influencewatch | The National Education Association (NEA) is America’s largest labor
union representing nearly three million employees, principally teachers.
With affiliates in every state across 14,000 communities [1],
NEA represents teachers, education support professionals, retired
teachers, education faculty and staff, substitute teachers, and
administrators.[2] It exercises enormous political clout in everything from contract negotiations to issue advocacy and lobbying.[3]
The NEA is a major political player, with its associated political
action committees contributing nearly $143.5 million to federal
candidates and committees—97% of which supported Democrats and
liberals—from 1990 through February 2019. [4]
The NEA is also deeply entangled in state and local politics and is a
major contributor to left-of-center nonprofit organizations.[5]
influencewatch | The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) is the second-largest
teachers’ union in the United States. The union represents roughly 1.5
million members, most of whom work in teaching and education-related
jobs as well as nursing.[1] The union is a member of the AFL-CIO.
The AFT, like most public-sector unions, is a major player in liberal
policy and Democratic Party politics. The union and union president Rhonda “Randi” Weingarten are associated with the Democracy Alliance network of liberal mega-donors.[2]
AFT and its associated political committees are also substantial
contributors to Democratic candidates and party committees: According to
the Center for Responsive Politics, those committees have spent upwards
of $80 million on federal elections, with $79 million going to
Democrats and left of center groups.[3]
The union’s political positions focus on preserving privileges for
teachers largely regardless of teacher quality. The AFT is a staunch
defender of “tenure” policies that make it exceptionally difficult to
remove ineffective teachers from the classroom.[4] Additionally, the union opposes many efforts to bring pension contributions and expenditures into long-run balance.[5]
Numerous AFT local unions have been affected by serious corruption committed by senior officers in the local unions. The Washington Teachers Union, the United Teachers of Dade, and the Broward Teachers Union all suffered substantial financial losses from financial corruption committed by their officers.[6] The AFT locals in Chicago and New York City have also been embroiled in highly controversial local politics.
Union president Randi Weingarten is a longtime union official, having
served previously as president of the AFT-affiliated local teachers
union in New York City, the United Federation of Teachers.
In her work as New York’s teacher union president, Weingarten gained
infamy for her aggressive defense of teachers awaiting dismissal
hearings for misconduct in the city’s “rubber rooms.” One principal went
so far as to suggest Weingarten “would protect a dead body in the
classroom.”[7]
foreignpolicy | If proud boys
and vigilantes can’t pull off a coordinated drive for power, they may
opt for a time-honored approach in democratic politics: the “strategy of
tension.” In a paper published this spring,
University of Winchester criminologists Matt Clement and Vincenzo
Scalia defined the strategy of tension as a political method of “state
crime,” designed to produce “a climate of fear within communities.
[Strategies of tension] employ deceit, threats, and acts of violence in
order to maintain control across society through fear of the
consequences of challenging the government of the day.”
The term was coined in Italy during the Years of Lead from the late 1960s to the 1980s, when political violence exploded, with bombings, kidnappings, and failed coups
making weekly headlines. Under the strategy of tension, as the left
grows more militant, influential, and strident in its demands, the right
tries to inflame social tensions rather than defuse them. The violence
has a dual purpose, to both suppress and provoke. The right’s aim is to
cordon the left off from power by simultaneously intimidating them,
eliciting escalation, getting the police to crack down, and using the
chaos to manipulate public opinion and political alliances.
Virtually every member of the Western Alliance has had its own years
of lead, not only Italy but Britain during The Troubles in Northern
Ireland, France as it tried to cling to Algeria and was targeted by its
own paramilitary terror campaign, South America in the years of Operation Condor,
Mexico’s Dirty War, and so on. America is no exception. The country has
been here several times before: Bleeding Kansas during the 1850s, when
slave-owners and abolitionists faced off in murderous confrontations;
the birth of the first Klan after the Civil War to resist Radical
Reconstruction; and the wave of violence that accompanied the rise of
the Third Klan during the civil rights movement. Elements of the left
from John Brown to the Italian Red Brigades have also pursued violent
accelerationist campaigns in pursuit of social change. But only the
reactionaries have enjoyed approval from more mainstream sources of
political power. Often, they got logistical support as well as material
and legal cover from security services.
Clement and Scalia described the strategy of tension as a vicious cycle.
State prevention of emancipatory politics leads to dissent, which is in
turn repressed and delegitimized, further isolating social movements.
State
prevention of emancipatory politics leads to dissent, which is in turn
repressed and delegitimized, further isolating social movements.
With no outlet for their demands, activists pursue more radical
confrontations, leading their opponents to justify almost any violence
in maintenance of the oppressive regime.
That dynamic is on display in the response to this year’s BLM
protests. Once initial police suppression was met with uprisings, the
“good guys with guns,” “patriots,” and militias showed up. Ostensibly
there to protect businesses and support law enforcement, the armed
right has instead brought Chekhov’s AR-15 onto the political stage. The
inevitable exchanges of gunfire and vehicular assaults at protests
demonstrate, as Christina Cauterucci recently wrote for Slate, the political ethos of “own the libs” has escalated into “kill the libs.”
In the classic model, the strategy of tension was associated with
Cold War covert action and CIA interference in our allies’ domestic
politics. After World War II, Western intelligence agencies really did
organize “stay-behind networks” with alumni of both fascist regimes and
anti-communist resistance networks in preparation for a possible Soviet
invasion.
And a military threat from the east was only one strategic danger:
The left, it was feared, could also rise to power in the West at the
ballot box and through social movements. The CIA did put its hands on
the scale in the elections like Italy in 1948, when left-wing parties
were portrayed as Soviet puppets and systemically kept out of a
coalition government. In the late 1960s, the rise of the New Left was
indeed met with covert violence, police terror, and a string of false
flag attacks by neo-Fascists intended to suppress, discredit, and
isolate the young movement.
WND | A co-founder of Proud Boys said Friday he will sue Democratic
presidential nominee Joe Biden and media outlets that have called the
organization "white supremacist" and "Nazi."
"I'm suing them. I'm suing Joe Biden. I'm suing CNN. All of these
reporters that call this multi-racial patriotic group white supremacists
and Nazis," said Gavin McInnes in an interview with Newsmax TV.
The group, which portrays itself as a patriotic counterbalance to
Antifa, was spotlighted in the presidential debate Tuesday when Biden
named it as a "white supremacist" group that President Trump should
specifically condemn.
McInnes, who left the group in 2018, said the people associated with
Proud Boys who are being labeled are "not tolerating it anymore."
"As far as I'm concerned, that's the new 'N' word. You call me a
Nazi? That's as bad as any other racial epithet," he told Newsmax TV.
Those people killed 6 million Jews, and to call us that is a deep-seated
insult.
McInnes left Proud Boys after an October 2018 clash between members
of the group and Antifa that followed a speech he made in New York at
the Metropolitan Republican Club. He helped found the Proud Boys in
2016.
He said the organization previously sued the discredited Southern
Poverty Law Center for describing the Proud Boys as a hate group.
"Now we're gonna start getting litigious with everyone. It's the only way to fight back," he said.
He said Biden labeled the Proud Boys as white supremacist possibly because he's "senile" or "mentally weak."
"When you're incurious and your brain is going, which seems to be
about half the American population these days, then the tiki torch guys
in Charlottesville, and Patriot Prayer, and militia, and
three-percenters, and Trump supporters, they're all the same, and the
KKK," McInnes said.
theatlantic |I drove from Kentucky
into the mountains of Carroll County, Virginia, and, in a field along a
winding road, parked at the end of a long row of pickup trucks and SUVs.
A hundred people, most of them armed, were looking up at a man giving a
speech from the back of a flatbed truck that was painted in camouflage.
Between the crowd and me were two young men with semiautomatic rifles.
They stopped me in a manner—neither friendly nor unfriendly—that I’d
encountered at checkpoints in other parts of the world.
So-called
militia musters like this one had been quietly happening all over the
state. The legislature was still pushing ahead with gun-control
measures, and people were preparing for the possibility of more riots,
and for the election. Rhodes was scheduled to give remarks but, as
usual, he was late.
One of the young men said something into a
walkie-talkie, and a muscular Iraq War veteran named Will joined me and
explained the reason for the guards and the men posted in the woods on
the far side of the field. They weren’t worried about law enforcement—a
deputy from the sheriff’s department stood not far from me, leaning
against his cruiser. It was leftists, antifa, who might record your
license plate, dox you, show up at your home.
This was a different
kind of crowd than Rhodes had drawn to the VFW hall. Many were in their
20s and 30s and had come in uniforms—some Three Percenters wore black
T‑shirts and camouflage pants, and members of another group stood
together in matching woodland fatigues. From the latter, a man climbed
onto the flatbed and introduced himself as Joe Klemm, the leader of a
new militia called the Ridge Runners.
He was a 29-year-old former
marine and spoke with a boom that brought the crowd to attention. “I’ve
seen this coming since I was in the military,” he said. “For far too
long, we’ve given a little bit here and there in the interest of peace.
But I will tell you that peace is not that sweet. Life is not that dear.
I’d rather die than not live free.”
“Hoo-ah,” some people cheered.
“It’s
going to change in November,” Klemm continued. “I follow the
Constitution. We demand that the rest of you do the same. We demand that
our police officers do the same. We’re going to make these people fear
us again. We should have been shooting a long time ago instead of
standing off to the side.”
“Are you willing to lose your lives?”
he asked. “Are you willing to lose the lives of your loved ones—maybe
see one of your loved ones ripped apart right next to you?”
After
he finished, Rhodes rolled up in his rented Dodge Ram and parked in the
grass beside me. He walked to the flatbed but didn’t climb it. Then he
turned and faced the crowd. His speech meandered back to revolutionary
times, evoking the traditions of a country founded in bloodshed. He
urged them to build a militia for their community.
Rhodes stayed
at the muster long after most people had left, meeting every last
person, his history lessons stretching on and on. Eventually the
conversation turned to the problems in the area—the drug overdoses and
mental-health crises and the desperate state of the local economy. The
people there seemed to believe that taking up arms would somehow stave
off the country’s unraveling rather than speed it along.
When the
protests erupted in Kenosha a month later, many of the demonstrators
brought guns, and vigilante groups quickly formed on the other side.
They called themselves the Kenosha Guard. There was a confrontation near
a gas station like the one at Pepperoni Bill’s, and a teenager
allegedly opened fire and killed two people. A man affiliated with
antifa allegedly gunned down a Trump supporter in Portland later that
week, and Rhodes declared that “the first shot has been fired.”
By
then, some writers popular on the militant right had been warning that
wars don’t always start with a clear, decisive event—an attack, a coup,
an invasion—and that you might not realize you’re in one until it’s
under way. Civil conflict is gradual. The path to it, I thought, might
begin with brooding over it. It could start with opening your mind.
caitlinjohnstone | Liberals hate leftists. Hate them, hate them, hate them.
They
don’t often admit it of course. Admitting you hate those to your left
at least as much as you hate those to your right would cause a lot of
cognitive dissonance for those who think of themselves as being on the
left, and it would weaken their arguments considerably.
But they do. Liberals hate leftists, for a number of reasons.
Liberals
hate leftists because there is a night-and-day difference between a
capitalist, imperialist establishment and an ideology which wants to
tear down that establishment and replace it with peace and socialism. There’s
more of a difference between true leftists and establishment liberals
than there is between the far right and establishment liberals.
Liberals hate leftists because the psychological discomfort known as cognitive dissonance actually hurts, so those who provoke it can often be perceived as the cause of that pain.
Liberals
hate leftists because they’ve spent their whole lives building and
reinforcing a worldview which validates war, oligarchy and exploitation
while thinking of themselves as defenders of equality and sanity, so
when someone comes in promoting an ideology which highlights the
discrepancy between those two points the cognitive dissonance which sets
in makes them feel like the leftist just slapped them in the face.
Liberals
hate leftists because while both purport to support the working class
and disempowered groups, only one of them actually does so.
Liberals
hate leftists for the same reason someone telling a bogus
self-aggrandizing story at a party would hate somebody who caught them
in one of their lies in front of everyone.
Liberals hate leftists because leftists are a constant reminder that liberals are not the thing they pretend to be.
Liberals
hate leftists for the same reason you’d hate someone who keeps yelling
out “This is all fake! Those are actors!” at a theater: they disrupt a
pleasant illusion the liberals are trying to enjoy about villains being
fought by heroic protagonists.
newyorker | The invention of the sensitivity-training group is often traced to a
specific evening: Lewin was running a workshop for teachers and social
workers in Connecticut, where he had been hired by the state to help
address racial and religious prejudice. After the participants had left,
a few stragglers returned and asked to be permitted to sit in on the
debriefings, and Lewin agreed. Though it was initially awkward to have
the participants present, Lewin realized that the setup led to frank and
open conversations. He saw the transformative possibilities of
uninhibited feedback in the real time of the group session, and
established the idea of the corporate T-group—shorthand for sensitivity
“training group”—at the National Training Laboratory, in Bethel, Maine.
His inroads into social engineering could also be put to less
conciliatory purposes; Lewin was a consultant for the Office of
Strategic Services and developed programs to help recruit potential
spies.
The T-group, which was sometimes called “therapy for
normals”—rather insensitively by today’s standards but with the intent
of destigmatizing the practice—was a therapeutic workshop for strangers
which would take place in a neutral locale and promote candid emotional
exchange. A typical T-group session would begin with the facilitator
declining to assume any active leadership over the session, a move that
would surprise and disconcert the participants, who would collectively
have to work out the problem of how to deal with a lack of hierarchy or
directives.
It sounds simple enough, but the experience could be
deeply unsettling, even life-changing, for some. As one contemporary
witness of the Bethel N.T.L. workshops remarked, “I had never observed
such a buildup of emotional tension in such a short time. I feared it
was more than some leaders and members could bear.” The T-group promised
an antidote to the oppressions of Dale Carnegie-style insincerity that
dominated the business world, and, crucially, the sessions seemed to
provide a glimpse of a reality in which it was finally possible to know
how one was really perceived.
the prize for the “toughest encounter seminar that had been ever
convened at Esalen” went to one run collaboratively by George Leonard
and Price Cobbs. Leonard was a white psychologist from the South, whose
youthful encounter with the terrified eyes of a Black prisoner
surrounded by a white mob instilled in him a lifelong commitment to
fighting racism. He implored Cobbs, an African-American psychiatrist who
was co-authoring the book “Black Rage,”
to come to Esalen to collaborate. They organized a storied,
twenty-four-hour-marathon racial-sensitivity workshop between Black and
white participants that became rancorous: “the anger rolled on and on
without end” and “interracial friendships crumbled on the spot.”
Finally, Anderson relates how, as the sun was beginning to rise, an
African-American woman was moved to spontaneously comfort a crying white
woman, and this shifted the tenor of the entire session. Though the
episode could easily be read less sunnily, as another troubling instance
of the oppressor requiring comfort from the oppressed, the facilitators
purportedly deemed it a success. Cobbs spoke to Leonard and declared,
“George, we’ve got to take this to the world.”
Cobbs’s
career encapsulates the shift of sensitivity training from its literary
roots to corporate argot. He was sparked by early epiphanies about
Black anger and injustice, inspired by reading Richard Wright, James
Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison. He admired the plot of “Invisible Man,”
for instance, because “the unnamed main character’s sense of his own
invisibility fans his ultimate rage into flames of
self-expression. . . .” Cobbs credited Lewin’s research as a key
precedent when he went on to found Pacific Management Systems, a
training center for T-group leaders, and he played a role in the spinoff
of diversity training from sensitivity training. His years of advising
African-American businesspeople formed the basis of his guide, from
2000, “Cracking the Corporate Code: The Revealing Success Stories of 32 African-American Executives.”
In her provocative history “Race Experts,”
from 2002, the scholar Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn examines Cobbs’s career as
part of the larger story of how “racial etiquette” and sensitivity
training “hijacked” and banalized civil-rights discourse. Quinn
persuasively maintains that “sensitivity itself is an inadequate and
cynical substitution for civility and democracy—both of which presuppose
some form of equal treatment and universal standard of conduct,” and
neither of which, of course, the U.S. has ever achieved.
BAR | The Biden-Trump confrontation revealed, with crystalline clarity,
that the real “genius” of the American electoral process is its total
imperviousness to popular demands for a healthier, more just and less
economically precarious society and a peaceful, ecologically stable
world. Instead, the Democratic alternative to the white supremacist
Republican in the White House is — another lifelong racist, mass-incarcerating, corporate-serving, warmongering old white man.
“The party is me, right now. I am the Democratic Party,” Joe Biden
shot back at the “clown” Donald Trump, who repeatedly tried to associate
the former vice president with the Green New Deal, Medicare for All and
Black Lives Matter demands to rein in the police — all issues supported
by super-majorities of Democrats, and even large chunks of Republican
voters, but opposed by the candidate now representing the Party.
“You just lost the left,” Trump twice hollered, wishfully. In an
actual democracy the Democrats would, indeed, have committed political
suicide by nominating a corporate hack and career race-baiter like Biden
as their standard-bearer. But the U.S. is a corporate dictatorship
where the rich have two parties and the rest of us effectively have
none.
The voters that Trump referred to in the debate as “the left,” are
actually at the center of the U.S. political spectrum, where
super-majorities favor the positions taken by Bernie Sanders during the
primaries. Exit polls in South Carolina and on “Super Tuesday” showed
that the same Democrats that voted for Joe Biden nevertheless favored
Sanders’ positions on the issues, but opted for Biden in fear of Trump
and his rabid White Man’s Party. It’s a simple formula that allows
Democrats to promise their base nothing — except that they are not Trump
or some other flagrant racist.
“The U.S. is a corporate dictatorship where the rich have two parties and the rest of us effectively have none.”
The trick will continue to work until voters, especially Blacks, stop
rewarding Democrats for their serial betrayals. There is nothing smart
or “strategic” about falling for the same trick every election cycle –
and anybody that tells you different is in on the con game.
capitalaspower | According to the theory of capital as power, capitalism, like any other
mode of power, is born through sabotage and lives in chains – and yet
everywhere we look we see it grow and expand. What explains this
apparent puzzle of ‘growth in the midst of sabotage’? The answer, we
argue, begins with the very meaning of ‘growth’. Whereas conventional
political economy equates growth with a rising standard of living, we
posit that much of this growth has nothing to do with livelihood as
such: it represents not the improvement of wellbeing, but the expansion
of sabotage itself. Building on this premise, the article historicizes,
theorizes and models the relationship between changes in hierarchical
power and sabotage on the one hand and the growth of energy capture on
the other. It claims that hierarchical power is sought for its own sake;
that building and sustaining this power demands strategic sabotage; and
that sabotage absorbs a significant proportion of the energy captured
by society. From this standpoint, capitalism grows, at least in part,
not despite but because of – and indeed through – sabotage.
ksjomo | Milton Friedman’s libertarian economics advocating shareholder capitalism has influenced generations trying to understand the economy, not only in the US, but all over the world.
He was not just an academic economist, but an enormously influential celebrityconservative ideologue who legitimized ideas for the like-minded, including the belief that ‘greed is good’. Now, shareholder capitalism’s consequences haunt the world and threaten humanity with stagnation and self-destruction.
In 1962, Friedman published his most influential book, Capitalism and Freedom. In September 1970, the New York Times Magazine published his essay, The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits.
The fiftieth anniversary of its publication has triggered an
international debate of its contemporary significance, especially with
the resurgence of ethno-populist jingoism embracing his neoliberal
economic agenda.
The article -- reiterating the Friedman Doctrine, presuming perfectly functioning markets that only exist in the minds and writings of some economists -- is a manifesto for American shareholdercapitalism. It inspired the counter-revolution against Keynesianism, development economics and other state interventions.
The word ‘competition’ appears only once, in the last sentence. Yet,somesupportersinsist that Friedman was not ‘pro-business’, but rather ‘pro-market’. But, unlike capitalism, the market has been with us for several millennia and has happily co-existed with unfreedoms of various types.
Perfect competition rarely exists due to inherent tendencies undermining it. Hence, various challenges to Friedmanite wisdom. For half a century, information and behavioural economics have challenged his many assumptions, certainly much more than the Austrian School advocacy and defence of capitalism.
Thus, Friedman conveniently ignored ‘market imperfections’ in the real world, although or perhaps because they undermined the empirical bases for his reasoning. So, even if Friedman’s logic was true, reality prevents profit-maximizing firm behaviour from maximizing societal welfare, if not cause the converse.
bMeanwhile, Friedman’s monetarist economics has been discredited, and has little practical influence anymore, especially with the turn to ‘unconventional monetary policies’, particularly after the 2008-2009 global financial crisis. Yet, his ideological sway remains strong, as it serves powerful interests.
mattstoller.substack | When I started writing this newsletter on monopoly power, I would not
have predicted that one of the more interesting and popular themes
would be on how market power plays out in the world of cheerleading. And yet, the story of monopolization in cheer is a great example of the problem of concentrated corporate power, because it reveals so much about how our economy actually works.
As
a quick recap, the company involved is called Varsity Brands, which has
monopolized the sport of cheerleading by buying up most major
competitions. Varsity is owned by private equity giant Bain Capital.
What makes this story so useful is that there are no fancy high tech
gadgets in cheer, no possible excuses from economists; it’s just the use
of raw power to extract money from teenagers and their families through
a business conspiracy.
The story also speaks to the power of
advocates to make change. Over the past six months, competitors and
customers have filed multiple class action antitrust lawsuits
against Varsity, all essentially alleging the same anti-competitive
practices from different angles. These cases hit one after another,
building on each other and adding more details to the overall story of
recklessness that occurs under a monopoly.
And now another shoe just dropped.
Last week, Marisa Kwiatkowski and Tricia L. Nadolny at USA Todaydetailed a massive scandal of rampant sexual abuse in cheerleading. There’s a high-profile aspect of this scandal; Netflix’s Cheer celebrity Jerry Harris was arrested
for producing child pornography involving young cheerleaders, with
complaints about him seemingly ignored by the main cheer governing body.
But the scandal is more far-reaching than just Harris. What Kwiatkowski
and Nadolny found was that over a 100 convicted sex offenders who had
raped or assaulted children or otherwise engaged in sexual misconduct
were allowed to work in the cheerleading world, and the two governing
nonprofits of the sport - USA Cheer and the U.S. All Star Federation
(USASF) - did not put these sex offenders on their list of people banned from the sport.
This
kind of abusive behavior happens in every sphere of human activity, so
one might think that abuse is not intrinsic to any particular business
model. Further, these offenders by and large did not work at Varsity,
but at independent gyms and associated companies doing business in the
cheerleading ecosystem, so it’s even easier to see this as an isolated
scandal. And yet, while it may not at first seem like it, this scandal
about predators is part of the same monopoly story that I happened to
hit on in January. This is a story of a theme I’ve hit on in other
industries, or what is known as absentee ownership.
benjaminstudebaker | Then there are jobs that require a degree but which are less secure
and less lucrative than they used to be. Attacks on teachers’ unions,
for instance, are gradually eroding the benefits and security which
teachers have traditionally enjoyed. As this happens, the distinction in
living standard between teachers and ordinary workers becomes blurrier
and blurrier. Tenured teachers still have a better situation than most
workers, but fewer and fewer teachers are put in position to acquire
tenure. Within teaching, then, there is a minority of secure, tenured
faculty–who are part of the rump professional class. Then there are
teachers who have no realistic path to tenure and have been effectively
turned into casual workers. These teachers are part of the fallen
professional class. The rump professional class and the fallen
professional class have largely the same education, but are nonetheless
treated very differently, because the system is not interested in
rewarding their merit but in reducing the cost of the education system.
The fallen professionals want to be part of the rump professional
class, but can no longer access it materially. They can only access it
culturally, by maintaining their familiarity with the language and ideas
of the rump professionals. For this reason, the fallen professionals
try very hard to continue to be part of the culture of the rump
professionals. This enables many rump professionals to make money off
their fallen counterparts by selling an ersatz version of the experience
of professional class life. This takes the form of podcasts, YouTube
videos, and prestige TV shows and films. By consuming this media, the
fallen professional continues to feel part of the rump professional
class, even as the fallen professional is robbed of the material
benefits of being a member.
Because the fallen professionals want to feel superior to the
ordinary workers, the rump professionals have a financial incentive to
sell ideas which flatter this superiority complex. This has led, in
recent years, to the development of a woke industry which invents new
terms and grounds for taking offence. By using these terms and taking
offence in these ways, the fallen professionals feel they are
participating in the culture of the rump professionals and they can
distinguish themselves from the ordinary workers, who fail to use the
language or to recognise the offensiveness.
The rump professionals justify this commercialisation of radicalism
on the grounds that it is ostensibly morally committed to resisting
racism, patriarchy, fascism, or even capitalism itself. But the main
effect of the product is to create cultural barriers between the fallen
professionals and the ordinary workers, so the fallen professionals will
continue to politically identify with the rump professionals and
therefore with the rich. The language is used to label the ordinary
worker a deplorable bigot, and the ordinary worker responds by seeking
the absolute destruction of these professionals through right
nationalist politics. Mortified by the right nationalism of the workers,
the rump and fallen professionals lean ever harder into denouncing them
as bigots, creating a vicious cycle which pushes the workers further
and further to the right.
For some time now, the left has sought to use these fallen
professionals as “class traitors”. They are supposed to lead left-wing
movements and organise on the ground. But the fallen professionals
cannot do this, because they have contempt for the people they are
trying to lead. This contempt is nurtured by the cultural content
manufactured by the rump professionals.
None of this is anyone’s fault, individually. Because it’s getting
harder and harder to be part of the rump professional class, would-be
professionals must do everything they can to compete, and that means
they have to look for money wherever they can find it. Those who make it
must make money off those who do not. Those who do not were fed lies
from childhood. They were told that a professional class life was
achievable, and they were told it would be wonderful and fulfilling.
Their desire to get the recognition and meaning they were promised is a
reasonable consequence of the way they were socialised. And how can the
ordinary worker react in any other way? The worker cannot have dignity
without resisting a professional culture that constantly denigrates
workers for lacking elite education.
epochtimes | Having the organizational infrastructure in place, unionized K-12
teachers and staff are the perfect societal, organized group to take the
combination of masks, grievance, and narcissism and operationalize it
as the shock troops for taking down the American constitutional system.
Rick Moran identified this in his 2017 piece, “Dozens of public school teachers involved in Antifa.” It was a clarion call that something was going on.
The arrest reports from around the country have shown a high number
of those arrested are part of the K-12 education system. Often times,
arrests from Portland have reflected numbers north of 50 percent. Andy Ngo and others have done an excellent job of documenting this connection—often at great personal risk. The street thugs of Antifa and BLM seem to lose their “bravery” once the mask comes off and they are exposed.
Do not quibble, do not try to rationalize with the mob—reject their
thesis and aggressively deal with them—both citizens and all levels of
government must lock shoulders and stand against the blind rage of the
street mobbery. Once specific personalities are personally held liable
for the death and destruction they create, the violence will rapidly go
away.
This is not just the masked actors—this includes the state and local
leaders and politicians that act in a feckless, hapless matter.
Fecklessness may not be a crime, but results count, so citizens, please
hold these politicians and leaders responsible through recall petitions
and new elections.
Forbes | Mayor Bill de Blasio is aggressively pushing for a $12.4 billion federal bailout— because New York City faces an unprecedented $7 billion budget deficit over the next two years.
Last week, in a public relations stunt, the mayor announced a
one-week unpaid furlough of himself and 494 employees within his office —
a taxpayer savings of a paltry $860,000.
So, how did the city get so deep into trouble?
Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com dug into the skyrocketing city payroll. In 2016, there were
76,166 employees with pay exceeding $100,000. By 2019, there were more
than 114,000 — a 50-percent increase in six-figure earners.
In 2019, plumber helpers earned $172,988; thermostat repairmen made
up to $198,630; regular laborers hauled away $213,169; electricians lit
up $253,132; and plumbers pocketed up to $286,245.
School janitors ($256,000) out-earned the principals ($154,000). Four
deputy mayors made over $241,641 each and 5,998 city employees
out-earned New York governor Andrew Cuomo ($178,000).
The city has 331,520 full-time equivalent employees – up from 297,349 in 2014.
$120 billion of funding for the restaurant industry
financial relief for the airline industry
$225 billion in education funding
$436 billion in financial aid for state, local and tribal governments
$75 billion for Covid-19 testing and tracing
$15 billion for the U.S. Post Office
Food assistance benefits
Senate not gonna do it..., (the item highlighted in red is why)
Pelosi could bring her new stimulus bill to the House floor for a vote as early as this week. Will this stimulus bill become law?
No, the Heroes Act will unlikely become law in its current form. Why?
Democrats need bipartisan support to pass any stimulus bill. While
Democrats control the House of Representatives, Republicans control the
U.S. Senate and the White House. While the revised Heroes Act would
result in lower federal spending (which Senate Republicans generally
prefer), Republicans have been clear that they won’t support a $2.2 trillion stimulus bill.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who is negotiating a potential
stimulus deal on behalf of the White House, says Republicans would be
willing to agree to a $1.5 trillion stimulus deal—but no more. Both
Mnuchin and President Donald Trump want a new stimulus deal, more
stimulus checks and aid to small businesses. However, they have not
committed to spend $2 trillion. Trump has also called to use some Covid relief funds to send stimulus checks. However, the White House has not publicly supported a $2 trillion stimulus deal.
off-guardian | We believe in one Virus, the SARS-COV-2, the Almighty, destroyer of heaven and earth, that is all there is, seen and unseen.
We believe in one Malady, Covid-19, the
only son of SARS-COV-2, eternally begotten of the Virus, God from God,
Darkness from Darkness, true God from true God, begotten, not made
(probably) of one Being with the Virus.
For diseases are they none but the One True
Virus and Death comes not without Its presence. Thou shalt have no
diseases before the One True Virus. They that die outside the Virus
shall not have their passing told unto the people on a quotidian basis
in hushed tones, but shall be quietly recorded in obscure tables when
the time comes.
Through the Virus all things were unmade.
For us men (and women and all points in between) and for our damnation
It came down from heaven (or maybe from China or Maryland):
By the power of the Holy WHO
It became incarnate from the swirling microbes (or maybe bat soup through immaculate Zoonosis), and was made Pandemic.
For Its sake we were crucified under ongoing Lockdown;
It suffered not death, like unto most it afflicteth, and is never buried in the news.
Though by the evidence that appeareth on those who do pass away or wax sick, it hath waned to almost nought.
On the second wave It rose again
And though few did perish many were tested and lo! Many were deemed
infected (probably) and ‘cases’ were they named, though sickness showed
they none,
in accordance with the Great Plan;
It ascended into the collective consciousness
and is seated on the right and left hand of all (lest with sanitiser they do anoint themselves five score times hourly)
It will come again in glory, as many times as necessary to convince the living and the dead,
and his mask’d kingdom will have no end, it seemeth.
turcopolier | I used to spend quite a lot of time with Catholic clergy and prelates in the US, Europe and the Levant when I was involved in charitable works in the ME.
The clergy and hierarchy in the US are, in my experience, in the main, vain, careerist homosexuals hiding from a largely heterosexual world. They cultivate each other from an early age, seeking the kind of "mentorship" that involves a lot of fawning and sucking up, one way or another,
That is not to say that there not a good many godly men who sacrifice a lot personally in the hope of following Jesus. I knew quite a few like that in the chaplainate of the Army, but there are more of the others. I will never forget a sermon preached on Memorial Day at the Presidio of Monterey by an Army Chaplain.
See my "Dear Hearts Across the Seas" for that.
In the ME, the age old practice of simony continues in the clergy. A Catholic Patriarch of Jerusalem, a Palestinian, had to be removed from his see some time back because he installed his nephew as auxiliary bishop of Nazareth, and then they shared the "loot" together. Eventually his sins became too great to ignore.
Teddy McCarrick was very, very queer all his clerical life and the corruptor of many young men. He was always like that. Clergy and Religious in and from the Archdiocese of New York would laugh sadly and say that if he had not made a pass at you , you must be really ugly. I was always careful to sit at the opposite end of any table in the fear that I might not be ugly or aged enough to escape his attention.
Pope Francis is accused by Archbishop Vigano of apostasy in the matter of doubting the reality of Transubstantiation and of various other heresies, including a confession and justification of his own homosexuality to a gay priest.
Nevertheless, it appears that he wants to shovel out the Church's stables.
fox4kc | Kansas City department heads are being told to trim 11% from their budgets. That directive includes Kansas City police.
Mayor Quinton Lucas said Wednesday the cuts are because of a projected $60 million budget shortfall next year.
Because of the pandemic, it’s really no surprise Kansas City and
probably most cities are worried about decreased revenue and tax
dollars.
If it’s a way Kansas City makes money, it’s probably been affected in
2020. Earnings taxes, sales taxes, convention and tourism taxes are all
down in the first four months of the fiscal year — a trend that’s
expected to continue.
“It’s now September, and we continue to be very down in a lot of
commercial spending economic activity, and that’s probably going to be
the case for the remainder of this calendar year and maybe into 2021,”
Lucas said.
The budget cuts could mean layoffs or vacant jobs not filled. But the
city will also look at other ways to cut costs without cutting too many
services.
It comes at a time when the Kansas City Health Department is trying
to fight a global pandemic and the Kansas City Police Department is
fighting what’s been called a pandemic of violence. Public safety
accounts for 72.8% of the General Fund operating budget, and Lucas said
he knows cuts there could have consequences.
“It’s why we organize a government to make sure that if you need a
paramedic, if you have a big car accident, if you need to call police in
the middle of the night, that somebody responds quickly,” Lucas said.
jsonline | Fewer than 1% of calls from Wisconsin residents
who lost their jobs during the pandemic were answered by state officials
overseeing unemployment benefits, and the Evers administration did not
report key information to lawmakers showing the full scope of the
problem, a new state audit shows.
The audit confirms stories the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has heard for months
from hundreds of people who were forced out of jobs or work because of
the pandemic, and it is being released a week after Gov. Tony Evers
fired the agency's secretary over lack of progress in clearing claims
from more than 90,000 people.
The analysis
from the Legislative Audit Bureau Friday shows 93.3% of the 41 million
calls to the state Department of Workforce Development unemployment call
centers between March 15 and June 30 were blocked, or callers received a
busy signal.
About 6% of callers hung up before reaching anyone and 0.5% of calls were ultimately answered.
But the agency didn't report the full scope of the problem to lawmakers on the audit committee, the audit shows.
Between
April and June, the agency reported to Republican audit committee
co-chairs Sen. Rob Cowles and Rep. Samantha Kerkman that 4.9 million
telephone calls were "blocked, abandoned, and answered."
But auditors found a total of 19.6 million calls were actually blocked or resulted in busy signals.
"That's the piece that is most troubling," Cowles, R-Green Bay, said in an interview.
Amy
Pechacek, former deputy secretary of the Department of Corrections who
now oversees DWD until a new leader is chosen, said in a statement the
agency's antiquated IT system hamstrung staff's ability "to quickly
implement new changes and programs, which prompted even more calls and
questions" to the call centers.
tribunemag | All over the world, Covid-19 is putting jobs and incomes under threat. As UNCTAD’s most recent Trade and Development report outlined,
more than 500 million jobs across the globe are at risk during the
crisis, and at least 100 million won’t be coming back. And this is only
half the story. Much of the world’s population never had formal
employment to begin with; for them, the future looks particularly bleak.
Between 90 to 120 million people are likely to be pushed into extreme
poverty by the pandemic.
UNCTAD’s report points out that the dire predictions about
the potential impact of the crisis are not preordained; what happens
between now and the discovery of a vaccine, and the shape of the
recovery after that, will be determined by policy decisions made by
governments. In much of the rich world, jobs protection schemes of one
kind or another seem to have limited the impact of the crisis on formal
employment so far. The main outlier is the United States, which had no
such centralised scheme. While statistical estimates aren’t all that
reliable in the midst of a crisis like this, unemployment claims, which
tend to understate the scale of the problem, hit one million in the US
this August.
In the Global South, the picture is far bleaker. UNCTAD’s
report points to precarious work conditions, high debt levels and
pressure from international financial markets as the main constraints on
Global South states seeking to respond to the crisis. The report claims
that the Global South is facing a $2-3 trillion financing gap as a
result of the pandemic. If this gap is not bridged, many of these states
will simply be unable to implement the public health and employment
support measures needed to tackle the crisis.
One of the most significant challenges for states in the
Global South is the scale of the euphemistically termed ‘informal’
economy, which often employs the majority of the population. Street
vendors, transport workers and waste collectors make up a significant
proportion of the urban economies of the Global South, which have
swelled substantially in recent years due, in part, to falling
employment in agriculture. Providing targeted support for these workers
is much harder than those in ‘formal’ employment – i.e. employment
recognised by the state.
Yet these workers tend to be the ones who will require the
most help. Many live on or near the poverty line, have few savings and
large families. Informal workers are also disproportionately likely to
live in informal housing, where crowded conditions and poor sanitation
facilitate the spread of the virus. In fact, many of these workers may
already have had the virus – recent research
suggests that 80% cases of Covid-19 in Africa have been asymptomatic,
and the mortality rate for Covid-19 on the continent is much lower,
meaning the virus may have swept through the population almost
unnoticed. This is substantially due to Africa’s youthful population and
lower life expectancy.
Even if the virus may prove less deadly among younger
populations in the Global South, the economic impact of the looming
global economic crisis will be severe. Indeed, the entirely avoidable
economic consequences of Covid-19 may end up killing more people than
the virus itself.
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Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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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 ...
