Thank you @joebiden from the 87% of Black men that voted for you whom you overlooked when hiring these positions. Instead opting largely for a white female base that in majority did not vote you to President-elect. “Biden hires all-female senior communications team.” pic.twitter.com/ORrUMr57la
blmchapterstatement |It
was recently declared that Patrisse Cullors was appointed the Executive
Director to the Black Lives Matter Global Network (BLMGN) Foundation.
Since then, two new Black Lives Matter formations have been announced to
the public: a Black Lives Matter Political Action Committee, and BLM
Grassroots. BLM Grassroots was allegedly created to support the
organizational needs of chapters, separate from the financial functions
of BLMGN. We, the undersigned chapters, believe that all of these events
occurred without democracy, and assert that it was without the
knowledge of the majority of Black Lives Matters chapters across the
country and world.
We
became chapters of Black Lives Matter as radical Black organizers
embracing a collective vision for Black people engaging in the
protracted struggle for our lives against police terrorism. With a
willingness to do hard work that would put us at risk, we expected that
the central organizational entity, most recently referred to as the
Black Lives Matter Global Network (BLMGN) Foundation, would support us
chapters in our efforts to build communally. Since the establishment of
BLMGN, our chapters have consistently raised concerns about financial
transparency, decision making, and accountability. Despite years of
effort, no acceptable internal process of accountability has ever been
produced by BLMGN and these recent events have undermined the efforts of
chapters seeking to democratize its processes and resources.
In
the spirit of transparency, accountability, and responsibility to our
community, we believe public accountability has become necessary. As a
contribution to our collective liberation, we must make clear:
Patrisse
Cullors, as the sole board member of BLMGN, became Executive Director
against the will of most chapters and without their knowledge.
The newly
announced formation, BLM Grassroots, does not have the support of and
was created without consultation with the vast majority of chapters.
The
formation of BLM Grassroots effectively separated the majority of
chapters from BLMGN without their consent and interrupted the active
process of accountability that was being established by those chapters.
In our
experience, chapter organizers have been consistently prevented from
establishing financial transparency, collective decision making, or collaboration on political analysis and visionwithin BLMGN
For years there has been inquiry
regarding the financial operations of BLMGN and no acceptable process of
either public or internal transparency about the unknown millions of
dollars donated to BLMGN, which has certainly increased during this time
of pandemic and rebellion.
To the best of our knowledge, most
chapters have received little to no financial support from BLMGN since
the launch in 2013. It was only in the last few months that selected
chapters appear to have been invited to apply for a $500,000 grant
created with resources generated because of the organizing labor of
chapters. This is not the equity and financial accountability we
deserve.
We
remain committed to collectively building an organization of BLM
chapters that is democratic, accountable, and functions in a way that is
aligned with our ideological values and commitment to liberation. We
will move forward with transparency and expound on our collective
efforts to seek transparency and organizational unity in a fuller
statement in the near future. As we collectively determine next steps,
we encourage our supporters to donate directly to chapters, who
represent the frontline of Black Lives Matter.
BAR | Black Lives Matter Inland Empire, in an open letter, last week
announced its departure from the cash-heavy Black Lives Global Network.
“The issue of greatest concern for us is the relationship between the Global Network and the Democratic Party.”
To our community,
Recently, a group of BLM chapters known as the BLM 10 has come
forward to voice their concerns and opposition to the Global Network.
Those concerns, along with the egregious conduct the Global network
demonstrated on Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday, have brought us to
the conclusion that continuing to remain silent would be an act of
betrayal. While the issues and problems that have been raised have been
well known within our circle for years, it prompted many questions &
concerns for us locally. We’d like to let the community know everything
outlined in the statement put out by the BLM 10 is valid.
We’ve also reached out to the BLM 10 and offered to sign on in support.
Hopefully, we can provide insight and clarification into our chapter’s
history, our relationship with the global network, and our commitments
going forward.
When BLM IE first started, we were originally known as the Black and
Brown Underground (BBU). In 2015 we were approached by an individual
named Patrisse Cullors, who offered us an opportunity to join the Global
Network and organize as a Black Lives Matter chapter. After hearing
her proposal, we believed that our work, direction, and principles
aligned and agreed to join the network; renaming ourselves Black Lives
Matter Inland Empire in the process. We were told that the organization
we were joining was decentralized and leaderless, but we quickly
discovered that was not the case. The Global Network is a top-down
dogmatic organization that promotes certain chapters that choose to
align with their direction and sequester the ones that don’t. For us
locally, that chapter has been Los Angeles.
“Continuing to remain silent would be an act of betrayal.”
For years, the leadership of the Los Angeles chapter has aligned with
the Global network and One United Bank to impose on various chapters,
particularly ours. We believe that while doing this they received
substantial donations and funding, despite them continually soliciting
the community for donations. Together, the Los Angeles Chapter along
with the Global Network have consistently tried to strong-arm other
groups and have worked to undermine a grassroots movement by
capitalizing on unpaid labor, suppressing any internal attempt at
democracy, commodifying Black death, and profiting from the same pain
and suffering inflicted on Black communities that we’re fighting to end.
In spite of being ostracised, receiving no financial support, and the
maltreatment from both the Global Network and Los Angeles Chapter we’ve
maintained our composure while working to the benefit of our community
and victims of state sanctioned violence.
Clearly, we do not have the same beliefs or sense of ethics. We no
longer feel, as we initially did, that our politics align. As a result,
we are announcing that we are no longer associated or connected to the
BLM Global Network. As an attempt to distance ourselves, we have decided
to rename part of our organization The Black Power Collective while we
restructure.
The use of the BLM name, which we believed was intended to unify our
struggle, has been commodified and debased. It is now being used to sell
products, acquire book deals, T.V. deals, and speaking engagements. We
have no interest in these pursuits, and we are opposed to the movement
to substitute Black capitalism for white capitalism. It has become clear
that the Global network and certain figures have platformed our
struggles with the sole purpose of exploiting our labor.
“The BLM name is now being used to sell products, acquire book deals, T.V. deals, and speaking engagements.”
Furthermore, the issue of greatest concern for us is the
relationship between the Global Network and the Democratic Party. This
is hypocritical at best, as the Democratic Party has historically
rejected and ignored BLM’s demands and has made it clear that they are
pro-police, pro-prison, and committed to capitalism. From Obama’s
support of police and his double-cross of Erica Garner, to “Top Cop”
Kamala Harris’ denial of justice for Matrice Richardson, even going back
to the 1994 Crime Bill authored by Joe Biden along with the Prisoner
Litigation Reform Act that stripped basic human rights from countless
Black people—the Democratic Party has
literally created the conditions that led to the formation of this
movement. Even now, the Democractic party continues to support
imperialism, killing African heads of state, bombing Somalia, abusing
immigrants (including those of the Black diaspora), and spreading the
U.S. military throughout Black and Brown countries around the world.
This is a party that is a threat both here and internationally. To ally
with them is to ally against ourselves.
RealClearPolitics | "Black Lives Matter is endangering the fairness of our legal system. Because they're rooting for outcomes based on race. Started a long time ago. Started with the O.J. Simpson case."
BostonGlobe | To support an organization or movement that promotes anti-Semitism
because it also supports good causes is the beginning of the road to
accepting racism. Many racist groups have also promoted causes that
deserve support. The Black Panthers had breakfast programs for
inner-city children, while advocating violence against whites. And the
Ku Klux Klan organized summer camps for working-class families, while
advocating violence against blacks.
There must be zero tolerance
for anti-Semitism, regardless of the race, religion, gender, or sexual
orientation of the bigots who promote, practice or are complicit with
it. Being on the right side of one racial issue does not give one a
license to be on the wrong side of the oldest bigotry.
To give
Black Lives Matter a pass on its anti-Jewish bigotry would be to engage
in racism. Black anti-Semitism is as inexcusable as white anti-Semitism
or white racism. There can be no double standard when it comes to
bigotry.
I write this column both in sorrow and in anger. In
sorrow because I support the goals of the Black Lives Matter movement — I
have long been involved in efforts to expose and prevent police abuses —
and worry that this obnoxious and divisionary platform plank may
destroy its credibility with regard to police abuse in America by
promoting deliberate lies about Israel. It is also alienating Jewish and
other supporters who could help them achieve their goals here at home —
as many such individuals have historically done in actively supporting
all aspects of the civil rights movement.
ghionjournal |Precisely at the time we need
leadership the most, we have been left out in the cold and shepherded
into the wilderness by black opinion leaders who are more interested in
cashing checks and enhancing their Q ratings than they are in standing
up for justice. Gone are the days of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and
erstwhile moral giants who confronted racism with the courage of lions,
we are now firmly entrenched in the era of hustling hyenas like
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Barack Obama and Kamala Harris who cozy up to the very
system of repression they pretend to be fighting against.
Instead of leading with imagination, sambos in expensive suits prefer to distract us
with agitprops and tropes. We went from “we shall overcome”, a mission
statement of resilience, to “black lives matter” as we meekly advertise
our inadequacies and beg for social acceptance. I am actually
embarrassed every time I see a similarly complexioned brother or sister
wearing a #BLM logo on their facemask or their chest;
As if doing damage to our psyche was not enough, some decide to add
insults to self-injury by dismissing the plight of anyone who does not
have melanin like ours. It is the height of absurdity to assume that
someone who is “white” has privilege by virtue of their skin color.
Not only is it patently untrue, it is counterproductive as it prevents
likeminded and like-mired “white” people–who would otherwise be
receptive to our plight–from hearing the message we are trying to convey
and joining the fight for redemption.
No one likes to be marginalized and their struggles to be minimized;
this is true for the truly privileged and the most disadvantaged alike.
Think about it; if someone in a wheelchair downplayed your pains and
pooh-poohed your anguish wrought by a broken leg, would you not take
umbrage with that person no matter how crippled she was? People who have
it bad don’t have a license to insult and disparage others who have it marginally better.
Instead of reaching an audience that is sympathetic to our cause, all
we do is close doors and preclude much needed conversations.
The only people who profit from these campaigns of grievance and
woe-is-me victimhood are the very charlatans who are sitting in the lap
of comfort and leading lives of true privilege. The establishment reward
demagogues who incite passions and lead us in the wrong direction.
There is a reason, after all, the Obamas were compensated to the tune of $60 million and why Ta-Nehisi Coates keeps landing on the New York Times bestsellers list.
The fastest way to make a buck and get leg up is to sell your own
people down the river in order to be invited into the whites’ house.
The leaders of Black Lives Matter have perfected the art of the
shakedown in ways that puts Jessie Jackson to shame; they have made more
money in our names and using our pains than any black organization
since the NAACP. What do we have to show for the hundreds of millions they have collected since Ferguson?
Email or DM me if you know the answer because I have been searching for
that answer since Michael Brown was assassinated. Far from being
freedom fighters, Black Lives Matter is a co-op of fee collectors who
hear cash registers ringing each time a “black” man or woman gets killed
by a cop.
nonsite |In light of recent events we thought to republish Adolph Reed’s
2016 essay on racial disparity and police violence. We include a new
introduction to the piece by Cedric Johnson, “The Triumph of Black Lives Matter and Neoliberal Redemption,” that considers the essay in view of the contemporary situation.
Some readers will know that I’ve contended that, despite its
proponents’ assertions, antiracism is not a different sort of
egalitarian alternative to a class politics but is a class
politics itself: the politics of a strain of the professional-managerial
class whose worldview and material interests are rooted within a
political economy of race and ascriptive identity-group relations.
Moreover, although it often comes with a garnish of disparaging but
empty references to neoliberalism as a generic sign of bad things,
antiracist politics is in fact the left wing of neoliberalism in that
its sole metric of social justice is opposition to disparity in the
distribution of goods and bads in the society, an ideal that naturalizes
the outcomes of capitalist market forces so long as they are equitable
along racial (and other identitarian) lines. As I and my colleague
Walter Benn Michaels have insisted repeatedly over the last decade, the
burden of that ideal of social justice is that the society would be fair
if 1% of the population controlled 90% of the resources so long as the
dominant 1% were 13% black, 17% Latino, 50% female, 4% or whatever
LGBTQ, etc. That is the neoliberal gospel of economic justice,
articulated more than a half-century ago by Chicago neoclassical
economist Gary Becker, as nondiscriminatory markets that reward
individual “human capital” without regard to race or other invidious
distinctions.
We intend to make a longer and more elaborate statement of this
argument and its implications, which antiracist ideologues have
consistently either ignored or attempted to dismiss through
mischaracterization of the argument or ad hominem attack.1
For now, however, I want simply to draw attention to how insistence on
reducing discussion of killings of civilians by police to a matter of
racism clouds understanding of and possibilities for effective response
to the deep sources of the phenomenon.
Available data (see https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings/?tid=a_inl)
indicate, to the surprise of no one who isn’t in willful denial, that
in this country black people make up a percentage of those killed by
police that is nearly double their share of the general American
population. Latinos are killed by police, apparently, at a rate roughly
equivalent to their incidence in the general population. Whites are
killed by police at a rate between just under three-fourths (through the
first half of 2016) and just under four-fifths (2015) of their share of
the general population. That picture is a bit ambiguous because seven
percent of those killed in 2015 and fourteen percent of those killed
through June of 2016 were classified racially as either other or
unknown. Nevertheless, the evidence of gross racial disparity is clear:
among victims of homicide by police blacks are represented at twice
their rate of the population; whites are killed at somewhat less than
theirs. This disparity is the founding rationale for the branding
exercise2
called #Black Lives Matter and endless contentions that imminent danger
of death at the hands of arbitrary white authority has been a
fundamental, definitive condition of blacks’ status in the United States
since slavery or, for those who, like the Nation’s Kai Wright,
prefer their derivative patter laced with the seeming heft of obscure
dates, since 1793. In Wright’s assessment “From passage of the 1793
Fugitive Slave Act forward, public-safety officers have been empowered
to harass black bodies [sic] in the defense of private capital and the
pursuit of public revenue.”3
This line of argument and complaint, as well as the demand for ritual
declarations that “black lives matter,” rest on insistence that
“racism”—structural, systemic, institutional, post-racial or however
modified—must be understood as the cause and name of the injustice
manifest in that disparity, which is thus by implication the singular or
paramount injustice of the pattern of police killings.
But, when we step away from focus on racial disproportions, the
glaring fact is that whites are roughly half or nearly half of all those
killed annually by police. And the demand that we focus on the racial
disparity is simultaneously a demand that we disattend from other
possibly causal disparities. Zaid Jilani found, for example, that
ninety-five percent of police killings occurred in neighborhoods with
median family income of less than $100,00 and that the median family
income in neighborhoods where police killed was $52,907.4 And, according to the Washington Post data,
the states with the highest rates of police homicide per million of
population are among the whitest in the country: New Mexico averages
6.71 police killings per million; Alaska 5.3 per million; South Dakota
4.69; Arizona and Wyoming 4.2, and Colorado 3.36. It could be possible
that the high rates of police killings in those states are concentrated
among their very small black populations—New Mexico 2.5%; Alaska 3.9%;
South Dakota 1.9%; Arizona 4.6%, Wyoming 1.7%, and Colorado 4.5%.
However, with the exception of Colorado—where blacks were 17% of the 29
people killed by police—that does not seem to be the case. Granted, in
several of those states the total numbers of people killed by police
were very small, in the low single digits. Still, no black people were
among those killed by police in South Dakota, Wyoming, or Alaska. In New
Mexico, there were no blacks among the 20 people killed by police in
2015, and in Arizona blacks made up just over 2% of the 42 victims of
police killing.
What is clear in those states, however, is that the great
disproportion of those killed by police have been Latinos, Native
Americans, and poor whites. So someone should tell Kai Wright et al to
find another iconic date to pontificate about; that 1793 yarn has
nothing to do with anything except feeding the narrative of endless
collective racial suffering and triumphalist individual
overcoming—“resilience”—popular among the black professional-managerial
strata and their white friends (or are they just allies?) these days.
medium | A new Intercept article
by George Joseph and Murtaza Hussain reports on never-before-seen
documents obtained from the FBI via Freedom of Information Act by the
civil rights groups Color of Change and the Center for Constitutional
Rights. The FOIA request for FBI files pertaining to Black Lives Matter
activism was answered with a stack of heavily-redacted documents
revealing evidence of police stakeouts at the homes and vehicles of
activists, as well as the use of police informants, with no mention of
any potential crimes suspected of the people they were monitoring.
One such document
is a report provided “for coordination with Monsanto” describing a
single Black Lives Matter activist’s plans to fly from New York City to
Ferguson for a 2014 protest against racially motivated police brutality.
The document covers the protesters’ plans to begin their demonstration
at a Monsanto factory, as well as money raised for protest materials and
bail money, without a single visible mention of potential crimes or
violence.
“Coordination with Monsanto.” To protect them from Black Lives Matter protesters.
Welcome to the real face of the FBI.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has enjoyed an obscene resurgence in
popularity among purportedly left-wing Americans lately as the current
administration locks horns with them over the imperialist Russiagate psyop,
but the FBI has never been the friend of anyone other than
establishment power structures. The FBI does not exist to protect and
serve the American people, and it certainly doesn’t exist to protect the
rights of black Americans to protest the violence of an increasingly
militarized police force. The FBI exists to protect Monsanto, and all
the other seats of real corporatist power in the United States.
guardian |By now, the world has witnessed white rioters seize the Capitol building in Washington DC. After hearing Donald Trump
encourage them to reject the presidential election’s outcome, thousands
reportedly pushed through cops to storm ongoing congressional debates
and reign supreme over politicians who fearfully scurried out of the
halls of power. Draped in American, Confederate, and Trump flags, the
raiders invaded the House floor, occupied representative offices, and
filled balconies and scaffolds that line the windows. Joe Biden took to a
podium to respond, cautioning the country that “our democracy is under
unprecedented assault”.
On television, I
saw paramedics rush a stretcher in the pandemonium. The woman bearing a
bloodied face laying on top startled me, the anchor, and the cameraman.
Please God, don’t let that woman be dead,I prayed, though her
eyes lacked an animating essence. When I saw the video of the Proud
Boys burn a Black Lives Matter banner a few weeks ago, I knew there
would be more violent acts of desperation because they need a cause to
feel empowered. Envying the resistance of the oppressed, Trump
supporters want reasons to march and chant, so they create enemies and
feign vulnerability as their cause grows lost. They sacrificed their
lives to save white supremacy, even though it threatens them, too,
materially and morally. And Black lives may never matter to people, like
the woman, who will risk their own white lives during a pandemic to
attack the nation’s capital to protect Donald Trump.
A
senior Capitol police officer reportedly shot and killed her. But even
the police shooting of the Trump supporter did not immediately catalyze
significant law enforcement action to stop the conservative Caucasian
invasion. Later, I watched a group of unmasked white men and women chase
down a Black law enforcement agent who wielded only a stick in return. I
was angry. Not because I felt bad for the cop, but because in that
moment, I watched him realize that he was Black, outnumbered, and per
the Dred Scott supreme court decision, “had no rights which the white
man was bound to respect.”
Wednesday was a reminder of one difference between white rebellion to
feigned oppression and Black resistance to actual oppression: where
there is radical Black resistance, there is state repression. Where there is white rebellion for conservative causes, there is collusion with the state. Even when the white cops are outnumbered, like the McKinney, Texas, cops who assaulted Dajerria Becton
in her swimsuit, they escalate; he just pulled the gun out on Black
teens who came to her rescue. Police have stomped, beat, shot,
teargassed, and arrested protesters who organize, march, pray and sing
for our multi-racial liberation movements. Including me. Yet on
Wednesday, activists and bystanders knew damn well that if the election
refusers who raided the Capitol were Black, then the same politicians
who kneeled for George Floyd and painted yellow “Black lives matter” letters onto the streets would have sent the full force of the law to stop it.
About those "rulers of BLM" - Never forget that Obama is the poster child and his cousin Warren Buffett is the money behind Black Lives Matter. Once you understand these basic facts, you can transcend the useless idiocy of talking in terms of "left" and "right", communist, fascist, conservative, progressive, etc..., rather, you can maintain laser-focus on who is doing the behavior and what their concrete-specific objectives can be discovered to be.
There
is, however, another version of events, in which the heartfelt
dedication to racial justice is only the forward-facing side of a more
complicated movement. Behind the street level activism and emotional
outpouring is a calculated machinery built by establishment money and
power that has seized on racial politics, in which some of the biggest
capitalists in the world are financially backing a group of
self-described “trained Marxists”—a label that Cullors enthusiastically
applies to herself and the group’s other co-founders.
These
bedfellows, whose stories and fortunes are never publicly presented as
related, are in reality intertwined under the umbrella of a fiscal
sponsor named the International Development Exchange. A modestly endowed
West Coast nonprofit with origins in the Peace Corps—which for decades
supported local farmers, shepherds, and agricultural workers across the
Global South—IDEX has, in the past six years, been transformed into two
distinct new things: the infrastructure back end to the Black Lives
Matter organization in the United States and also, at the very same
time, an investment fund vehicle driven by recruited MBAs and finance
experts seeking to leverage decades of on-the-ground grantee
relationships for novel forms of potentially problematic lending
instruments . And it did so with help from the family of one of the most
famous American billionaires in history—the Oracle of Omaha
himself.
About the police, as currently
configured, these economic burdens have been determined to be obsolete and a decision has been taken to do away with
their current barely governable configuration. Part of the War on Drugs
was to keep cops from policing their own neighborhoods. Even if they
live in the city they serve, they cannot work in the jurisdiction they
live in, as it may create a conflict of interest. Police not knowing
residents is policy, not accident.
Many police,
firefighters/EMTs, and other city employees do not live in the cities
that employ them. As the ratio of local residents working for a city
steadily declines, so does the performance of that city’s government.
It’s a terrible situation, made demonstrably worse by state laws that
struck down residency requirements for city employees statewide, in
contravention of home rule guarantees. State preemption of local control
is destroying municipal governments throughout numerous states. Again, this is a matter of policy, not accident.
With
the military, it seems odd that progressives are just now waking up to
the idea that an all-volunteer force somehow may mysteriously end up
with a disproportionate number of right-wing members. Maybe we have a
similar phenomenon with police. So I would suggest a draft not only for
the military but also for local police. Everyone at a young age should
experience one or the other, or maybe both, for a few years. Then
perhaps we could have informed discussions and dispense with most of the
righteous ranting.
We should also dispassionately
consider how dangerous a police officer’s job actually is – compared to a
truck driver, carpenter, farmer and host of other jobs…. hint, you will
find that a cops level of danger in their job does not make the top ten
list. And as for stopping crime, the police are
really, really bad at it. According to FBI stats, only 4% of major
crimes reported to police end in someone being convicted of a
crime and only half of all major crimes are reported. Again, this is a matter of policy, not accident.
If
we are actually concerned with public safety, with crime control, with
having a public institution who’s mandate is actually to serve and
protect the citizenry, then we need to design a whole new system from
the ground up. Trying to reform the policing system we have into doing
what we want it to do is doomed to fail. We need to start with a system
that is accountable to the populace it serves, and that is designed
specifically to provide security to that populace. We should not waste another moment trying to reform a
system that was designed for entirely different purposes than to protect
and serve the public.
So all the soap opera and
machismo pushed by cops – that their job is so tough and dangerous –
reduces to mush when held to the light of evidence. Continuing in that
vein, by and large, police officers are exceptionally well-paid for the
minimal qualifications required to get the job. Moreover, there are the
power and prestige attractions associated with being narratized as
heroic first responders and all that folderal. When you take into
consideration official overtime pay, and the pay available for
moonlighting, policing is one of the few remaining occupations in which a
certain demographic with nothing more than a high-school diploma can
realistically achieve a 6 figure income. Again, this is a matter of policy, not accident.
This is why
police have so little difficulty parting with the 6-8% annual vigorish
to their “fraternal orders”. The fraternal lodges are the real command
and control systems for police departments. The chief of police is
typically a bureaucratic figurehead whose job it is to run interference
with politicians – and to a limited degree – the public.
In the interest of supporting citations – I offer the following link - but recommend a google search on – fop brad lemon tow lot scandal
This
is a wonderful mid-sized urban anecdote of most of the moving parts
involved with the structure of power, prestige, and accountability in
contemporary policing. Abusive policing is concentrated among a
relatively small proportion of police officers. The majority of U.S.
police probably spend their entire careers without any incidence of
corruption or brutality. The problem is that police
abuse is protected, unconditionally, resulting in either no or
disproportionately low consequences for their actions. What results is
that some naturally violent or naturally corrupt people will seek out
police careers because it allows them to fulfill these desires without
consequence. Again, this is a matter of policy, not accident.
There’s an endemic debate over what people are saying when they refer
to ‘the west’. Is the west defined by its whiteness, its wealth, its
liberal democracy? Should we call it the ‘highly developed countries’,
the ‘advanced economies’, the ‘first world’, or the ‘global north’? I
think most of these terms misses what is distinctive about this set of
places. The countries we think of as ‘western’ are all countries where
Catholicism was once dominant but is now in varying levels of retreat.
Western countries are ‘post-Catholic’.
Catholicism
has certain distinctive effects on a place. Crucially, Catholicism
situates politics as subordinate to morality. In medieval Catholic
states, the monarch derives authority from the pope or from divine
right. This means the monarch’s legitimacy depends on the monarch having
the right moral orientation. In other parts of the world, politics and
morality were more heavily enmeshed. In the Byzantine Empire, the
emperor was supreme in both religious and temporal matters. In the
Islamic world, the caliph combined both political and religious
authority. In China, different dynasties embraced and promoted the
teachings of many different schools of thought at varying points. It was
only in the Catholic west that politics and morality were firmly
separated, with the former rendered clearly subordinate to the latter.
Are
corporations now deriving their "authoriteh" from the rump
"professional" class mediocrities comprising the
diversity-inclusion-equity clergy? Can the ecclesiastical congregation
of diversity-inclusion-equity offer absolution? Or merely economic cancellation...,
Given the weakness of post-Catholic morality - the only pervasive corporate values I see nowadays boil down
to Overton's Window of permitted discourse - and - expected prompt and
unquestioning compliance on the part of economically captured consumers. The pretend ethics of
diversity-inclusion-equity have been quickly and none too subtly
supplemented by "trust the science" indoctrination and compliance. If
our corporate feudal lords can only police what we say or have ever
said, that only scratches the surface of intended moral orthodoxy. If they can
police what we do in ways that extend down to our genomes, then the post-Catholic corporatism has transcended the wildest fantasies of the pre-reformation Holy Roman Church.
The
government can't police your intentions or your expressions or your
behaviors anywhere near as well as corporations with amorphous
community standards and big data, algorithms, and inexpensive filipino and
south asian comment moderators.
Did you happen to see Warren Buffett's cousin and
the diversity commander-in-chief peddling some highly suspect
"trust the science" theocracy just last sunday on teevee? When everything's said and done, if
we can't persuade you to comply, we've got some community standard
digital passports coming your way here shortly so that you can show and
prove your true belief in a way that the penitents of old never previously had to do in their confessionals...,
niemanlab | On Aug. 20, 2018, the first day of a federal police surveillance
trial, I discovered that the Memphis Police Department was spying on me.
The ACLU of Tennessee had sued the MPD, alleging that the department
was in violation of a 1978 consent decree barring surveillance of
residents for political purposes.
I’m pretty sure I wore my pink gingham jacket — it’s my summer go-to
when I want to look professional. I know I sat on the right side of the
courtroom, not far from a former colleague at The Commercial Appeal. I’d
long suspected that I was on law enforcement’s radar, simply because my
work tends to center on the most marginalized communities, not
institutions with the most power.
One of the first witnesses called to the stand: Sgt. Timothy
Reynolds, who is white. To get intel on activists and organizers,
including those in the Black Lives Matter movement, he’d posed on
Facebook as a “man of color,” befriending people and trying to
infiltrate closed circles.
Projected onto a giant screen in the courtroom was a screenshot of people Reynolds followed on Facebook.
My head was bent as I wrote in my reporter’s notebook. “What does this
entry indicate?” ACLU attorney Amanda Strickland Floyd asked.
“I was following Wendi Thomas,” Reynolds replied. “Wendi C. Thomas.”
I sat up.
“And who is Wendi Thomas?” Floyd asked.
She, he replied, used to write for The Commercial Appeal. In 2014, I left the paper after being a columnist for 11 years.
It’s been more than a year since a judge ruled against
the city, and I’ve never gotten a clear answer on why the MPD was
monitoring me. Law enforcement also was keeping tabs on three other
journalists whose names came out
during the trial. Reynolds testified he used the fake account to
monitor protest activity and follow current events connected to Black
Lives Matter.
My sin, as best I can figure, was having good sources who were local
organizers and activists, including some of the original plaintiffs in
the ACLU’s lawsuit against the city.
In the days since cellphone video captured white Minneapolis police
officer Derek Chauvin squeezing the life out of George Floyd, a black
man, residents in dozens of cities across the country have exercised
their First Amendment rights to protest police brutality.
Here in Memphis, where two-thirds of the population is black and 1 in
4 lives below the poverty line, demonstrators have chanted, “No
justice, no peace, no racist police!”
The most recent protests were sparked by the killings of Floyd and of
Breonna Taylor, a black woman gunned down in her home by Louisville,
Kentucky, police in March. But in Memphis, like elsewhere, the seeds of
distrust between activists and police were planted decades ago. And law
enforcement has nurtured these seeds ever since.
thenation | Emanuel has enjoyed baffling immunity from criticism from just about every elected Democrat outside the city of Chicago.
The exception is a small handful of prominent black members of the
House of Representatives, like Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, who told
The Hill “It’s pretty obvious to anybody that there is some cover-up
taking place here.”
From pretty much everybody else in the party, there has been silence.
None of the major presidential candidates—who have spent the better
part of a year embracing the Black Lives Matter movement and decrying
police brutality—have even timidly called out Emanuel’s blazing
misconduct in the case, let alone asked for his resignation. Hillary
Clinton’s initial statement on the shooting didn’t so much as allude
to a year-long cover-up. She has since voiced support for a federal
investigation into the shooting death, which Emanuel opposes, but has
otherwise not broken with the mayor. Emanuel said Wednesday that he is
“pretty confident” he still enjoys Clinton’s support.
President Obama’s statement also didn’t address the cover-up. Senator
Bernie Sanders has been silent on the mayor’s role in the McDonald
case, which is particularly odd given he’s been a longtime critic of
Emanuel.
It’s hard to imagine this being the case if Emanuel were a Republican.
Pretend that Florida Governor Rick Scott, a two-term conservative
governor of a key swing state and a frequent Democratic punching bag,
had similarly aided state troopers in covering up a police killing. Or
imagine a presidential candidate like Chris Christie did it. While
impossible to prove the hypothetical, it seems certain that leading
national Democrats would have pilloried Christie relentlessly and
demanded he resign.
That criticism and demand for accountability would have been fair and
appropriate—it would arguably have been the most helpful thing
prominent Democrats could do in a situation like this. While they can’t
personally prosecute offending officers, they can create serious
political consequences for other leaders that facilitate and enable a
racist and violent system of policing.
But no political consequences for Rahm appear to be forthcoming, at
least not from his Democratic colleagues. For different reasons—namely,
a disinclination to mount a serious fight against police
brutality—leading Republicans won’t go after Emanuel either, thus
giving him a free pass from both sides. That’s a shame, because the
mayor is already teetering on the brink of political collapse and
exhibiting all of the signs of a politician who’s tenure is in critical
condition: scapegoating his police commissioner (after a long and
telling period where he refused to do so), cancelling scheduled visits,
and sniping with reporters. One nudge from the likes of Hillary
Clinton, and Emanuel would surely be headed to an early retirement.
Republicans, and particularly conservative media figures, like to
portray Democratic crusades against police brutality and their embrace
of Black Lives Matter as a crude and insincere play for votes. That
criticism is now in danger of being validated. If you want people to
know you care about police brutality, you have to demonstrate that you
care even when “your team” needs to be held accountable. Otherwise,
everything else you say on the subject is rendered insincere.
I don't believe it's controversial to state that President Donald John Trump is one of THE WHYTEST WHYDTE MEN IN AMERICA. He's like an exemplar. Whatever else one might opine about the man, he's also a low-level baller, something at least approaching billionaire, and not a No Lives Matter, Left Behind, Little Man like you and I. That said, these 9% muhuggahs here done put DJT through the ringer and then some, seriously. The level of sustained, public ni****ization to which he has been subject is unprecedented in U.S. history. If what has been done to Trump is any indication of what the panopticon is willing to do to a political adversary, then TRUST and BELIEVE that you and I don't have even the barest iota of a prayer.
Sally
Yates, Rod Rosenstein, Jim Comey and everyone who signed the Carter Page
FISA application also be indicted for perjury? They signed a FISA
application and made representations to the secret FISC on the basis of
false information. Shouldn't representations to FISC need double
verification since the accused has no opportunity to defend themselves
or confront their accuser?
An average American doesn't get the option of saying I signed under penalty of perjury but I didn't know what I was signing.
What about James Clapper who lied under oath to Congress? The same crime for which Roger Stone was indicted and convicted.
And the
United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had no idea that
they were involved in anything out of the ordinary? As long as they
crossed the i's and dotted the t's this was just a routine case like
hundreds of others and how could they have known the thing was a fix?
Poor trusting souls, misled so badly by such bad people.
Utter bullshit. They were only dealing with what must have been the
most explosively sensitive issue ever to come before them. We're
expected to believe they were innocents misled?
Sometimes not asking the right questions, and searching questions too
in such a high profile case as this, shows complicity just as much as
if they'd been assisting.
McCabe's
wife was an out-of-the-blue candidate who ran for public office (VA
State Senator) in 2015, during which she reportedly received over
$650,000 in support from Clinton crony, then VA Gov. Terry McAuliffe.
Her candidacy was suspicious in that she had no previous political
experience (she's a physician who was on record as having voted in a Republican
primary!) and it was promoted over the local VA Democratic Party's
recommended candidate, a well-known retired Army colonel, attorney and
party activist.
And yet McCabe, during this same time, was rapidly promoted to #3 in
the FBI and didn't recuse himself from the Hillary Clinton email scandal
investigation until one week before the 2016 election (and months after
the infamous Comey press briefing in July when he declared Clinton
would not be prosecuted), after the $650,000 donation came to light.
It's obvious why there are some who would think the very generous
political contribution to McCabe's wife was in fact a backdoor bribe to
her husband.
turcopelier | I will be very clear up front--I have no
inside information about what John Durham is going to do. But if he is
simply following the facts and the evidence, Andrew McCabe will be one
of the first to fall in the probe into the failed coup to destroy the
Presidency of Donald Trump. The record on this is indisputable. He lied
in three separate instances--1) He lied to FBI investigators, according
to Michael Horowitz, 2) He lied to the House Permanent Select Committee
on Intelligence, and 3) He lied to the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence.
McCabe's record of lying starts with questions put to him by FBI
investigators about leaks of sensitive FBI evidence to the media in the fall of 2016:
Former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe
faced scorching criticism and potential criminal prosecution for
changing his story about a conversation he had with a Wall Street Journal
reporter. Now newly released interview transcripts show McCabe
expressed remorse to internal FBI investigators when they pressed him on
the about-face.
In the final weeks of the 2016 presidential campaign, the Journal broke news
about an FBI investigation involving then-candidate Hillary Clinton,
describing internal discussions among senior FBI officials.
The apparent leak drew scrutiny from the
bureau’s internal investigation team, which interviewed McCabe on May 9,
2017, the day President Donald Trump fired James Comey from his post as
FBI director. The agents interviewed him as part of an investigation
regarding a different media leak to the online publication Circa, and
also asked him about the Journal story.
In that interview, McCabe said he did not know how the Journal story came to be. But a few months later, his story changed after he reviewed his answer.
McCabe's actions as an Artful Liar did not result in a prosecution.
The Trump Justice Department reportedly decided to take a pass on that
front, conceding that McCabe might prevail by insisting he just
misremembered.
But subsequent statements by McCabe before the House and Senate Intelligence Committees expose him as a terminal liar.
unz |Let’s
assume that the events of the last five months are neither random nor
unexpected. Let’s say they’re part of an ingenious plan to transform
American democracy into a lockdown police state controlled by criminal
elites and their puppet governors. And let’s say the media’s role is to
fan the flames of mass hysteria by sensationalizing every gory detail,
every ominous prediction and every slightest uptick in the death toll in
order to exert greater control over the population. And let’s say the
media used their power to craft a message of terror they’d repeat over
and over again until finally, there was just one frightening storyline
ringing-out from every soapbox and bullhorn, one group of governors from
the same political party implementing the same destructive policies,
and one small group of infectious disease experts –all incestuously
related– issuing edicts in the form of “professional advice.”
Could such a thing happen in America?
What’s
most astonishing about the Covid-19 operation is the manner in which
the elected government was circumvented by public health experts
(connected to a power-mad billionaire activist.) That was a stroke of
genius. Most people regard the US as a fairly stable democracy and yet,
the first sign of infection triggered the rapid transfer of power from
the president to unelected “professionals” whose conflicts of interest
are too vast to list. Equally fascinating is the fact that the lockdowns
were not the brainchild of Donald Trump but the mainly Democrat
governors who shrugged-off any Constitutional limits to their power and
arbitrarily ordered people to stay in their homes, wear masks and avoid
close physical contact with other humans. All of this was done in the
name of “science” and condoned under “emergency powers” despite the fact
that mass quarantines of healthy people have no historical precedent or
scientific basis. No matter, this was never about science or logic
anyway, and it certainly wasn’t about saving lives. It was always about
power, pure, unalloyed political power. The power to push the economy
into freefall destroying millions of jobs and businesses. The power to
bail out Wall Street while diverting attention to a fairly-mild
infection that kills roughly 1 in every 500 people. The power to create a
permanent underclass willing to work for table scraps or less. And the
power to fundamentally restructure human relations so that normal
intimacies like handshakes, hugs or social gatherings are entirely
banned. This, of course, was the most ambitious part of the project, the
basic changes to human interaction that date back thousands of years,
and which are now seen as an obstacle to a new order in which the
individual must be isolated, desensitized and kept in a constant state
of fear to be more easily controlled and manipulated.
On
top of that, all of this is taking place in plain sight where anyone
with even minimal critical thinking skills should be able to see what is
happening, but very few do. Why is that?
Fear.
Fear has gripped the population and is preventing typically
intelligent, perceptive people from seeing something that’s right
beneath their noses. Check out this clip from an article titled “When
Will the Madness End?”:
“What’s happening now is a spread of this serious medical condition to the whole population…
The public is adopting a personality disorder … paranoid delusions, and
irrational fear. … It can happen with anything but here we see a primal
fear of disease turning into mass panic….
….
Once fear reaches a certain threshold, normalcy, rationality, morality,
and decency fade and are replaced by shocking stupidity and cruelty.…..We
find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object,
and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously
impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is
caught by some new folly more captivating than the first. ..…
…This
is made far worse by politics, which has only fed the beast of fear.
This is the most politicized disease in history, and doing so has done
nothing to help manage it and much to make it all vastly worse.” (“When Will the Madness End?“, AIER)
We’re
not saying that Covid doesn’t kill people, and we’re not suggesting
that Covid is a bioweapon released on the public for nefarious purposes.
(although that’s certainly a possibility.) What we’re saying is that
scheming elites and their allies in the media and politics see every
crisis as an opportunity to advance their own authoritarian agenda. In
fact, the restructuring of basic democratic institutions can only take
place within the confines of a major crisis. That’s why the CIA, the
giant corporations, the WHO and the Gates Posse gathered for meetings
that anticipated an event just like the Covid outbreak. They needed a
crisis of that magnitude to achieve their ultimate objective; total
control. That’s what they mean when they say there will be “no return to
normal”, they mean they’re replacing representative government with a
new totalitarian model in which the levers of state power will be
controlled by them. So while the virus outbreak might be coincidental,
the management of the crisis certainly is not.
TomDispatch | As in Baghdad, so in Baltimore.
It’s connected, you see. Scholars, pundits, politicians, most of us in
fact like our worlds to remain discretely and comfortably separated.
That’s why so few articles, reports, or op-ed columns even think to link
police violence at home to our imperial pursuits abroad or the
militarization of the policing of urban America to our wars across the
Greater Middle East and Africa. I mean, how many profiles of the Black
Lives Matter movement even mention America’s 16-year war on terror
across huge swaths of the planet? Conversely, can you remember a foreign
policy piece that cited Ferguson? I doubt it.
Nonetheless, take a moment to consider the ways in which
counterinsurgency abroad and urban policing at home might, in these
years, have come to resemble each other and might actually be connected
phenomena:
*The degradations involved: So often, both counterinsurgency
and urban policing involve countless routine humiliations of a mostly
innocent populace. No matter how we’ve cloaked the terms --
“partnering,” “advising,” “assisting,” and so on -- the American
military has acted like an occupier of Iraq and Afghanistan in these
years. Those thousands of ubiquitous post-invasion U.S. Army foot and
vehicle patrols in both countries tended to highlight the lack of
sovereignty of their peoples. Similarly, as long ago as 1966, author
James Baldwin recognized
that New York City’s ghettoes resembled, in his phrase, “occupied
territory.” In that regard, matters have only worsened since. Just ask the black community in Baltimore or for that matter Ferguson, Missouri. It’s hard to deny America’s police are becoming progressively more defiant; just last month St. Louis cops taunted protestors by chanting “whose streets? Our
streets,” at a gathering crowd. Pardon me, but since when has it been
okay for police to rule America’s streets? Aren’t they there to protect
and serve us? Something tells me the exceedingly libertarian Founding
Fathers would be appalled by such arrogance.
*The racial and ethnic stereotyping. In Baghdad, many U.S. troops called the locals hajis, ragheads, or worse still, sandniggers.
There should be no surprise in that. The frustrations involved in
occupation duty and the fear of death inherent in counterinsurgency
campaigns lead soldiers to stereotype, and sometimes even hate, the
populations they’re (doctrinally)
supposed to protect. Ordinary Iraqis or Afghans became the enemy, an
“other,” worthy only of racial pejoratives and (sometimes) petty
cruelties. Sound familiar? Listen to the private conversations of
America’s exasperated urban police, or the occasionally public insults
they throw at the population they’re paid to “protect.” I, for one,
can’t forget the video
of an infuriated white officer taunting Ferguson protestors: “Bring it
on, you f**king animals!” Or how about a white Staten Island cop caught
on the phone bragging
to his girlfriend about how he’d framed a young black man or, in his
words, “fried another nigger.” Dehumanization of the enemy, either at
home or abroad, is as old as empire itself.
*The searches: Searches, searches, and yet more searches.
Back in the day in Iraq -- I’m speaking of 2006 and 2007 -- we didn’t
exactly need a search warrant to look anywhere we pleased. The Iraqi
courts, police, and judicial system were then barely operational. We
searched houses, shacks, apartments, and high rises for weapons,
explosives, or other “contraband.” No family -- guilty or innocent (and
they were nearly all innocent) -- was safe from the small, daily
indignities of a military search. Back here in the U.S., a similar
phenomenon rules, as it has since the “war on drugs” era of the 1980s.
It’s now routine for police SWAT teams to execute rubber-stamped or “no knock” search warrants on suspected drug dealers’ homes (often only for marijuana
stashes) with an aggressiveness most soldiers from our distant wars
would applaud. Then there are the millions of random, warrantless, body
searches on America’s urban, often minority-laden streets. Take New
York, for example, where a discriminatory regime
of “stop-and-frisk” tactics terrorized blacks and Hispanics for
decades. Millions of (mostly) minority youths were halted and searched
by New York police officers who had to cite
only such opaque explanations as “furtive movements,” or “fits relevant
description” -- hardly explicit probable cause -- to execute such daily
indignities. As numerous studies have shown (and a judicial ruling found), such “stop-and-frisk” procedures were discriminatory and likely unconstitutional.
DOTE | First, and just to get this point out of the
way, Johnson's "killing spree" was totally meaningless unless one deems
it meaningful that humans have big brains which can go haywire and often
do. If you follow that uncomfortable truth to the end of the line, you
risk becoming a social pariah. Few take that path!
Secondly, what we see above is that the shooting or abuse of unarmed
black men by white police officers, which is routine in the United
States, has been conflated with the actions of a single black man whose
big brain had gone haywire. These incidents are taken to be separate but
somehow equal. What's wrong with this picture?
I'll tell you what's wrong with it — in the former case, we're
talking about a real and alarming trend reflecting implicit racial bias,
whereas in the latter ("killing spree") case, we're talking about a
one-off. Big brains go haywire all the time, but let's be specific:
How many times have black men armed with assault rifles carried out sniper-style attacks on white police officers?
Never! — until last week (as far as I know, and read here). Certainly there's no trend.
Police have shot and killed a young black man (ages 18 to 29) — such
as Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. —175 times since January 2015; 24 of
them were unarmed. Over that same period, police have shot and killed
172 young white men, 18 of whom were unarmed. Once again, while in raw
number there were similar totals of white and black victims, blacks were
killed at rates disproportionate to their percentage of the U.S.
population.
Of all of the unarmed men shot and killed by police in 2015, 40 percent of them were black, even though black men make up just 6 percent of the nation’s population.
And, when considering shootings confined within a single race, a
black person shot and killed by police is more likely to have been
unarmed than a white person. About 13 percent of all black people who
have been fatally shot by police since January 2015 were unarmed,
compared with 7 percent of all white people.
Perhaps these raw statistics don't seem quite as damning as Black
Lives Matter people would like to argue, but we are talking about only
the most extreme cases here — black people were shot and killed. What about "less extreme" cases like this? (Vox,
July 7, 2016). This incident is described by a former St. Louis police
officer who is black. Reading this account requires a strong stomach.
As a new officer with the St. Louis in the mid-1990s, I responded to a
call for an "officer in need of aid." I was partnered that day with a
white female officer. When we got to the scene, it turned out that the
officer was fine, and the aid call was canceled. He'd been in a foot
pursuit chasing a suspect in an armed robbery and lost him.
The officer I was with asked him if he'd seen where the suspect went.
The officer picked a house on the block we were on, and we went to it
and knocked on the door. A young man about 18 years old answered the
door, partially opening it and peering out at my partner and me. He was
standing on crutches. My partner accused him of harboring a suspect. He
denied it. He said that this was his family's home and he was home
alone.
My partner then forced the door the rest of the way open, grabbed him
by his throat, and snatched him out of the house onto the front porch.
She took him to the ledge of the porch and, still holding him by the
throat, punched him hard in the face and then in the groin. My partner
that day snatched an 18-year-old kid off crutches and assaulted him,
simply for stating the fact that he was home alone.
I got the officer off of him. But because an aid call had gone out,
several other officers had arrived on the scene. One of those officers,
who was black, ascended the stairs and asked what was going on. My
partner pointed to the young man, still lying on the porch, and said,
"That son of a bitch just assaulted me." The black officer then went up
to the young man and told him to "get the fuck up, I'm taking you in for
assaulting an officer." The young man looked up at the officer and
said, "Man ... you see I can't go." His crutches lay not far from him.
The officer picked him up, cuffed him, and slammed him into the
house, where he was able to prop himself up by leaning against it. The
officer then told him again to get moving to the police car on the
street because he was under arrest. The young man told him one last
time, in a pleading tone that was somehow angry at the same time, "You
see I can't go!" The officer reached down and grabbed both the young
man's ankles and yanked up. This caused the young man to strike his head
on the porch. The officer then dragged him to the police car. We then
searched the house. No one was in it.
And the point is...
These kinds of scenes play themselves out everyday all over our country in black and brown communities.
Beyond the many unarmed blacks killed by police, including recently Freddie Gray
in Baltimore, other police abuses that don't result in death foment
resentment, distrust, and malice toward police in black and brown
communities all over the country. Long before Darren Wilson shot and
killed unarmed Michael Brown last August, there was a poisonous
relationship between the Ferguson, Missouri, department and the
community it claimed to serve. For example, in 2009 Henry Davis was stopped unlawfully
in Ferguson, taken to the police station, and brutally beaten while in
handcuffs. He was then charged for bleeding on the officers' uniforms
after they beat him.
So every time somebody treats that Dallas killing spree — blue lives
matter — as akin to police brutality against black people in the United
States — black lives matter — you can say "bullshit!" because that's
what it is.
theintercept | Our rulers did demonstrate a spasm of rationality with the passage of
the CARES Act in March. It was partly a cash-grab by big business but
did get lots of people a $1,200 check and provided an extra $600 per
week in federal unemployment benefits on top of state benefits.
Without these benefits, the 30 million people who lost their jobs in
March and April would have already plummeted into the void. And because
everyone’s spending is someone else’s income, as they fell they would
have grabbed onto tens of millions more and taken them down as well.
And in fact, this downward spiral began to happen
in mid-March. As the danger of Covid-19 became clear, consumer spending
dropped by an astonishing 30 percent in a matter of days. But as soon
as the government cash started flowing, spending began to recover, and
it’s now more than 90 percent of normal. In poorer zip codes, it’s
returned to almost 100 percent.
This has kept the lives of tens of millions of Americans merely bad,
rather than totally impossible. But the supplemental unemployment
benefits expire at the end of July. The GOP opening bid is to extend
them but to cut the amount from $600 to $200. The reason, Treasury
Secretary Steve Mnuchin explained in the Oval Office,
is to prevent malingering: “We’re going to make sure that we don’t pay
people more money to stay home than go to work.” In addition, Senate
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said that the Republican “red line”
in negotiations is making it essentially impossible for employees to sue employers on the grounds that their workplace is failing to protect them
from Covid-19. Furthermore, under the proposed new rules,
employers and even the Trump Justice Department would find it easy to
countersue workers for bringing a coronavirus lawsuit.
Rationally, of course, this makes no sense. For most of the
unemployed, there aren’t any jobs to go back to, and won’t be until the
pandemic is under control. If their unemployment benefits are cut,
people without jobs will desperately cut back on spending, leading to
more unemployment, which will lead to less spending, and so on. The
process will be accelerated as states and cities, which until now have attempted to avoid slashing payrolls in hopes that the federal government would rescue them, finally do so.
This may plausibly lead to basic material deprivation — true hunger
and homelessness — on a scale few alive today have ever seen. According
to the Census Bureau, the number of America’s 249 million households
reporting that they sometimes or often do not have enough to eat has
already jumped from 22.5 million earlier this year to 29.3 million in
July. With Republicans opposing
an expansion of food stamp funding, as well as the renewal of the CARES
Act supplemental food program for children, that is likely just the
beginning.
Then there’s housing. The CARES Act contained a federal ban on
evictions that covered about 30 percent of U.S. rental units. That ban
just ended, as have most state-level bans. Forty million people could potentially lose their homes in the next several months. In states like Florida, Texas, and New York, half of the tenants will shortly be unable to make the rent.
As long as a man does not separate himself from himself he can achieve nothing, and no one can help him.
To govern oneself is a very difficult thing--it is a problem for the future; it requires much power and demands much work. But this first thing, to separate oneself from oneself, does not require much strength, it only needs desire, serious desire, the desire of a grown-up man. If a man cannot do it, it shows that he lacks the desire of a grown-up man. Consequently it proves that there is nothing for him here. What we do here can only be a doing suitable for grown-up men.
Our mind, our thinking, has nothing in common with us, with our essence--no connection, no dependence. Our mind lives by itself and our essence lives by itself. When we say "to separate oneself from oneself" it means that the mind should stand apart from the essence. Our weak essence can change at any moment, for it is dependent on many influences: on food, on our surroundings, on time, on the weather, and on a multitude of other causes. But the mind depends on very few influences and so, with a little effort, it can be kept in the desired direction. Every weak man can give the desired direction to his mind. But he has no power over his essence; great power is required to give direction to essence and keep essence to it. (Body and essence are the same devil.)...
Speaking of the mind I know that each of you has enough strength, each of you can have the power and capacity to act not as he now acts....
I repeat, every grown-up man can achieve this; everyone who has a serious desire can do it. But no one tries....
In order to understand better what I mean, I shall give you an example: now, in a calm state, not reacting to anything or anyone, I decide to set myself the task of establishing a good relationship with Mr. B., because I need him for business purposes and can do what I wish only with his help. But I dislike Mr. B. for he is a very disagreeable man. He understands nothing. He is a blockhead. He is vile, anything you like. I am so made that these traits affect me. Even if he merely looks at me, I become irritated. If he talks nonsense, I am beside myself. I am only a man, so I am weak and cannot persuade myself that I need not be annoyed--I shall go on being annoyed.
Yet I can control myself, depending on how serious my desire is to gain the end I wish to gain through him. If I keep to this purpose, to this desire, I shall be able to do so. No matter how annoyed I may be, this state of wishing will be in my mind. No matter how furious, how beside myself I am, in a corner of my mind I shall still remember the task I set myself. My mind is unable to restrain me from anything, unable to make me feel this or that toward him, but it is able to remember. I say to myself: "You need him, so don't be cross or rude to him." It could even happen that I would curse him, or hit him, but my mind would continue to pluck at me, reminding me that I should not do so. But the mind is powerless to do anything.
This is precisely what anyone who has a serious desire not to identify himself with his essence can do. This is what is meant by "separating the mind from the essence."
And what happens when the mind becomes merely a function? If I am annoyed, if I lose my temper, I shall think, or rather "it" will think, in accordance with this annoyance, and I shall see everything in the light of the annoyance. To hell with it!
And so I say that with a serious man--a simple, ordinary man without any extraordinary powers, but a grown-up man--whatever he decides, whatever problem he has set himself, that problem will always remain in his head. Even if he cannot achieve it in practice, he will always keep it in his mind. Even if he is influenced by other considerations, his mind will not forget the problem he has set himself. He has a duty to perform and, if he is honest, he will strive to perform it, because he is a grown-up man.
No one can help him in this remembering, in this separation of oneself from oneself. A man must do it for himself. Only then, from the moment a man has this separation, can another man help him....
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4/3
43
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