matter caused wealthy Americans to ask each other if they too had a ‘Zoë Baird problem’, as the hiring of illegal aliens and the paying of household help off the books were both commonplace.” And so — speculating freely — we have solved that potential optics problem with the ubiquituous nanny brokers (“agencies”) of today, chat boards that share tips for explain the risks of hiring nannies, all of which are filled with “I don’t, but I have heard that others do” comments. 

As far as the class angle goes, the median hourly wage for all nannies in the United States is $14.59 an hour (in New York, $17.63). The median hourly wage (pause for toothgrinding calculation) for all occupations is $18.12. Taking income as a proxy for class, and assuming that being a nanny is a full time job, it seems reasonable to conclude that the working class (the 90%) isn’t hiring nannies (except perhaps for labor aristocrats)[1]. That means that the labor market for nannies is made by the 9.9% and the 0.1%; they are the ones doing the hiring.

So let’s take a look at that labor market. It would not be fair to say that all, or even most, nannies are illegal migrants. (The illegality comes in at another angle, which I’ll get to.) From GTM Payroll Services in 2015, and taking “maids and housekeepers” as a proxy for nannies:

According to a Pew Research Center study published last year, there were 8.1 million unauthorized immigrants either working or looking for work in 2012. The study also shows that the largest number of unauthorized immigrant workers are found in service occupations, which include maids, cooks, or groundskeepers. In fact, maids and housekeepers account for 25% of undocumented workers within those occupations. These employees make up a critical part of our economy.

We have no numbers for nannies hired illegally by the 0.1%, but we do have telling anecdotes, as of this from Hollywood actress and producer Amber Heard. (The median yearly salary for a Hollywood produder is “just $66,121.”) From TMZ:

The actress took to Twitter just after midnight on Tuesday and said, “Just heard there’s an ICE checkpoint in [H]ollywood, a few blocks from where I live. Everyone better give their housekeepers, nannies and landscapers a ride home tonight.”

“Everyone,” eh? Some in the 0.1% (those who don’t hire elite nannies) might actually prefer hiring nannies illegally, since that gives them more leverage. Reading between the lines:

Truth is Treason in the Empire of Lies

theburningplatform |  The forces of tyranny are winning. Our banking, financial, political, and media structures are wracked by corruption and controlled by a “few” insiders for the benefit of themselves and their cronies. Smedley Butler said war was a racket, but every institution is now a racket, with a corrupt powerful cadre of evil men reaping riches at the expense of the many. Their rackets are based upon nothing but lies and the continued blissful ignorance of the masses to their flagrant criminal activities.

The dark side of human nature has been on full display as the country has been hijacked by organizations run by psychopaths like Brennan, Clapper, Comey, Soros, Dimon, Bernanke, Paulson, Rubin, Zuckerberg, Bezos and a multitude of lesser known, but equally dangerous, psychopaths infecting government, business and the media.

Those pulling the strings of our ever-degrading society share many of the same traits – superficially charming, pathologically deceitful, manipulative, accepting no responsibility for their actions, lacking empathy, absence of guilt, no humility, dishonest, treacherous, having a grandiose sense of self-worth, and prone to dangerous destructive risk taking. These are the people who rise to power when citizens become lazy, disinterested, willfully ignorant, distracted by social media, dumbed down by government run education, and easily led to believe falsehoods peddled by a media doing the bidding of the psychopaths in power.

Just listen to Brennan or Clapper on fake news CNN or MSNBC to get a glimpse of psychopaths in action. It’s almost as if they believe their own lies. The faux journalist millionaires questioning these scumbags aren’t paid by their corporate masters to uncover the truth, but perpetuate the narrative of lies.

Ate El Salvadoran Twice This Past Weekend - Oh My Gawd....,

Counterpunch |  U.S. pundits and politicians just discovered, it seems, that Washington’s decisions harm Central American families. For the New York Times, “separating families…is something new and malicious,” reflecting Trump’s “heartlessness” and violating “fundamental American values.” “This, apparently, is how you turn off the idea of America,” Alex Wagner (The Atlantic) added. The Los Angeles Times thinks “the administration’s cold-hearted approach to enforcement has crossed the line into abject inhumanity,” departing– so we’re to believe– from past practice.

These are half-accurate charges: Trump’s policy is malicious, heartless, cold-hearted. But it isn’t new. Both in Central America and along its Mexican border, Washington has helped rip apart families for decades, forcing children to endure a world without their parents, mothers to cope with their children’s sickening ends. Abject inhumanity, in other words, is a U.S. foreign policy hallmark.

Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras– review their histories. You’ll be crushed by evidence revealing which values shape Washington’s conduct, which norms govern its behavior in a region where it enjoys immense influence. And you’ll begin to understand why many had to flee these countries. Start with Guatemala. Ríos Montt, the dictator the U.S. funded, armed, and encouraged, oversaw the Mayan genocide there. In one episode, on April 3, 1982, the Guatemalan army overran the village of Chel, slaughtering its residents and orphaning Pedro Pacheco Bop, whose great-grandfather, parents, and five siblings (aged two to 14) were all murdered, their blood draining into the Chel River where the troops hurled the dead. Tomas Chávez Brito was two years old when the army fell upon his village, Sajsibán, seven months later, torching his home with his mother, sisters, and other family members inside. In the mountains, where Tomas hid for the following year eating plants to survive, one can only imagine how the idea of orphanhood, his new reality, settled in his mind. Margarita Rivera Ceto de Guzmán’s family separation was quicker. Soldiers knifed her in the stomach, killing her unborn child.

Egla Martínez Salazar, addressing this genocide, explains that assaults on Maya households conveyed “the message that Mayas did not live in ‘real’ families, but rather in ‘living arrangements’ that constituted breeding spaces for ‘international communist indoctrination.’” Erasing these spaces required “the mass murder of children,” plus “the forced transfer of surviving Maya children to military and paramilitary families,” tactics Salvadoran forces also adopted in the 1980s. Apart from killing most of the 75,000 slain there from 1980-1992– the stretch when Carter, Reagan, and Bush I funneled $6 billion into the country– “soldiers [also] abducted children in what an international court says was a ‘systematic pattern of forced disappearances.’” 

Why Isn't The Law Being Enforced On Replacement Negroe Lovers?

nakedcapitalism |  As readers know, I deprecate the (informal: disparaging and dffensive) noun “illegals,” not only because it’s a slippery slope to “frugals,” “orals,” “regals,” and so forth, but because I can’t think of a good reason to insult people who are, often courageously, trying to improve their own lives and those of their families. (“Scab,” of course, is another pejorative for people with similar motives. So, for that matter, is “banker.” It’s complicated!) In any case, it’s these migrants[1] presence that’s illegal, not they themselves, so, heck, maybe it’s all just an innocent case of metonymy…. In this post, I want to straighten out not these, but another small kink in our political discourse, which shows up when you read this story from the Times carefully. The headline:

An ICE Raid Leaves an Iowa Town Divided Along Faith Lines

Parenthetically, and just for the record, allow me to insert this photo of a church congregation that became a crossroads for families and supporters of the men detained in the workplace raid in that small town:

I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I have the nagging feeling there’s something about that picture inconsistent with an important liberal Democrat construct, identity politics. Close parenthesis.

Immediately I asked, as one should ask, why is faith the chosen dividing line? After all, you can slice and dice a human population as many ways as you can a pineapple, or a cake. Could it be that there’s another, more interesting “divide” that the reporter’s choice elides?

The reporter, slicing the pineapple by faith, ignores the question of law. We know who is subject to the law: The migrants, caught up in the raid. Is there anybody in the story who is not subject to the law? Why, yes. Yes, there is:

No charges have been filed against the owners of the Midwest Precast Concrete plant in Mount Pleasant that was raided. An ICE spokesman declined to comment, citing a continuing investigation.

So, the elite have impunity when they break the law; et in Mount Pleasant ego. We know this, of course, from the Crash, so no surprises here. Oddly, or not, the reporter, when interviewing business owners, doesn’t raise this point: