wsws | The Oxford Union has finally responded to the exposure of its
attempts to censor one of its own panel discussions, “Whistleblowing:
Exposing injustices or undermining institutions?” held on February 27.
The response came in the form of an article in Oxford University’s student newspaper, Cherwell,
June 7 under the headline “Union denies censoring whistleblowing panel video.” In it, the Oxford Union’s society bursar Lindsey Warne and
current president Gui Cavalcanti use evasions and lies against one of
the panel members, human rights activist Heather Marsh.
As the World Socialist Web Site has explained, “Records of
the event, including transcripts and videos, have been withheld from
publication.” The only plausible reason for this was to suppress Marsh’s
devastating criticism of one of her co-panelists—former US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operative David Shedd.
For more than three months Oxford Union have kept silent on why the
event was not reported. This is despite repeated requests by Marsh,
asking when the video of the panel would be uploaded and why this was
not being done.
The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) has
made its own attempts to establish on whose authority and on what
grounds the panel was censored but has been ignored.
Only after Marsh visited Oxford Union in person in April did she
receive a response. Marsh states that Warne informed her that Shedd had
pressured for the video to be withheld—something Warne now claims she
never said.
strategic-culture |The beginning of the end of the
Bilderberg/Soros vision is in sight. The Old Order will cling on, even
to the last of its fingernails. The Bilderberg vision is the notion of
multi-cultural, international cosmopolitanism that surpasses old-time
nationalism; heralding the end of frontiers; and leading toward a
US-led, ‘technocratic’, global economic and political governance. Its
roots lie with figures such as James Burnham, an anti-Stalin, former
Trotskyite, who, writing as early as 1941, advocated for the levers of
financial and economic power being placedin the hands of a management
class: an élite – which alone would be capable of running the
contemporary state - thanks to this élite’s market and financial
technical nous. It was, bluntly, a call for an expert, technocratic
oligarchy.
Burnham renounced his allegiance to
Trotsky and Marxism, in all its forms in 1940, but he would take the
tactics and strategies for infiltration and subversion, (learned as a
member of Leon Trotsky’s inner circle) with him, and would elevate the
Trotskyist management of ‘identity politics’ to become the fragmentation
‘device’ primed to explode national culture onto a new stage, in the
Western sphere. His 1941 book, “The Managerial Revolution,” caught
the attention of Frank Wisner, subsequently, a legendary CIA figure,
who saw in the works of Burnham and his colleague a fellow Trotskyite,
Sidney Hook, the prospect of mounting an effective alliance of former Trotskyites against Stalinism.
But, additionally, Wisner perceived its
merits as the blueprint for a CIA-led, pseudo-liberal, US-led global
order. (‘Pseudo’, because, as Burnham articulated clearly, in The Machiavellians, Defenders of Freedom,his version of
freedom meant anything but intellectual freedom or those freedoms
defined by America’s Constitution. “What it really meant was conformity
and submission”).
Trump evidently has heard the two key
messages from his constituency: that they neither accept to have (white)
American culture, and its way-of-life, diluted through immigration;
and, neither do they wish – stoically – to accommodate to America’s
eclipse by China.
The issue of how to arrest China’s rise is
primordial (for Team Trump), and in a certain sense, has led to an
American ‘retrospective’: America now may only account for 14% of global
output (PPP – Purchasing Power Parity basis), or 22%, on a nominal
basis (as opposed to near half of global output, for which the US was
responsible, at the close of WW2), but American corporations, thanks to
the dollar global hegemony, enjoy a type of monopoly status (i.e.
Microsoft, Google and Facebook, amongst others), either through
regulatory privilege, or by marketplace dominance. Trump wants to halt
this asset from decaying further and to leverage it again as a potent
bargaining chip in the present tariff wars. This is clearly a political
‘winner’ in terms of US domestic grass-roots, politics, and the upcoming
November mid-term elections.
America’s dollar hegemony has proved toxic
to the rest of the world in very many ways, and Trump - in leveraging
that hegemony so gangsterishly: “We’re America, Bitch”,
as one official described America’s approach – is fueling antagonism
towards dollar hegemony (if not yet towards America per se). It is
pushing all of non-America into a common stance of rebellion against
America’s unipolar financial dominance.
kunstler | You can’t overstate how fortunate this country was after the Second
World War. The mid-twentieth century was the apex of American industrial
wealth. We produced real goods and lived in extraordinary comfort. Now,
of course that has all turned around, the industry is mostly bygone,
the magnificent energy supply is getting sketchy, and all that’s left is
a false-front financialized economy based on swindling and
accounting fraud. Medicine and health care have become unabashed
rackets, and good luck finding a place to live for less than half of
your monthly income.
Things have changed, as Bob Dylan once noted in song, and the times
they are a ‘changing once again. This is probably the worst time in
recent history to go full-bore socialist. Look, it’s as simple as this:
the 20th century saw the greatest rise of global GDP ever.
The prospect of that is what drove the various socialisms of the period —
the belief that there would be evermore material wealth and that a lot
of it had to be fairly redistributed to the workers who brought it into
being. You can debate the finer socio-ethical points of that — and
indeed that’s what much of politics consisted of throughout the
industrialized world — but the stunning bonanza of wealth compelled it.
That is the world we are moving out of right now, despite the
fantasies of Elon Musk and the many techno pied pipers like him. GDP
growth has stalled, the implacable trend is toward contraction, and the
wizards of financial hocus-pocus are running out of tricks for
pretending that they create anything of value. In short: there’s no there
there. All that’s left are IOUs for loans that will never be paid back —
and that kind of loan (especially in the form of a bond) doesn’t have
any value.
So, the Democratic Party has embarked on a crusade to redistribute
the wealth of the nation at the exact moment when the “wealth” is
turning out to be gone. Good luck with that.
What intellectuals don't get about MIGRATION is the ethical notion of SYMMETRY:
OPEN BORDERS work if and only if the number of pple who want to go from EU/US to Africa/LatinAmer equals Africans/Latin Amer who want to move to EU/US
Independent | What is really needed in dealing with cannabis is
a “tobacco moment”, as with cigarettes 50 years ago, when a majority of
people became convinced that smoking might give them cancer and kill
them. Since then the number of cigarette smokers in Britain has fallen by two-thirds.
A depressing aspect of the present debate about cannabis is
that so many proponents of legalisation or decriminalisation have
clearly not taken on board that the causal link between cannabis and psychosis has
been scientifically proven over the past ten years, just as the
connection between cancer and cigarettes was proved in the late 1940s
and 1950s.
The proofs have emerged in a series of scientific studies
that reach the same grim conclusion: taking cannabis significantly
increases the risk of schizophrenia. One study in The Lancet Psychiatry
concludes that “the risk of individuals having a psychotic disorder
showed a roughly three times increase in users of skunk-like cannabis,
compared with those who never used cannabis”.
As 94 per cent of cannabis seized by the police today is super-strength skunk,
compared to 51 per cent in 2005, almost all those who take the drug
today will be vulnerable to this three-fold increase in the likelihood
that they will develop psychosis.
Mental health professionals have long had no doubts about the danger.
Five years ago, I asked Sir Robin Murray, professor of psychiatric
research at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, about them. He said
that studies showed that “if the risk of schizophrenia for the general
population is about one per cent, the evidence is that, if you take
ordinary cannabis, it is two per cent; if you smoke regularly you might
push it up to four per cent; and if you smoke ‘skunk’ every day you push
it up to eight per cent”.
Anybody wondering what happens to this 8 per cent of the skunk-smoking population should visit any mental hospital in Britain or speak to somebody who has done so.
Dr Humphrey Needham-Bennett, medical director and consultant
psychiatrist of Cygnet Hospital, Godden Green in Sevenoaks, explained to
me that among his patients “cannabis use is so common that I assume
that people use or used it. It’s quite surprising when people say ‘no, I
don’t use drugs’.”
The connection between schizophrenia and cannabis was long
suspected by specialists but it retained its reputation as a relatively
benign drug, its image softened by the afterglow of its association with
cultural and sexual liberation in the 1960s and 1970s.
WaPo | For many people, leisure time now means screen time.
Mom’s on social media, Dad’s surfing the Web, sister is texting friends,
and brother is playing a multiplayer shooting game like Fortnite.
But are they addicted? In June, the World Health Organization announced
that “gaming disorder” would be included in its disease classification
manual, reigniting debates over whether an activity engaged in by so
many could be classified as a disorder.
Experts were quick to point out that only 1 to 3 percent of gamers are likely to fit the diagnostic criteria,
such as lack of control over gaming, giving gaming priority over other
activities and allowing gaming to significantly impair such important
areas of life as social relationships.
Those low
numbers may give the impression that most people don’t have anything to
worry about. Not true. Nearly all teens, as well as most adults, have
been profoundly affected by the increasing predominance of electronic
devices in our lives. Many people suspect that today’s teens spend much
more time with screens and much less time with their peers face-to-face
than did earlier generations,and my analysis of numerous large
surveys of teens of various ages shows this to be true: The number of
17- and 18-year-olds who get together with their friends every day, for
example, dropped by more than 40 percent between 2000 and 2016. Teens
are also sleeping less, with sleep deprivation spiking
after 2010. Similar to the language in the WHO’s addiction criteria,
they are prioritizing time on their electronic devices over other
activities (and no, it’s not because they are studying more: Teens
actually spend less time on homework
than students did in the 1990s). Regardless of any questions around
addiction, how teens spend their free time has fundamentally shifted.
If teens were doing well, this might be fine. But they are not: Clinical-level depression, self-harm behavior (such as cutting), the number of suicide attempts and the suicide rate
for teens all rose sharply after 2010, when smartphones became common
and the iPad was introduced. Teens who spend excessive amounts of time
online are more likely to be sleep deprived, unhappy and depressed. Nor
are the effects small: For example, teens who spent five or more hours a
day using electronic devices were 66 percent more likely
than those who spent just one hour to have at least one risk factor for
suicide, such as depression or a previous suicide attempt.
Guardian | When I am well, I am happy and popular. It is tough to type these
words when I feel none of it. And sometimes when I am most well I am…
boring. Boring is how I want to be all of the time. This is what I have
been working towards, for 12 years now.
When friends decades older tell me off for saying that I am old, at
28, what I mean is: I haven’t achieved all the things I could have done
without this illness. I should have written a book by now. I should have
done so many things! All the time, I feel I am playing catch-up.
Always. I worry, and most of the literature tells me, that I will have
this problem for life. That it will go on, after the hashtags and the
documentaries and the book deals and Princes Harry and William – while the NHS circles closer to the drain.
Maybe it’s cute now, in my 20s. But it won’t be cute later, when I am
older and wearing tracksuits from 20 years ago and not in an ironic
hipster way but because I no longer wash or engage with the world, and
it’s like: my God, did you not get yourself together already?
When I left appointments and saw the long-term patients, walking
around in hospital-issue pyjamas, dead-eyed (the kind of image of the
mentally ill that has become anathema to refer to as part of the
conversation, but which in some cases is accurate), four emotions rushed
in: empathy, sympathy, recognition, terror. It’s one of those things
you can’t really talk about with authenticity unless you’ve seen it, not
really: the aurora borealis, Prince playing live and the inpatient
wards.
Maybe my prognosis will look up, maybe I’ll leave it all behind. I’ve
noticed a recent thing is for people to declare themselves “proud” of
their mental illness. I guess I don’t understand this. It does not
define me.
It’s not something that, when stable, I feel ashamed of, or that I
hide. But I am not proud of it. I’d rather I didn’t have it – so I
wasn’t exhausted, so I wasn’t bitter about it – despite the fact that I
know some people, in all parts of the world, are infinitely worse off.
I want it gone, so that I am not dealing with it all the time, or
worrying about others having to deal with it all the time. So I don’t
have to read another article, or poster, about how I just need to ask
for help. So that when a campaigner on Twitter says, “To anyone feeling
ashamed of being depressed: there is nothing to be ashamed of. It’s
illness. Like asthma or measles”, I don’t have to grit my teeth and say,
actually, I am not OK, and mental illness couldn’t be less like
measles. So that when someone else moans about being bored with everyone
talking about mental health, and a different campaigner replies,
“People with mental illness aren’t bored with it!” I don’t have to say,
no, I am: I am bored with this Conversation. Because more than talking
about it, I want to get better. I want to live.
quantamagazine | The question most of genetics tries to answer is how genes connect to
the traits we see. One person has red hair, another blonde hair; one
dies at age 30 of Huntington’s disease, another lives to celebrate a
102nd birthday. Knowing what in the vast expanse of the genetic code is
behind traits can fuel better treatments and information about future
risks and illuminate how biology and evolution work. For some traits,
the connection to certain genes is clear: Mutations of a single gene are
behind sickle cell anemia, for instance, and mutations in another
are behind cystic fibrosis.
But unfortunately for those who like things simple, these conditions
are the exceptions. The roots of many traits, from how tall you are to
your susceptibility to schizophrenia, are far more tangled. In fact,
they may be so complex that almost the entire genome may be involved in
some way, an idea formalized in a theory put forward last year.
Starting about 15 years ago, geneticists began to collect DNA from
thousands of people who shared traits, to look for clues to each trait’s
cause in commonalities between their genomes, a kind of analysis called
a genome-wide association study (GWAS). What they found, first, was that you need an enormous number of people to get statistically significant results — one recent GWAS
seeking correlations between genetics and insomnia, for instance,
included more than a million people.
Second, in study after study, even
the most significant genetic connections turned out to have surprisingly
small effects. The conclusion, sometimes called the polygenic
hypothesis, was that multiple loci, or positions in the genome, were
likely to be involved in every trait, with each contributing just a
small part. (A single large gene can contain several loci, each
representing a distinct part of the DNA where mutations make a
detectable difference.)
How many loci that “multiple” description might mean was not defined
precisely. One very early genetic mapping study in 1999 suggested that
“a large number of loci (perhaps > than 15)” might contribute to
autism risk, recalled Jonathan Pritchard, now a geneticist at Stanford University. “That’s a lot!” he remembered thinking when the paper came out.
Over the years, however, what scientists might consider “a lot” in this
context has quietly inflated. Last June, Pritchard and his Stanford
colleagues Evan Boyle and Yang Li (now at the University of Chicago) published a paper about this in Cell
that immediately sparked controversy, although it also had many people
nodding in cautious agreement. The authors described what they called the “omnigenic” model of complex traits.
Drawing on GWAS analyses of three diseases, they concluded that in the
cell types that are relevant to a disease, it appears that not 15, not
100, but essentially all genes contribute to the condition. The authors
suggested that for some traits, “multiple” loci could mean more than
100,000.
theatlantic | But
chimeras are not just oddities. You surely know one. In pregnant women,
fetal stem cells can cross the placenta to enter the mother’s
bloodstream, where they may persist for years. If Mom gets pregnant
again, the stem cells of her firstborn, still circulating in her blood,
can cross the placenta in the other direction, commingling with those of
the younger sibling. Heredity can thus flow “upstream,” from child to
parent—and then over and down to future siblings.
The
genome, Zimmer goes on to reveal, eludes tidy boundaries too. Forget
the notion that your genome is just the DNA in your chromosomes. We have
another genome, small but vital, in our cells’ mitochondria—the tiny
powerhouses that supply energy to the cell. Though the mitochondrial
genes are few, damage to them can lead to disorders of the brain,
muscles, internal organs, sensory systems, and more. At fertilization,
an embryo receives both chromosomes and mitochondria from the egg, and
only chromosomes from the sperm. Mitochondrial heredity thus flows
strictly through the maternal line; every boy is an evolutionary dead
end, as far as mitochondria are concerned.
Beyond the genome are
more surprises. Schoolchildren learn that Darwin’s predecessor, the
great French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, got heredity wrong when he suggested that traits acquired through
experience—like the giraffe’s neck, elongated by straining and
stretching to reach higher, perhaps tenderer, leaves—could be passed
down. The biologist August Weismann famously gave the lie to such
theories, which collectively are known as “soft” heredity. If Lamarckism
were true, he said, chopping the tail off mice and breeding them,
generation after generation, should eventually produce tailless mice. It
didn’t. Lamarck wasn’t lurking in the details.
Recent
research, however, is giving Lamarck a measure of redemption. A subtle
regulatory system has been shown to silence or mute the effects of genes
without changing the DNA itself. Environmental stresses such as heat,
salt, toxins, and infection can trigger so-called epigenetic responses,
turning genes on and off to stimulate or restrict growth, initiate
immune reactions, and much more. These alterations in gene activity,
which are reversible, can be passed down to offspring. They are
hitchhikers on the chromosomes, riding along for a while, but able to
hop on and off. Harnessing epigenetics, some speculate, could enable us
to create Lamarckian crops, which would adapt to a disease in one or two
generations and then pass the acquired resistance down to their
offspring. If the disease left the area, so would the resistance.
All
of these heredities—chromosomal, mitochondrial, epigenetic—still don’t
add up to your entire you. Not even close. Every one of us carries a
unique flora of hundreds if not thousands of microbes, each with its own
genome, without which we cannot feel healthy—cannot be “us.” These too
can be passed down from parent to child—but may also move from child to
adult, child to child, stranger to stranger. Always a willing volunteer,
Zimmer allowed a researcher to sample the microbes living in his
belly-button lint. Zimmer’s “navelome” included 53 species of bacteria.
One microbe had been known, until then, only from the Mariana Trench.
“You, my friend,” the scientist said, “are a wonderland.” Indeed, we all
are.
With this in mind,
reconsider the ongoing effort to engineer heredity. The motto of the
Second International Eugenics Congress, in 1921, was “Eugenics is the
self-direction of human evolution.” Since then, controlling heredity has
become technically much easier and philosophically more complicated.
When, in the 1970s, the first genetic engineering made medical gene
therapy feasible, many of its pioneers urged caution, lest some
government try to create a genetic Fourth Reich. In particular, two
taboos seemed commonsense: no enhancement, only therapy (thou shalt not
create a master race); and no alterations in germ-line tissues, only in
somatic cells (thou shalt not make heritable modifications).
Breitbart | Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic Party’s rising socialist
star, describes herself as “a girl from the Bronx” to project a
working-class image. However, this claim is only half true – to borrow a
phrase from the left-wing website PolitiFact.
“Well, you know, the president is from Queens, and with all due
respect — half of my district is from Queens — I don’t think he knows
how to deal with a girl from the Bronx,” Ocasio-Cortez said this week on
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
She similarly told the Washington Post:
“I wasn’t born to a wealthy or powerful family — mother from Puerto
Rico, dad from the South Bronx. I was born in a place where your Zip
code determines your destiny.”
The congressional candidate, who pulled off an upset win
against high-ranking establishment Rep. Joe Crowley (D-NY), was indeed
born in New York City’s Bronx borough. She currently lives there, too.
So what’s the issue? For most of her formative years, Ocasio-Cortez
was actually raised in one of the United States’ wealthiest counties.
Around the age of five, Alexandria’s architect father Sergio Ocasio
moved the family from the “planned community” of Parkchester in the
Bronx to a home in Yorktown Heights, a wealthy suburb in Westchester
County. The New York Timesdescribes her childhood home as “a modest two-bedroom house on a quiet street.” In a 1999 profile of the area, when Ocasio-Cortez would have been ten years old, the Times lauded Yorktown Heights’ “diversity of housing in a scenic setting” – complete with two golf courses.
The paper quoted Linda Cooper, the town supervisor, describing
Yorktown as ”a folksy area where people can come, kick off their shoes,
wander around, sit in a cafe, listen to a concert in the park, or go to
the theater.”
consortiumnews |Conventional
wisdom said that powerful Congressman Joseph Crowley couldn’t be beat.
But his 20-year career in the House of Representatives will end in
January, with the socialist organizer who beat him in the Democratic
primary in the deep-blue district of the Bronx and Queens poised to
become Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
In a
symbolic twist of fate, the stunning defeat of Crowley came a day before
the Rules and Bylaws Committee of the Democratic Party voted on what to
do about “superdelegates,” those unelected Democratic Party elite
who’ve had an undemocratic and automatic vote in presidential
nominations since 1984 to prevent leftwing candidates from being
nominated.
Crowley’s
defeat shows how grass-roots movements can prevail against corporate
power and its pile of cash. The Crowley campaign spent upward of $3
million in the Democratic Party primary. The Ocasio-Cortez campaign
spent one-tenth of that. He wielded the money. She inspired the people.
As the
28-year-old Ocasio-Cortez was quick to say after her Tuesday night
victory, her triumph belongs to everyone who wants social, economic and
racial justice. She ran on a platform
in harmony with her activism as a member of Democratic Socialists of
America and an organizer for the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign.
Conventional wisdom said superdelegates—who exerted undemocratic power
over the selection of the party’s presidential nominee in 2016—couldn’t
be stopped from once again putting the establishment’s thumbs on the
scale.
But on
Wednesday afternoon, the party committee approved a proposal to prevent
superdelegates from voting on the presidential nominee during the first
ballot at the 2020 Democratic National Convention. (The last time the
party’s convention went to a second ballot was 1952.)
As NPR reported,
the committee “voted to drastically curtail the role ‘superdelegates’
play in the party’s presidential nominating process. The DNC’s Rules and
Bylaws Committee voted 27 to 1 to block officeholders, DNC members and
other party dignitaries from casting decisive votes on the first ballot
of presidential nominating conventions.”
Make no
mistake: Those in the top echelons of the Democratic Party aren’t moving
in this direction out of the goodness of their hearts. Grass-roots
pressure to democratize the party—mounting since 2016—is starting to pay
off.
KansasCity | "I’m glad my clients can finally put this nightmare behind them,"
Hinrichs said. "The last few years have been really difficult. This
(settlement) has provided them some closure."
The suit named E.I.E. LLC, the
company doing business as Whiskey Tango, as a defendant. It also named
five men who worked there or continue to work there: Shawn Brown, the
owner of E.I.E.; Harley Jon Wayne Akin, a manager of security overseeing
the bouncers; Michael Anthony Malick, a bouncer; Cody Reese Atchley, a
bouncer; and Fredrick R. Failing, a bouncer.
Four of the men have pleaded guilty to criminal charges or face trial: Akin, Atchley, Malick and Failing. Brown was not charged.
The country bar, at 401 S. Outer
Road, hosts poker, beer pong and flip cup tournaments, according to its
website. It has a mechanical bull. Blake Shelton made an appearance there a few months before the women were wrongly imprisoned.
The website advertises the bar as the best nightclub in Kansas City and a top spot to meet people.
Around midnight on the night of the incident, the
sisters were at a restaurant in a different city when an unknown woman
bought a Bud Light with the counterfeit bill, the suit says.
About 90 minutes later, the sisters arrived at the bar with their cousins.
Around 3 a.m., shortly before the bar's closing time, a man
approached Mariel and accused her of using the fake bill. She adamantly
denied the accusation, the suit says.
As the sisters left, multiple
bouncers wearing skull or camouflage masks pursued them into the parking
lot and "restricted them from leaving," the suit and criminal records
say.
Back in the bar, Akin accused
Mariel of using the fake bill. Audrey grabbed Akin by the front of his
shirt and told her sister to run, according to criminal records.
Mariel fled, dashing into the woods toward a gas station about a half-mile away.
Security supervisors Justin Wilson and Akin told Atchley, Malick and Failing to "pursue her," the suit says.
Read more here: https://www.kansascity.com/news/local/crime/article213899559.html#storylink=cpy
Read more here: https://www.kansascity.com/news/local/crime/article213899559.html#storylink=cpy
Read more here: https://www.kansascity.com/news/local/crime/article213899559.html#storylink=cpy
eand | Predatory
capitalism has long fuelled the American economy — the middle class
hollowed out to make the rich richer. But they don’t have any money,
savings, or income left to give. And yet the only thing that American
economy was built to do was prey. So whom will it prey on now?
Do
you see the problem? The machine was built to generate “growth” by
taking things from people — their money, their time, their imagination,
their courage, their empathy — and in return jacking up the price of the
basics of life, healthcare, education, finance, to astronomical prices.
Not exactly a fair trade to begin with. But
people now have nothing left to give. They have been bled dry. So what
happens now? What will the machine consume to keep itself going?
Well,
whom can it prey on now? Maybe more camps will have to be built, and
more kids put in them, and each one made a profit center. Maybe all
those private prisons will have to be filled up with dissidents. Maybe
all those tech companies will start reporting you as dangerous. Maybe
all those TV shows you watch will be used to make a profile of whether
or not you are a good citizen. It’s not a coincidence they built
concentration camps in old Walmarts — it’s a perfect metaphor for an
implosive economy.
The point is this. Profits
have to propped up, by more and more violent and coercive means,
because America’s economy isn’t really capable of producing much that is
real or valuable anymore. Nobody in the world really wants to
buy what America has to sell — guns, Facebook ads, and greed, to put
simply. But America’s own broken middle class doesn’t have anything left
to give now. So the ways that such a predatory economy can “grow” are
few now: by imprisoning people for profit, by abusing them for profit,
by expropriating their wealth, or by putting them to work. What are
those ways, in particular?
So the third thing “implosion” implies is a violent, spectacular process.
When a society is collapsing, it is run by plutocrats. But when a
society is imploding, it is run by mafias and warlords. That is
basically where America is, though maybe it wouldn’t like to admit it.
What other kinds of people smile as kids are shot in schools? Mafias and
warlords exact their tribute. It doesn’t matter who pays, or whether
payment is made in gold, silver, or bodies — it only matters that the
mafias are paid.
That is why
predation is now taking on a very different tone now. It is going from
the hidden, soft predation of crap jobs and raiding pension funds and
shifting debt from bailed out hedge funds onto students — to something
harder, something more lethal, whose teeth and claws are finally being
revealed. So implosion means, in this second sense, that predatory
institutions are ready to use hard force, real violence, to accomplish
their means. They are ready to consume everything that is left now, with
very real abuse and systematic human rights violations. Hence, the
camps.
But
the camps are just a beginning. For an economy which has no good way
left to grow, which makes mostly nothing the world wants, and whose
people are too poor to buy what the world makes, the endgame is clear.Such
an economy is going to have start resorting to more and more
spectacularly violent means of repression and subjugation, to alleviate
fast-spreading poverty. So today’s camps, as terrible as they are, are only a starting point, not an end point.
NYTimes | It
wasn’t long ago that the term “middle class” suggested security,
conformity and often complacency — a cohort that was such a reliable
feature of postwar American life that it attracted not just political
pandering but also cultural ridicule. The stereotype included everyone
from men in gray flannel suits to the slick professionals of
“Thirtysomething,” stuck or smug in their world of bourgeois comforts.
“Squeezed:
Why Our Families Can’t Afford America,” a timely new book by the
journalist and poet Alissa Quart, arrives at a moment when members of
the middle class are no longer a robust demographic but an embattled and
shrinking population, struggling to hold on to their delicate perch
in an unforgiving economic order. These aren’t the truly poor but those
in the “just-making-it group,” or what Quart also calls “the Middle
Precariat.” The people she talks to believed their educations and
backgrounds (most of them grew up in middle-class homes) would guarantee
some financial stability; instead, their work is “inconstant or
contingent,” and their incomes are stagnant or worse.
“They
are people on the brink who did everything ‘right,’” Quart writes, “and
yet the math of their family lives is simply not adding up.”
Quart
describes her own experience of slipping into the “falling middle-class
vortex” after the birth of her daughter seven years ago, a time when
she and her husband were freelance writers facing new child care costs
and hospital bills. She eventually became the executive editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project,
a nonprofit organization founded by the journalist Barbara Ehrenreich,
but her family had a “few years of fiscal vertigo.” Quart includes
herself in the group she’s writing about; her book succeeds and suffers
accordingly.
As
she puts it in her introduction, the concerns of her subjects “were not
abstract to me.” Quart is a sympathetic listener, getting people to
reveal not just the tenuousness of their economic situations but also
the turbulence of their emotional lives. A chapter on middle-age
job-seekers who once worked as computer programmers or newspaper
reporters captures the fallout of a discriminatory job market, which
tells older unemployed people they should buck up and start over while
also making them feel superfluous.
“I’ve
tried to reinvent myself so many times,” an
aeronautical-engineer-turned-website-designer-turned-personal-chef tells
her. “To be honest, it hasn’t worked.” The woman is now in her 50s,
with two grown daughters and plenty of debt from culinary school. “The
world has evolved beyond me,” she says.
prospect |During the last two decades, policing has become synonymous with surveillance:
the intense scrutiny of persons in public spaces. Poverty and the
symptoms of drug addiction signify criminality to the police in ways
similar to race. This surveillance targets the most vulnerable people in
American society: people of color and poor whites. L. experienced a
form of social oppression well known to people of color, targeted
because their presence is considered a threat to others, because of
their appearance, race, or presence in certain public spaces.
Mass incarceration in the U.S., is largely thought of as a problem
for black and brown communities. But this characterization risks masking
the pervasive injustice that befalls others who live in and around
those communities. The threat of surveillance has fallen
disproportionately on African Americans and Latinos for decades. But
during the era of mass incarceration, surveillance has increasingly
become further disconnected from any legitimate suspicion of criminal
behavior.
The new approach makes surveillance seem like a primary
responsibility of government. But this purported governmental
“responsibility” (which does not appear in the Constitution) is rapidly
overtaking the right to be free from surveillance, a protection that the
Fourth Amendment to the Bill of Rights guarantees.
We live in a country where the poor are often presumed guilty, since
they have failed to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. This
“failure” has profound consequences. As Barton Gellman and Sam
Adler-Bell, a senior fellow and senior policy advocate at the Century
Foundation, noted in the 2017 Century Foundation report, “The Disparate Impact of Surveillance,”
the gaze of the state is “heaviest in communities already disadvantaged
by their poverty, race, religion, ethnicity, and immigration status.”
WaPo | The Trump administration says the United Nations is
overestimating the number of Americans in “extreme poverty” by about
18.25 million people, reflecting a stark disagreement about the extent
of poverty in the nation and the resources needed to fight it.
In May, Philip G. Alston, special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights for the U.N., published a report saying 40 million Americans live in poverty and 18.5 million Americans live in extreme poverty.
But in a rebuke to that report on Friday, U.S. officials told the United Nations Human Rights Council there only appear to be approximately 250,000 Americans in extreme poverty, calling Alston's numbers “exaggerated.”
The
rift highlights a long-running debate among academics over the most
accurate way to describe poverty in America, one with enormous
implications for U.S. policy-making and the nation's social safety net.
It also sheds light on the ongoing feud between Trump and U.N. officials
over Alston's report on American poverty, with U.S. Ambassador Nikki
Haley last week calling the report “politically motivated” and arguing it “is patently ridiculous for the U.N. to examine poverty in America.”
But who is right about the number of Americans in extreme poverty?
It depends on how you define it.
The
U.N.'s numbers come from the official Census definition that has been
kept for decades by the U.S. government, defining extreme poverty as
having an income lower than half the official poverty rate, Alston said
in an interview. (For 2016, that was about $12,000 a year for a family
of four.) By this criteria, the poverty rate in America has only
slightly ticked downward since the mid-1960s.
vogue | But Ocasio-Cortez’s challenge goes far beyond surface level;
Ocasio-Cortez is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, a
leftist organization that has helped buoy the campaigns of dozens of
outsider candidates running on very progressive platforms in places
where Democrats like Crowley are used to winning—handily. Some of
Ocasio-Cortez’s positions include fighting for Medicare for All and a federal jobs guarantee,
abolishing ICE, and insisting on much more severe policing of luxury
real estate development (part of the reason she has refused corporate
donations). Her push on economic justice has exposed ways that Crowley,
as a powerful Democrat who sits on the House Committee on Ways and
Means, pays lip service to the post–Donald Trump resistance while
maintaining largely centrist politics. Newcomers like Ocasio-Cortez and Cynthia Nixon,
who is hoping to unseat Governor Andrew Cuomo (Nixon and Ocasio-Cortez
have endorsed each other), have already helped spur a leftward shift in
some of the stances of their opponents.
Ocasio-Cortez spoke to Vogue on the phone last week before heading to a child detention center in Tornillo, Texas. Trump’s family separation policy
has been a flash point not just along partisan lines, but also between
Democrats: those who denounce ICE’s action but refuse to call for its
dismantling, like Crowley, and those who believe it should not exist.
It’s an issue that has also created a debate around “civility,” as pundits squabble over whether or not Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, for example, should have been heckled out of a Mexican restaurant last week.
As the people’s millennial challenger, Ocasio-Cortez weighed in on what
needs to change in New York, in elections, and in how we talk about
holding those in power accountable.
truthdig | The Trump administration did not rise, prima facie, like Venus on a
half shell from the sea. Donald Trump is the result of a long process of
political, cultural and social decay. He is a product of our failed
democracy. The longer we perpetuate the fiction that we live in a
functioning democracy, that Trump and the political mutations around him
are somehow an aberrant deviation that can be vanquished in the next
election, the more we will hurtle toward tyranny. The problem is not
Trump. It is a political system, dominated by corporate power and the
mandarins of the two major political parties, in which we don’t count.
We will wrest back political control by dismantling the corporate state,
and this means massive and sustained civil disobedience, like that demonstrated by teachers around the country this year. If we do not stand up we will enter a new dark age.
The Democratic Party, which helped build our system of inverted totalitarianism,
is once again held up by many on the left as the savior. Yet the party
steadfastly refuses to address the social inequality that led to the
election of Trump and the insurgency by Bernie Sanders. It is deaf, dumb
and blind to the very real economic suffering that plagues over half
the country. It will not fight to pay workers a living wage. It will not
defy the pharmaceutical and insurance industries to provide Medicare
for all. It will not curb the voracious appetite of the military that is
disemboweling the country and promoting the prosecution of futile and
costly foreign wars. It will not restore our lost civil liberties,
including the right to privacy, freedom from government surveillance,
and due process. It will not get corporate and dark money
out of politics. It will not demilitarize our police and reform a
prison system that has 25 percent of the world’s prisoners although the
United States has only 5 percent of the world’s population. It plays to
the margins, especially in election seasons, refusing to address
substantive political and social problems and instead focusing on narrow
cultural issues like gay rights, abortion and gun control in our
peculiar species of anti-politics.
This is a doomed tactic, but one that is understandable. The
leadership of the party, the Clintons, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Tom
Perez, are creations of corporate America. In an open and democratic
political process, one not dominated by party elites and corporate
money, these people would not hold political power. They know this. They
would rather implode the entire system than give up their positions of
privilege. And that, I fear, is what will happen. The idea that the
Democratic Party is in any way a bulwark against despotism defies the
last three decades of its political activity. It is the guarantor of
despotism.
Trump has tapped into the hatred that huge segments of the American
public have for a political and economic system that has betrayed them.
He may be inept, degenerate, dishonest and a narcissist, but he adeptly
ridicules the system they despise. His cruel and demeaning taunts
directed at government agencies, laws and the established elites
resonate with people for whom these agencies, laws and elites have
become hostile forces. And for many who see no shift in the political
landscape to alleviate their suffering, Trump’s cruelty and invective
are at least cathartic.
downwithtyranny | How cynical is the Democratic Party's support for identity politics? To
this observer, it seems impossible not to notice that those in control
of the Democratic Party care about "identity politics" — about
supporting more women, more people of color, more LGBTQ candidates, etc.
— only when it suits them. Which means, if you take this view, that
their vocal support for the underlying principles of "identity politics"
is both cynical and insincere.
As I said, this has been apparent for some time. I've never seen it documented so well in one place, however, until this recent piece by Glenn Greenwald.
The Past as Prologue: Cynthia Nixon
Apparently, however, Democratic Party interest in electing strong progressive women (Hillary Clinton includes herself
on that list) has dissipated in the smoke of the last election. As
Greenwald notes, "Over and over, establishment Democrats and key party
structures have united behind straight, white male candidates (including
ones tainted by corruption), working to defeat their credible and
progressive Democratic opponents who are women, LGBT people, and/or
people of color. Clinton herself has led the way."
The article is replete with examples, from the Brad Ashford–Kara Eastman
battle in Nebraska, to the Bob Menendez–Michael Starr Hopkins–Lisa
McCormick three-way contest in New Jersey, to the Ben Cardin–Chelsea
Manning primary in Maryland. In all cases, the Party backed the white
male candidate (or in Menendez's case, the whiter male candidate)
against the woman, the person of color, and the LGBTQ candidate. Not
even the smoke of 2016's identity fire remains.
The Ocasio-Crowley Battle Is a Very High-Leverage Fight
A second point: I recently wrote about the importance of progressives
involving themselves heavily in high-leverage races — like the Bernie
Sanders 2016 race, for example — where the payoff would have been huge
relative to the effort. (You can read that piece and its argument here: "Supporting Aggressive Progressives for Very High-Leverage Offices".)
The Ocasio-Crowley contest is similarly high-leverage — first, because he's perceived as vulnerable and acting like he agrees,
and second because it would, to use a chess metaphor, eliminate one of
the most powerful (and corrupt) anti-progressive players from House
leadership in a single move.
Again, Crowley is widely seen as the next Democratic Speaker of the
House. He would be worse by far than Nancy Pelosi, and he's dangerous.
He has blackmailed, as I see it, almost all of his colleagues into
supporting him by the implicit threat of, as Speaker, denying them
committee assignments and delaying or thwarting their legislation. He
also controls funding as Speaker via the leadership PAC and the DCCC.
Even Mark Pocan, co-chair of the CPC and normally a reliable progressive
voice and vote, is reportedly whipping support for Crowley among his
colleagues.
Crowley plays for keeps. Taking him off the board entirely, removing him
from the House for the next two years, would produce a benefit to
progressives far in excess of the effort involved.
DailyCaller | California Rep. Maxine Waters burst into tears Monday on MSNBC as she
used “the children” to deflect away from the harassment comments she
made over the weekend.
“I did not call for harm for anybody. The president lied again,” Waters said.
She then turned to “the children.”
“But let’s not talk about
that. Let’s focus on the children. That’s what this is all about. It is
about the fact that children have been snatched from their parents’
arms,” Waters said, moving away from the controversy over her comments.
Waters then burst into tears after being confronted with the fact that major Democrats are denouncing her harassment claims.
“They
don’t really say I’m out of line. What they do is try to find a way
talk about civility without attacking me or anybody else as the leader
of the Democratic Party, I expect that she would do everything that she
could to make sure nobody believes that Democrats are out here harassing
anybody or causing any violence,” Waters said of House Minority Leader
Nancy Pelosi, who denounced Waters’ harassment comments Monday.
Waters
made comments over the weekend about getting out and pushing back on
people with differing political ideologies, saying, “If you see anybody
from that cabinet in a restaurant, in department store, at a gasoline
station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them.
Tell them they’re not welcome any more, anywhere!”
WashingtonTimes | President Trump slammed Rep. Maxine Waters on Monday afternoon, after
her speech calling for supporters to heckle members of the Trump
administration went viral over the weekend.
Congresswoman
Maxine Waters, an extraordinarily low IQ person, has become, together
with Nancy Pelosi, the Face of the Democrat Party. She has just called
for harm to supporters, of which there are many, of the Make America
Great Again movement. Be careful what you wish for Max!
Mr.
Trump and Ms. Waters have crossed each other several times. The
president has called Ms. Waters “a low IQ individual” at a rally for
Rick Saccone in March 2018, and she has repeatedly called for his
impeachment.
Ms. Waters told her supporters to “push out” members of the Trump administration from public spaces.
“If
you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department
store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you
push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore,
anywhere,” Ms. Waters said Saturday during a rally in Los Angeles.
Maxine
Waters calls for attacks on Trump administration: “If you see anybody
from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline
station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them,
and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.” pic.twitter.com/jMV7wk48wM
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