influencewatch | The Project’s mission was to raise awareness for ocean conservation
efforts. Maxwell spoke at a 2014 Council on Foreign Relations event
about the issue. [8] She also spoke at events at the United Nations in 2013 and 2014. [9][10] She also gave a TED Talk. [11][12]
These high-profile events dovetailed with Maxwell’s and the Project’s
high-profile partnerships. The Project’s effort to hold the United
Nations to sustainable promises made regarding the ocean were praised
and backed by the Clinton Global Initiative. [13][14]
Maxwell authored a 2015 op-ed for the Project’s newsletter, “The
Daily Catch,” which theorized the moment the oceans “failed” due to
environmental harm. [15]
Archives of The Daily Catch were live as of August 17, 2019. TerraMar
Project’s director of development Brian Yurasitis’ LinkedIn profile
shows that the Project had several projects as part of its mission. [16]
One project was the “How I sea” campaign, which collected stories from
environmentalists and others who took photos of the ocean around the
world. [17]
The #NoMoreButts initiative was the Project’s effort to create more
opportunities for smokers to dispose of cigarette butts in an
environmentally friendly fashion. [18]
Ghislaine Maxwell
Maxwell is the daughter of controversial British media magnate Robert
Maxwell, who was implicated in mishandling the pension fund of the Daily Mirror after his death in 1991. [19]
After Ghislaine Maxwell moved to New York following her father’s
death, she became widely known for her high-end social connections with
U.S. Presidents Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, ex-boyfriend Jeffrey
Epstein, British royalty, and others. [20][21] She attended Chelsea Clinton’s wedding. [22]
Despite decades in the public eye, she became a very private person
in 2016. That year, she sold her $15 million home and largely
disappeared from the public. [23]
After Epstein’s death, Maxwell became a notable figure amid
allegations that she was involved in Epstein’s alleged sex-trafficking
scheme. A federal court ordered the release of 2,000 pages of documents
related to a 2015 lawsuit filed by one of Epstein’s accusers; the woman
alleged that Maxwell had solicited her to perform sex acts for Epstein
as a 16-year-old. Maxwell denied the allegations and has not been
criminally charged for these alleged acts as of early July 2020. [24]
Maxwell reportedly has settled lawsuits with two women who claimed she
was involved in Epstein’s exploitation without admitting guilt. [25][26]
Maxwell has been involved in many public projects and efforts. She
co-hosted a launch party for the publishing platform Ideapod in 2013. [27][28]
In July 2020, federal prosecutors secured an indictment of Maxwell on
charges related to conspiracy in Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of
underage girls; she was arrested and faced trial as of early July.[29]
policytensor | The core idea of Boasian antiracism is the
negation of the core idea of high racialism, the hegemonic ideology of
the Western world, and beyond, from the turn of the century to the
anti-systemic turn after 1968. In order to understand the contours of
Boasian antiracism, we must therefore begin with high racialism. The
core belief of high racialism was that the world was composed of
discrete anthropological races that sat in a natural hierarchy of
ability, and it was these biological differences between races that
explained why some nations were rich and strong and others poor and
weak. As I explained last year,
What made racial taxonomy so compelling was what it was mobilized to explain:
the astonishing scale of global polarization. As Westerners
contemplated the human condition at the turn of the century, the
dominant fact that cried out for explanation was the highly uneven
distribution of wealth and power on earth. It did really look like fate
had thrust the responsibility of the world on Anglo-Saxon shoulders;
that Europe and its offshoots were vastly more advanced, civilized and
powerful that the rest of the world; that Oriental or Russian armies
simply couldn’t put up a fight with a European great power; that six
thousand Englishmen could rule over hundreds of millions of Indians
without fear of getting their throats cut. The most compelling
explanation was the most straightforward one. To the sharpest knives in
the turn of the century drawer, what explained the polarization of the
world was the natural hierarchy of the races.
Ashley Montagu was the first to question
the existence of biological races in 1942. But since before the turn of
the century, Franz Boas, a physical anthropologist at Columbia, had been
questioning self-satisfied perceptions of innate biological differences
between the races. In the mid-1930s, his students at Columbia
Anthropology, above all, Ashley Montagu, Margret Mead and Ruth Benedict,
argued forcefully against Nazi racism—this was the first time the word
“racism” appeared in public; ‘race prejudice’ was used before that.
There are two important facts to note about high racialism. First, there was hardly any daylight between the German and Anglo-Saxon understanding of race. Both were, in the final analysis, anchored in the scientific discourse of physical anthropology—no one, including the Nazis, was free to reject the main claims of ‘the science of race’.
The 1950 UNESCO
Statement on Race looms large in the historical study of “race” in the
20th century. Historians, sociologists, anthropologists and others point
to the 1950 Statement on Race as the key moment in which science was
harnessed in the political battle to combat racism and overturn the
philosophical underpinnings of European colonialism and Jim Crow. These
scholars recognize how the UNESCO Statement was doubly significant
because the newly formed United Nations called for such an effort along
with its 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and because the
Statement apparently signaled the triumph of anti‐racist anthropology
over the science that had defined social Darwinism, eugenics, and the
Holocaust (Baker 1998; Banton 2002; Barkan 1992; Graves 2001; Kohn 1995; Patterson 2001; Shipman 2002; Tucker 1994; Zack 2002).
These scholars are mistaken. Not a single
physical anthropologist contributed to the 1950 UNESCO Statement on
Race, which was authored by a small coterie of Boasian antiracists led
by Ashley Montagu. It is fair bet that the vast majority of physical
anthropologists disagreed with it. The dominant figure in the scientific
understanding of race at midcentury was Carlton Coon. Coon’s magnum
opus, The Origin of Races was published in 1962. He posited H. erectus and H. sapiens as stages of hominin development. He argued that some continental races achieved sapiens
status later than others, and mobilized their differential time-depth
to explain global polarization. The monograph, with its obvious racist
implications, was seized on by southern racists, including Coon’s cousin
Putnam, to contest school desegregation. It was also immediately
contested by Boasian antiracists.
reddit | "Marc Dutroux (born 6 November 1956) is a Belgian serial killer and child molester, convicted of having kidnapped, tortured and sexually abused six girls from 1995 to 1996, ranging in age from 8 to 19, four of whom he murdered. He was also convicted of having killed a suspected former accomplice, Bernard Weinstein, later proved insane. He was arrested in 1996, four years after the disappearance of his victims had begun, and has been in prison ever since, though he briefly escaped in April 1998.
Dutroux's widely publicised trial took place in 2004. A number of shortcomings in the Dutroux investigation caused widespread discontent in Belgium with the country's criminal justice system, and the ensuing scandal was one of the reasons for the reorganisation of Belgium's law enforcement agencies."
There were many many extremely disturbing things about his trial;
"On the witness stand, Jean-Marc Connerotte (fr), the original judge of the case, broke down in tears when he described "the bullet-proof vehicles and armed guards needed to protect him against the shadowy figures determined to stop the full truth coming out. Never before in Belgium has an investigating judge at the service of the king been subjected to such pressure. We were told by police that [murder] contracts had been taken out against the magistrates." Connerotte testified that the investigation was seriously hampered by protection of suspects by people in the government. "Rarely has so much energy been spent opposing an inquiry," he said. He believed that the Mafia had taken control of the case."
Dutroux himself claimed that;
"There is a well-grounded [paedophile] ring," he said. "I maintained regular contact with people in this ring. However, the law does not want to investigate this lead."
Recently in my home country(The United Kingdom) there has been a lot of news surrounding underground paedophile rings.;
Quite a few MPs(conveniently deceased) as well as one MI5 agent have been indicated as involved.
wikileaks forum |WikiLeaks in 2009 published a File called "Dutroux dossier summary, written down in 1235 pages, from the year 2005" http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Belgium:_Dutroux_dossier_summary,_1235_pages,_2005 We started to translate this File into english (it is written down in French), to get the most possible impact into this children trafficing ring and the people behind the case. You will find soon here the first sites that hass been tanslated and we will release every page, one by one, until this document is fully public. Available to everyone in the world and every one visits the Wikileaks Forum.
nakedcapitalism | The New York Department of Financial Services, which made its mark
under Benjamin Lawsky by embarrassing Federal regulators via its
aggressive pursuit of big bank money laundering, and later went after
mortgage servicing misconduct, is back in the headlines. It’s dinged
Deutsche Bank for $150 million for playing fast and loose with
anti-money-laundering requirements on Jeffrey Epstein’s accounts, a bank
in Cyprus accused of money laundering and connections to the Russian
mob, and Danske Estonia, which conducted what was arguably Europe’s
biggest money laundering operation. We’ve embedded the consent order at
the end of the post and focus this post on Jeffrey Epstein, although for
anyone in the banking business, the entire order is a good read.
Even though cynics have pointed out that the US likes to come down
harder on misbehaving foreign banks than home grown ones, Department of
Financial Services has clout over foreign banks because pretty much all
of them choose to organize their operations through a New York branch.
Long-standing readers may recall that Lawsky caused outrage in the
Beltway when he ordered the CEO of serial
anti-money-laundering-regulation abuser Standard Chartered to appear in
his office and explain why his New York banking license should not be
revoked. That was the equivalent of a death threat. No New York banking
license means no dollar clearing, which would end Standard Chartered’s
international operations.
In the past, Federal regulators embarrassed by the Department of
Financial Services’ enforcement actions would either join the DFS effort
or launch a parallel one and in either case, collect additional fines.
So far, there’s no evidence of that happening with this DFS consent
order with Deutsche.
One has to wonder if Deutsche is truly as incompetent and
disorganized as it appears in the DFS account, or whether the bank was
so caught with its pants down that this was the best defense it could
muster. For instance, if you read carefully, you can infer that someone
who had been on the Epstein team was able to produce a copy of an e-mail
from a co-head of Wealth Management Americas saying the head of
anti-money laundering and the General Counsel had said Epstein didn’t
represent a reputation risk despite his sex offender warts and he was
good to go as long as “nothing further is identified”. Deutsche
maintained it had no record of that e-mail and claimed there had been no
initial review by the Americas Reputational Risk Committee.
Similarly, even though Epstein’s accounts were designated high risk,
which supposedly called for close supervision, the bank looked past
obvious red flags. For instance, Epstein and his minions regularly wired
$10,000 or more to three co-conspirators named in the press. His
“Butterfly Trust” had these co-conspirators among its beneficiaries, as
well as women with “Eastern European surnames” (this after the press had
alleged that Epstein had been procuring underaged women from Eastern
Europe). The Order makes clear the trust looks a, if not the, payment
channel for Esptein’s sex trafficking via over 120 wires for $2.65
million.
Forbes | NASA is about to begin building its latest spacecraft. Called
“Psyche” it will explore a 140 miles/226 kilometers-wide asteroid called
“16 Psyche.” Today it’s passed a major milestone.
Why is NASA going to ‘16 Psyche?’
Located in the Solar System’s main asteroid belt between Mars and
Jupiter, metal-rich 16 Psyche is thought to be the exposed metallic
iron, nickel and gold core of a protoplanet. Most asteroids are rocky or icy.
The Psyche mission is part of NASA’s Discovery Program of low-cost robotic space missions.
16 Psyche’s core is tantalisingly similar to Earth’s, which means that it could be the heart of a dead planet that lost its rocky outer layers or suffered from violent collisions.
The metals that make-up this one-of-a-kind asteroid could, according to some, be worth $10,000 quadrillion.
Due to launch from Pad 39A at Cape Canaveral, Florida, in August 2022 on top of a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket,
fly-past Mars in 2023, and begin orbiting the asteroid in January
2026, Psyche has just passed its “critical design review” stage.
Now the mission moves to actually making the space hardware.
“It’s one of the most intense reviews a mission goes through in its
entire life cycle,” said Lindy Elkins-Tanton, principal investigator for
the Psyche mission. “And we passed with flying colors. The challenges
are not over, and we’re not at the finish line, but we’re running
strong.”
The team now has to build its three science instruments:
a magnetometer to measure the asteroid’s magnetic field.
a multispectral imager to capture images of its surface and data, about what its made of, and its geological features.
spectrometers that analyze the neutrons and gamma rays coming from the surface to reveal what the asteroid is made of.
Assembly and testing of the full robotic spacecraft begins in
February 2021, and everything has to be in the clean room at NASA’s Jet
Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) by April 2021.
The main spacecraft chassis is now being built at Maxar Technologies in Palo Alto, California.
prospect | Pelosi rolled back student debt relief
in the HEROES Act after learning that it would cost $100 billion more
than expected. This was a $3.2 trillion messaging bill not designed to
become law, yet an additional 3 percent cost was considered
unacceptable. Pelosi also declined
to add “automatic stabilizers” that would maintain expanded benefits
until economic stress dissipated, blaming a Congressional Budget Office
scoring quirk that made the cost appear artificially larger.
So with over 30 million out of work, the important thing to Pelosi
was that her pie-in-the-sky, going-nowhere bill was “reasonable,” based
on some ineffable standard of reason. It matches the worldview of a
Democratic leader who, just two years ago, made a lugubrious elegy
on the House floor after the death of Pete Peterson, who bankrolled the
deficit hysteria industry for decades and relentlessly targeted Social
Security for cuts. (Ball does reveal that Pelosi told Obama during his
“grand bargain” talks that she would support his aims, “even if it meant
agreeing to entitlement cuts.”)
Devotion to deficit hawkery in normal times is unwise policy. It’s
downright fatal during an economic crisis, where relief could be yanked
away from needy families prematurely simply because of an unwillingness
to challenge CBO’s scoring model. But here we finally see the contours
of Pelosi’s governing framework, not just on the budget, but on
everything.
Pelosi believes that the nation’s resources are scarce, and what
sadly passes for the modern welfare state must be protected at all
costs, rather than raised to greater heights. The goal is, at best, a
less bad world than Republicans want. It’s a defensive crouch dating back to Pelosi’s initial entry into Congress under President Reagan, and it has dominated her thinking ever since.
Progressives who dream too big are to be sat in a corner, and
anti-government conservatives are to be bargained with and mollified.
Official Washington’s approval is craved. Pelosi hosts an annual ideas
conference at her own vineyard for a group of elite donors. That’s who
gets to scale the fortress she has built around her desiccated
ambitions. Her thoughts today on activism date back to something she
said during her first campaign: “Someday they will realize just how
insignificant they are.”
Pelosi demands total control; you can argue that she never groomed a
successor for this purpose, to keep everyone reliant on her. She finds
this to be the best method to gain leverage over the legislative
process. But to what end is this leverage employed? Pelosi fights
intensely to obtain power, but she seems to consider power so fragile
and fleeting that it shouldn’t be used for very much.
The Bretton Woods Conference of 1944, which established an international institution for monetary policy, recognized the need for a comparable international institution for trade to complement the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.[1]
Bretton Woods was attended by representatives of finance ministries and
not by representatives of trade ministries, the proposed reason why a
trade agreement was not negotiated at that time.[2]
In early December 1945, the United States invited its war-time allies to enter into negotiations to conclude a multilateral agreement for the reciprocal reduction of tariffs on trade in goods. In July 1945, the US Congress had granted President Harry S. Truman the authority to negotiate and conclude such an agreement. At the proposal of the United States, the United Nations Economic and Social Committee adopted a resolution, in February 1946, calling for a conference to draft a charter for an International Trade Organization.
A Preparatory Committee was established in February 1946, and met
for the first time in London in October 1946 to work on the charter of
an international organization for trade; the work was continued from
April to November 1947.[3]
The rewards of an increasingly integrated global economy
have brought forth a new global elite. Labeled ‘Davos Men’, ‘gold-collar
workers’ or . . . ‘cosmocrats’, this emerging class is empowered
by new notions of global connectedness. It includes academics,
international civil servants and executives in global companies, as well
as successful high-technology entrepreneurs. Estimated to number
about 20 million in 2000, of whom 40 percent were American, this elite
is expected to double in size by 2010. Comprising fewer than 4 percent of the American people,
these transnationalists have little need for national loyalty, view
national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see
national governments as residues from the past whose only useful
function is to facilitate the elite’s global operations. In the coming
years, one corporation executive confidently predicted, “the only people
who will care about national boundaries are politicians.” Involvement
in transnational institutions, networks and activities not only defines
the global elite but also is critical to achieving elite status within
nations. Someone whose loyalties, identities and involvements are
purely national is less likely to rise to the top in business, academia,
the media and the professions than someone who transcends these limits.
Outside politics, those who stay home stay behind. Those who move ahead
think and act internationally. As sociologist Manuel Castells has said,
“Elites are cosmopolitan, people are local.”
“Why don’t they just move?” being the quintessential question of
Davos Man, aspirational or no, or has been until recently. Perhaps now
Davos Man (or, today, Person) is hearing the faint, far-off sound of blades
being sharpened, and is about to display adaptability. Or will, if the
WEF has anything to do with it. If so, that’s interesting and something
to think about. (FOX is already excited; they seem to think that the WEF is going to bring about socialism. Pas si bête.)
In this post I’m going to take a brief look at the WEF’s upcoming
2021 potlatch, dubbed “The Great Reset,” first at its ideological, and
then at its institutional characteristics. As I said, this post will be
quite superficial, since I’m not a global elites maven. Indeed, reading
the WEF site made me feel like I was trapped in a large and luxurious
conference hotel where all the signage was in a language that looked
like English, but wasn’t. So I hope readers will chime in. No yarn
diagrams, please!
BusinessInsider | Former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao says Ghislaine Maxwell was rubbing elbows
with Silicon Valley's elites in 2011 — and Pao believes people
suspected Maxwell's ties to child trafficking at the time and didn't
care.
Maxwell was arrested
last week and is awaiting trial for four criminal charges related to
procuring and transporting minors for illegal sex acts. Prosecutors say
Maxwell participated in a sex trafficking operation alongside her
partner Jeffrey Epstein.
Pao, a former partner at venture capital
firm Kleiner Perkins, said Maxwell was at the firm's holiday party in
2011, more than two years after Epstein was first convicted
of soliciting sex from a 14 year old. Maxwell was Epstein's long-time
girlfriend and associate at the time but did not face any criminal
charges prior to her 2020 arrest.
"[Maxwell] was at the Kleiner
holiday party in 2011, but I had no desire to meet her much less have a
photo taken with her," Pao wrote in a tweet,
screenshotted and reposted by reporter Lachlan Markay. "We knew about
her supplying underage girls for sex, but I guess that was fine with the
'cool' people who managed the tightly controlled guest list."
Pao set her Twitter account to private Monday morning after sending
the tweet. When reached for comment by Business Insider, Pao shared two
additional tweets that she subsequently posted clarifying her remarks.
In one tweet, Pao linked to a Daily Mail report published in March 2011 in which Epstein's victims accused Maxwell of participating in the abuse.
"To
be clear, the press had described her as supplying underage girls for
sex, but she had not been charged so I guess it would be more accurate
to say we 'suspected' v 'knew,'" Pao wrote.
According to a 2011 Business Insider report,
the Kleiner Perkins holiday party that year drew esteemed guests
including former Vice President Al Gore, Apple VP of Engineering Mike
Abbott, and former HP chairman Ray Lane.
A Kleiner Perkins spokesperson declined to comment.
dailymail |Ghislaine Maxwell has a secret stash of Jeffrey Epstein's
twisted sex tapes and will use the footage as an insurance policy to
save herself, a former friend exclusively revealed to DailyMail.com.
Maxwell,
58, was arrested at her hideout in Bradford, New Hampshire last
Thursday. She was charged with six federal crimes, including enticement
of minors, sex trafficking and perjury.
The
British socialite was arguably Epstein's closest friend and she is
alleged to have acted as his madam, accused of securing underage girls
for the multi-millionaire, who reportedly kept evidence of his perverted
sex acts against the minors.
When officials raided Epstein's Manhattan
townhouse after his arrest last July, they found thousands of graphic
photos that included images of underage girls and a safe filled with
compact discs labeled 'nude girls', according to authorities.
Maxwell's
former friend explained: 'Ghislaine has always been as cunning as they
come. She wasn't going to be with Epstein all those years and not have
some insurance.
'The secret stash of
sex tapes I believe Ghislaine has squirreled away could end up being her
get out of jail card if the authorities are willing to trade. She has
copies of everything Epstein had. They could implicate some twisted
movers and shakers.'
They added: 'If Ghislaine goes down, she's going to take the whole damn lot of them with her.'
The former friend continued: 'Not only did
Epstein like to capture himself with underage girls on camera – he
wanted to make sure he had something to hold over the rich and powerful
men who took advantage of his sick largesse.'
'I'll
bet anything that once it comes out that Ghislaine has those tapes
these men will be quaking in their Italian leather boots.
'Ghislaine
made sure that she socked away thumb drives of it all. She knows where
all the bodies are buried and she'll use whatever she had to save her
own a**.'
jonathanturley | It is bad enough when you become a political rally cry for the right
as a man trying to destroy our economy or instill fear into the nation.
Now, Dr. Anthony Fauci is being called a mass murderer who, with the
cabal of Bill and Melinda Gates, are seeking to “depopulate the Earth.”
That is hardly the most deranged thing that Nation of Islam leader Louis
Farrakhan, 87, has uttered, but it may be the most dangerous. Farrakhan
is encouraging people to refuse vaccinations, a problem that is already causing world health leaders concerns in Africa. This is viewed as the new “epicenter” for the pandemic
with Africans facing a threat with the need to protect hundreds of
millions of Africans.
Health officials will need their cooperation but
they have now heard from Farrakhan who has declared that, if they want
to live, “Do not take their medication.”
In this Fourth of July remarks, Farrakhan declared that
“They’re making money now, plotting to give seven
billion, five-hundred million people a vaccination. Dr. Fauci, Bill
Gates and Melinda — you want to depopulate the Earth. What the hell gave
you that right? Who are you to sit down with your billion to talk about
who can live, and who should die?
…
I say to my brothers and sisters in Africa, if they come up with a
vaccine, be careful. Don’t let them vaccinate you with their history of
treachery through vaccines, through medication.”
He added “That’s why your world is coming to an end quickly, because
you have sentenced billions to death, but God is now sentencing you to
the death that you are sentencing to others.”
SMH | "The explanation could only be that these agents don't come or go
anywhere. They are always here and something ignites them, maybe human
density or environmental conditions, and this is what we should look
for."
Dr Jefferson believes that the virus may be transmitted through the
sewerage system or shared toilets, not just through droplets expelled by
talking, coughing and sneezing.
Jefferson
and Professor Carl Heneghan, director of the Centre for Evidence-Based
Medicine, have called for an in-depth investigation similar to that
carried out by John Snow in 1854, which showed cholera was spreading in
London from an infected well in Soho.
Exploring why so many
outbreaks happen at food factories and meat-packing plants could uncover
major new transmission routes, they believe. It may be shared toilets
coupled with cool conditions that allow the virus to thrive.
"We're
doing a living review, extracting environmental conditions, the ecology
of these viruses which has been grossly understudied," said Dr
Jefferson.
"There
is quite a lot of evidence of huge amounts of the virus in sewage all
over the place, and an increasing amount of evidence there is faecal
transmission. There is a high concentration where sewage is four
degrees, which is the ideal temperature for it to be stabled and
presumably activated. And meat-packing plants are often at four degrees.
"These
meat-packing clusters and isolated outbreaks don't fit with respiratory
theory, they fit with people who haven't washed their hands properly.
politico | In May 1969, a group of African-American parents in Holmes County,
Mississippi, sued the Treasury Department to prevent three new
whites-only K-12 private academies from securing full tax-exempt status,
arguing that their discriminatory policies prevented them from being
considered “charitable” institutions. The schools had been founded in
the mid-1960s in response to the desegregation of public schools set in
motion by the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. In
1969, the first year of desegregation, the number of white students
enrolled in public schools in Holmes County dropped from 771 to 28; the
following year, that number fell to zero.
In Green v. Kennedy (David Kennedy was secretary of the
treasury at the time), decided in January 1970, the plaintiffs won a
preliminary injunction, which denied the “segregation academies”
tax-exempt status until further review. In the meantime, the government
was solidifying its position on such schools. Later that year, President
Richard Nixon ordered the Internal Revenue Service to enact a new
policy denying tax exemptions to all segregated schools in the United
States. Under the provisions of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which
forbade racial segregation and discrimination, discriminatory schools
were not—by definition—“charitable” educational organizations, and
therefore they had no claims to tax-exempt status; similarly, donations
to such organizations would no longer qualify as tax-deductible
contributions.
Paul Weyrich, the late religious conservative political activist and co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, saw his opening.
In the decades following World War II, evangelicals, especially
white evangelicals in the North, had drifted toward the Republican
Party—inclined in that direction by general Cold War anxieties,
vestigial suspicions of Catholicism and well-known evangelist Billy
Graham’s very public friendship with Dwight Eisenhower and Richard
Nixon. Despite these predilections, though, evangelicals had largely
stayed out of the political arena, at least in any organized way. If he
could change that, Weyrich reasoned, their large numbers would
constitute a formidable voting bloc—one that he could easily marshal
behind conservative causes.
“The new political philosophy must be defined by us [conservatives]
in moral terms, packaged in non-religious language, and propagated
throughout the country by our new coalition,” Weyrich wrote in the
mid-1970s. “When political power is achieved, the moral majority will
have the opportunity to re-create this great nation.” Weyrich believed
that the political possibilities of such a coalition were unlimited.
“The leadership, moral philosophy, and workable vehicle are at hand just
waiting to be blended and activated,” he wrote. “If the moral majority
acts, results could well exceed our wildest dreams.”
But this hypothetical “moral majority” needed a catalyst—a standard
around which to rally. For nearly two decades, Weyrich, by his own
account, had been trying out different issues, hoping one might pique
evangelical interest: pornography, prayer in schools, the proposed Equal
Rights Amendment to the Constitution, even abortion. “I was trying to
get these people interested in those issues and I utterly failed,”
Weyrich recalled at a conference in 1990.
The Green v. Connally ruling provided a necessary first step: It captured the attention of evangelical leaders , especially
as the IRS began sending questionnaires to church-related “segregation
academies,” including Falwell’s own Lynchburg Christian School,
inquiring about their racial policies. Falwell was furious. “In some
states,” he famously complained, “It’s easier to open a massage parlor
than a Christian school.”
One such school, Bob Jones University—a fundamentalist college in
Greenville, South Carolina—was especially obdurate. The IRS had sent its
first letter to Bob Jones University in November 1970 to ascertain
whether or not it discriminated on the basis of race. The school
responded defiantly: It did not admit African Americans.
Although Bob Jones Jr., the school’s founder, argued that racial
segregation was mandated by the Bible, Falwell and Weyrich quickly
sought to shift the grounds of the debate, framing their opposition in
terms of religious freedom rather than in defense of racial segregation.
For decades, evangelical leaders had boasted that because their
educational institutions accepted no federal money (except for, of
course, not having to pay taxes) the government could not tell them how
to run their shops—whom to hire or not, whom to admit or reject. The
Civil Rights Act, however, changed that calculus.
Bob Jones University did, in fact, try to placate the IRS—in its own
way. Following initial inquiries into the school’s racial policies, Bob
Jones admitted one African-American, a worker in its radio station, as a
part-time student; he dropped out a month later. In 1975, again in an
attempt to forestall IRS action, the school admitted blacks to the
student body, but, out of fears of miscegenation, refused to admit unmarried African-Americans.
The school also stipulated that any students who engaged in interracial
dating, or who were even associated with organizations that advocated
interracial dating, would be expelled.
The IRS was not placated. On January 19, 1976, after years of
warnings—integrate or pay taxes—the agency rescinded the school’s tax
exemption.
For many evangelical leaders, who had been following the issue since Green v. Connally,
Bob Jones University was the final straw. As Elmer L. Rumminger,
longtime administrator at Bob Jones University, told me in an interview,
the IRS actions against his school “alerted the Christian school
community about what could happen with government interference” in the
affairs of evangelical institutions. “That was really the major issue
that got us all involved.”
WaPo | "We always think, well, we’re never going to have integrated schools
as long as we have such highly segregated neighborhoods," she says. "I
want to point out maybe we’ll never have integrated neighborhoods if we
have segregated schools."
If we found ways to integrate schools — as former District Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) controversially proposed two years ago —
that might take some of the exclusivity out of certain neighborhoods.
School quality is capitalized into housing prices, making
those neighborhoods unaffordable to many families. Imagine, for
instance, if all the public schools in the District or the Washington
region were integrated and of comparable quality. Families might pay
more to live in Northwest to be near Rock Creek Park. But you'd see
fewer home-bidding wars there just to access scarce school quality. More
to the point, homes families already paid handsomely to buy might lose
some of their value.
Politically, the two topics that most enrage
voters are threats to property values and local schools. So either of
these ideas — wielding housing policy to affect schools, or school
policy to affect housing — would be tough sells. Especially to anyone
who has secured both the desirable address and a seat in the best kindergarten in town. Parents in Upper Northwest, for instance, deeply opposed the idea of ending neighborhood schools in Washington. And Gray's proposal never came to pass.
But,
Owens says, "I feel more hopeful in studying these issues today than I
did five years ago." At least, she says, we are all now talking more
about inequality and segregation.
NYTimes | In many northern cities, the 1974 United States Supreme Court decision Milliken v. Bradley
killed any hopes of integrating the public schools. That ruling,
involving Detroit and its suburbs, said that a mandatory plan to achieve
integration by busing black children from Detroit across district lines
to mainly white suburbs was unconstitutional. The result accelerated
white flight to the suburbs, leaving the schools in urban centers even
more segregated than they had been.
Most famously, this happened in Boston, where court-ordered integration
resulted in a busing plan that wound up mainly moving children of color
around the city.
But busing had greater success in some places, particularly those where
the plans were carried out countywide, reducing the chances of white
flight. They included Louisville-Jefferson County, Raleigh-Wake County
and Charlotte-Mecklenburg County.
This week’s Retro Report video, “The Battle for Busing,” follows the
story of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg district, which became a national
model for racial integration for 30 years only to resegregate about a
decade ago, after a court ruling lifted the mandatory integration plan.
When the Charlotte busing plan began in 1971, there were whites who
threatened to go to jail before they would let their children attend
schools with blacks. The open racism voiced by whites in the Retro
Report’s archival footage is vicious and ugly; students were injured
when fistfights broke out between whites and blacks.
But by 1974, the district was being singled out in the news media as a
national model, particularly West Charlotte High, which had previously
been all black. The impact of integration was visible almost immediately
at the school. When whites arrived, the facilities were upgraded, said a
former chairman of the school board, Arthur Griffin. A gravel parking
lot was paved, and the football stadium and the gymnasium were
renovated.
Over the years, researchers like Prof. Roslyn Mickelson at the
University of North Carolina, Charlotte, conducted studies concluding
that children of any race who attended diverse schools were more likely
to succeed, in areas like graduating, avoiding crime and attending
college.
But in the end, the same federal courts that had ushered in integration helped kill it. In the late 1990s, Judge Robert D. Potter of Federal District Court
essentially said that the Charlotte district had met its constitutional
duty by successfully creating a single school system serving all
children regardless of race and that no more need be done.
In a few years’ time, West Charlotte High, which had been roughly 40
percent black and 60 percent white in the 1970s, became 88 percent black
and 1 percent white. And it wasn’t just Charlotte. Today, nearly
two-thirds of the school districts that had been ordered to desegregate
are no longer required to do so, including Seminole County, Fla. (2006);
Little Rock, Ark. (2007); and Galveston County, Tex. (2009).
The New York City system is more segregated than it was in the 1980s:
half the schools are more than 90 percent black and Hispanic. For more
about the nation’s “steady and massive resegregation,” see this Reporter’s Notebook from Retro Report.
This week’s Retro Report is the 10th in our documentary project, which was started with a grant from Christopher Buck. Retro Report
has a staff of 12 journalists and 6 contributors led by Kyra Darnton.
It is a nonprofit video news organization that aims to provide a
thoughtful counterweight to today’s 24/7 news cycle. The videos are
typically 10 to 12 minutes long.
I was fetching around for a way in which to try and integrate today's dismissals of both BLM and the black political mainstream, with tomorrow's refresher course on American racism and living memory history. Tomorrow is REALLY important. That said, I suspect that even here, short attention span theater predominates - such that a simple succinct six minute turn that Irami Osei Frimpong offered - will have been lost even on my audience.
For sure what has been lost is the fundamental, core living memory experience of racism that shaped my life, largely i'm guessing, because it had little to no impact on any of your lives. What I'm referring to is public school desegregation attempted in the 70's and flatly and legally and politically rejected by white Americans of all socioeconomic and political persuasions.
Kunstler entirely misses this in his haste to blame black folks for their exclusion and alienation from the American mainstream. See, I and a number of my peers, my immediate personal cohort, were among the lucky and durable ones who integrated public and private schools during the 70's, survived, got tough, and thrived, all the while learning everything there is to know about white America.
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, don't get me wrong. I'm not crying about anything, I'm not playing a victim card, and I sincerely believe and exemplify the ethos "that which does not kill you". But the simple fact of the matter is, that when white Americans refused to accept integration of public schools and shifted themselves in very dramatic macro-scale fashion in response to the prospective horror of little Cindy Lou sitting next to young Tyrone in the 3rd grade, well..., that kind of set the mold for much of what has followed over the next 50 years.
kunstler | That business was the full participation of Black citizens in
American life. The main grievance now is that Black Americans are still
denied full participation due to “systemic racism.” That’s a dodge. What
actually happened is that Black America opted out and lost itself in a
quandary of its own making with the assistance of their white
dis-enablers, the well intentioned “progressives.”
Let me take you back to the mid-20th century. America had just fought and won a war against manifest evil. The nation styled itself as Leader of the Free World.
That role could not be squared with the rules of Jim Crow apartheid, so
something had to change. The civil rights campaign to undo racial
segregation under law naturally began in the courts in cases such as
Brown v. Board of Education (1954). So-called public accommodations —
hotels, theaters, restaurants, buses, bathrooms, water fountains, etc. —
remained segregated. By the early 1960s, the clamor to end all that
took to the streets under the emerging moral leadership of Martin Luther
King and his credo of non-violent civil disobedience.
Many acts of non-violent street protest were met by police using
fire-hoses, vicious dogs, and batons to terrorize the marchers. This
only shamed and horrified the rest of the nation watching on TV and
actually quickened the formation of a political consensus to end
American apartheid. That culminated in the passage of three major
federal laws: the Public Accommodations Act of 1964, the Voting Rights
Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
Meanwhile, something else was going on among Black Americans: not
everybody believed in Dr. King’s non-violence, and not everybody was so
sure about full participation in American life. Altogether, Black
America remained ambivalent and anxious about all that. That full participation implied
a challenge to compete on common ground. What if it didn’t work out? An
alternate view emerged, personified first by Malcolm X, who called MLK
an “Uncle Tom,” and then by the younger generation, Stokely Carmichael,
the Black Panthers and others retailing various brands of Black Power,
Black Nationalism, and Black Separatism. It amounted, for some, in
declining that invitation to participate fully in American life. “No
thanks. We’ll go our own way.” That sentiment has prevailed ever since.
So, the outcome to all that federal legislation of the 1960s
turned out not to be the clear-cut victory (like World War Two) that
liberals and progressives so breathlessly expected. The civil rights
acts had some startling adverse consequences, too. They swept away much
of the parallel service and professional economy that Blacks had
constructed to get around all the old exclusions of everyday life. With
that went a lot of the Black middle-class, the business owners
especially. In its place, the liberal-and-progressive government
provided “public assistance” — a self-reinforcing poverty generator that
got ever worse, especially in big cities where de-industrialization
started destroying the working-class job base beginning in the 1970s. Fist tap Big Don.
gatestoneinstitute | The idea that in the United States there is "structural racism" (defined
by the Aspen Institute as "a system in which public policies,
institutional practices, cultural representations, and other norms work
in various, often reinforcing ways to perpetuate racial group inequity")
has led, it seems, to a form of obsessive expiation. Films have been
removed from streaming services. Gone with the Wind will now be shown with five-minute disclaimer. (One minute would not have been enough?)
The film is probably just first on a lengthening list. A reporter from Variety recently listed "10 Problematic Films That Could Use Warning Labels". They include Forrest Gump:
for a brief moment, the title character is described, in an ironic
fashion, as having been named after a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Consumer product brands, such as Uncle Ben's Rice and Aunt Jemima syrup are abruptly having their names and logos changed. Princeton
voted to expunge the name of Woodrow Wilson from its public policy
school. Demands have been made that universities and corporations show
that they are not racist by declaring their support for Black Lives
Matter. Many have bowed to the demand.
Of course there is still some racism among individuals, but the idea
that the United States today is a society where "structural racism"
exists is contradicted
by decades of political decisions to repair the damage and, as in, for
example, affirmative action programs, to favor equality for all
Americans. As Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an American author who fled her homeland
of Somalia, wrote:
"The problem is that there are people among us who don't
want to figure it out and who have an interest in avoiding workable
solutions. They have an obvious political incentive not to solve social
problems, because social problems are the basis of their power. That is
why, whenever a scholar like Roland Fryer brings new data to the table—showing
it's simply not true that the police disproportionately shoot black
people dead—the response is not to read the paper but to try to
discredit its author."
For many years, American films dealing with racial questions have
been explicitly hostile to any racial discrimination, and it would be
impossible to find a book put out by a U.S. publishing house supporting
racial discrimination, unless it dates from an era long gone. Rewriting
history by falsifying it is simply an attempt to replace history with propaganda.
Removing films and other information that do not correspond to a
predetermined vision of history has long been the practice of totalitarian
despotisms. Dictating that universities and corporations face severe
consequences if they refuse to bowdlerize the past is simply a
fascistic, tyrannical
means of coercion. Worse, the submissive attitude of so many
universities and corporations is what enables the bullying to continue.
libcom | Coexisting with this egalitarian ideology was the Civil Rights
movement's appeal to a functionalist conception of social rationality.
To the extent that it blocked individual aspirations, segregation was
seen as restricting artificially social growth and progress. Similarly,
by raising artificial barriers such as the construction of blacks'
consumer power through Jim Crow legislation and, indirectly, through low
black wages, segregation impeded, so the argument went, the free
functioning of the market. Consequently, segregation was seen not only
as detrimental to the blacks who suffered under it, but also to economic
progress as such. Needless to say, the two lines of argument were met
with approval by corporate liberals.[31]
......
Outside the South, rebellion arose from different conditions. Racial
segregation was not rigidly codified and the management sub-systems in
the black community were correspondingly more fluidly integrated within
the local administrative apparatus. Yet, structural, generational and
ideological pressures, broadly similar to those in the South, existed
within the black elite in the Northern, Western, and Midwestern cities
that had gained large black populations in the first half of the 20th
century. In non-segregated urban contexts, formal political
participation and democratized consumption had long since been achieved:
there the salient political issue was the extension of the
administrative purview of the elite within the black community. The
centrality of the administrative nexus in the "revolt of the cities" is
evident from the ideological programs it generated.
Black Power came about as a call for indigenous control of economic and political institutions in the black community.[33]
Because one of the early slogans of Black Power was a vague demand for
"community control," the emancipatory character of the rebellion was
open to considerable misinterpretation. Moreover, the diversity and
"militance" of its rhetoric encouraged extravagance in assessing the
movement's depth. It soon became clear, however, that "community
control" called not for direction of pertinent institutions — schools,
hospitals, police, retail businesses, etc. — by their black
constituents, but for administration of those institutions by alleged
representatives in the name of a black community. Given an existing
elite structure whose legitimacy had already been certified by federal
social-welfare agencies, the selection of "appropriate" representatives
was predictable. Indeed, as Robert Allen has shown,[34]
the empowerment of this elite was actively assisted by corporate-state
elements. Thus, "black liberation" quickly turned into black "equity,"
"community control" became simply "black control" and the Nixon
"blackonomics" strategy was readily able to "coopt" the most rebellious
tendency of 1960s black activism. Ironically, Black Power's supersession
of the Civil Rights program led to further consolidation of the
management elite's hegemony within the black community. The black elite
broadened its administrative control by uncritically assuming the
legitimacy of the social context within which that elite operated. Black
control was by no means equivalent to democratization.
Rejuvenation Pills
-
No one likes getting old. Everyone would like to be immorbid. Let's be
careful here. Immortal doesnt include youth or return to youth. Immorbid
means you s...
Death of the Author — at the Hands of Cthulhu
-
In 1967, French literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes wrote of
“The Death of the Author,” arguing that the meaning of a text is divorced
from au...
9/29 again
-
"On this sacred day of Michaelmas, former President Donald Trump invoked
the heavenly power of St. Michael the Archangel, sharing a powerful prayer
for pro...
Return of the Magi
-
Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
-
Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
-
sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
