libertyblitzkrieg | What a cute little Banana Republic this America has become. Our government can’t put a single bank executive in jail for destroying the global economy, but when a mere peasant is caught not paying back his student debt, a team of U.S. Marshals arrive at his door to arrest him at gunpoint.
Believe it or not, the US Marshals Service in Houston is arresting people for not paying their outstanding federal student loans.
Paul Aker says he was arrested at his home last week for a $1500 federal student loan he received in 1987.
He says seven deputy US Marshals showed up at his home with guns and took him to federal court where he had to sign a payment plan for the 29-year-old school loan.
Congressman Gene Green says the federal government is now using private debt collectors to go after those who owe student loans.
Green says as a result, those attorneys and debt collectors are getting judgements in federal court and asking judges to use the US Marshals Service to arrest those who have failed to pay their federal student loans.
Our reliable source with the US Marshal in Houston say Aker isn’t the first and won’t be the last.
They have to serve anywhere from 1200 to 1500 warrants to people who have failed to pay their federal student loans.
Unfortunately, it looks like it was a lapse in communication that landed Aker in handcuffs (to be clear, he did not spend time in jail — he was escorted by Marshals to court).And, to add insult to injury, he was ordered to pay more than $1,200 in fees back to the U.S. Marshals service for the cost of arresting him.
Yes, Federal US Marshals spent $1,200 arresting a guy for $1,500 in debt. Brilliant use of taxpayer funds. Yet somehow they still can’t find a single bank executive who did anything wrong.
cluborlov | On the Democratic side, we have Hillary the Giant Flying Lizard, but she
seems rather impaired by just about everything she has ever done, some
of which was so illegal that it will be hard to keep her from being
indicted prior to the election. She seems only popular in the sense
that, if she were stuffed and mounted and put on display, lots of folks
would pay good money to take turns throwing things at her. And then we
have Bernie, the pied piper for the “I can't believe I can't change
things by voting” crowd. He seems to be doing a good job of it—as if
that mattered.
On the Republican side we have Donald and the Seven Dwarfs. I previously wrote
that I consider Donald to be a mannequin worthy of being installed as a
figurehead at the to-be-rebranded Trump White House and Casino (it is
beneath my dignity to mention any of the Dwarfs by name) but Donald has a
problem: he sometime tells the truth. In the most recent debate with
the Dwarfs he said that Bush lied in order to justify the invasion of
Iraq. Candidates must lie—lie like, you know, like they are
running for office. And the problem with telling the truth is that it
becomes hard to stop. What bit of truthiness is he going to deliver
next? That 9/11 was an inside job? That Osama bin Laden worked for the
CIA, and that his death was faked? That the Boston Marathon bombing was
staged, and the two Chechen lads were patsies? That the US military is a
complete waste of money and cannot win? That the financial and economic
collapse of the US is now unavoidable? Even if he can stop himself from
letting any more truthiness leak out, the trust has been broken: now
that he's dropped the T-bomb, how can he be relied upon to lie like he's
supposed to?
And so we may be treated to quite a spectacle: the Flying Lizard,
slouching toward a federal penitentiary, squaring off against the Donald
the T-bomber. That would be fun to watch. Or maybe the Lizard will
implode on impact with the voting booth and then we'll have Bernie vs.
the T-bomber. Being a batty old bugger, and not wanting to be outdone,
he might drop some T-bombs of his own. That would be fun to watch too.
Not that any of this matters, of course, because the country's
trajectory is all set. And no matter who gets elected—Bernie or
Donald—on their first day at the White House they will be shown a short
video which will explain to them what exactly they need to do to avoid
being assassinated.
WaPo | Yesterday afternoon, Hillary Clinton delivered a speech on race in
Harlem. There’s a political context here, of course, which is that
African American voters are central to both the Feb. 27 South Carolina
Democratic primary and the entire campaign for the Democratic
presidential nomination.
But when Clinton speaks about race,
something important happens: we get a revealing view not just of what
she thinks is important, but of how she understands politics, power, and
change.
According to guidance distributed by the Clinton
campaign, today’s speech is going to cover a lot of policy ground,
including criminal justice, education, housing, and economic
opportunity. Clinton will also be discussing “systemic racism,” which is
a key phrase to keep in mind to understand how she sees race, and how
it differs from the way Barack Obama has dealt with racial issues over
the past eight years.”
The idea of systemic racism has symbolic
weight, but it’s primarily practical. It does speak to the fundamental
truth that black people understand and that some whites resist, that
racism exists in a thousand places at once, both those we can see and
those we overlook. Saying you understand systemic racism is a way of
saying that you see the problem as deep, wide, and historically
grounded.
But it’s also a way of saying: This is a problem we,
and the president him or herself, can actually do something about. If
the racism that imposes itself on people’s lives is to be found in
systems, then the way you attack it is to change the way those systems
operate, through changes in law and policy.
ICH | In the Milwaukee debate, Hillary Clinton took pride in her role in a recent UN Security Council resolution on a Syrian ceasefire:
But I would add this. You know, the Security Council finally got
around to adopting a resolution. At the core of that resolution is an
agreement I negotiated in June of 2012 in Geneva, which set forth a
cease-fire and moving toward a political resolution, trying to bring
the parties at stake in Syria together.
This is the kind of compulsive misrepresentation that makes Clinton
unfit to be President. Clinton's role in Syria has been to help
instigate and prolong the Syrian bloodbath, not to bring it to a close.
In 2012, Clinton was the obstacle, not the solution, to a ceasefire
being negotiated by UN Special Envoy Kofi Annan. It was US
intransigence - Clinton's intransigence - that led to the failure of
Annan's peace efforts in the spring of 2012, a point well known among
diplomats. Despite Clinton's insinuation in the Milwaukee debate, there
was (of course) no 2012 ceasefire, only escalating carnage. Clinton
bears heavy responsibility for that carnage, which has by now displaced
more than 10 million Syrians and left more than 250,000 dead.
As every knowledgeable observer understands, the Syrian War is not
mostly about Bashar al-Assad, or even about Syria itself. It is mostly
a proxy war, about Iran. And the bloodbath is doubly tragic and
misguided for that reason.
Saudi Arabia and Turkey, the leading Sunni powers in the Middle East,
view Iran, the leading Shia power, as a regional rival for power and
influence. Right-wing Israelis view Iran as an implacable foe that
controls Hezbollah, a Shi'a militant group operating in Lebanon, a
border state of Israel. Thus, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Israel have all
clamored to remove Iran's influence in Syria.
This idea is incredibly naïve. Iran has been around as a regional power
for a long time--in fact, for about 2,700 years. And Shia Islam is not
going away. There is no way, and no reason, to "defeat" Iran. The
regional powers need to forge a geopolitical equilibrium that
recognizes the mutual and balancing roles of the Gulf Arabs, Turkey,
and Iran. And Israeli right-wingers are naïve, and deeply ignorant of
history, to regard Iran as their implacable foe, especially when that
mistaken view pushes Israel to side with Sunni jihadists.
Yet Clinton did not pursue that route. Instead she joined Saudi Arabia,
Turkey, and right-wing Israelis to try to isolate, even defeat, Iran.
In 2010, she supported secret negotiations between Israel and Syria to attempt to wrest Syria from Iran's influence. Those talks failed. Then the CIA and Clinton pressed successfully for Plan B: to overthrow Assad.
When the unrest of the Arab Spring broke out in early 2011, the CIA and
the anti-Iran front of Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey saw an
opportunity to topple Assad quickly and thereby to gain a geopolitical
victory. Clinton became the leading proponent of the CIA-led effort at
Syrian regime change.
ICH | Bill and Hillary Clinton are under increasing scrutiny from the mainstream press over paid speeches they have given to big banks in exchange for millions of dollars.According toCNN, the couple has earned a total of $153 million in lecture fees from companies and organizations affiliated with the financial industry.
But the media has been conspicuously silent about the large sums the Clintons have raked in from paid addresses to pro-Israel organizations, including the Jewish National Fund (JNF), which directly participates in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and Bedouin citizens of Israel. An evaluation of Hillary Clinton’spublic disclosuresfrom 2001 to 2015 shows that she and Bill, and their daughter, Chelsea, have earned roughly $4 million in speaking fees from pro-Israel organizations, including JNF and organizations allied with the right-wing government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The vast majority of these documented payments—$3,599,999—have gone toward the Clintons’ personal income, and up to $450,000 has been funneled into the Clinton Foundation.
Ramah Kudaimi, membership outreach coordinator for the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, told AlterNet, "It is the right of voters to know what every single candidate earns in speaking fees, whether from banks or pro-Israel groups that engage in oppressive policies against Palestinians. It is the voters’ right to know if we have candidates running to be president who plan to continue horrific U.S. policies that make us all complicit in Israel’s denial of Palestinian rights.”
mondoweiss | Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton expressed great pride in making enemies of “the Iranians” during this week’s Democratic Party debate. When asked “which enemy are you most proud of?” by CNN debate moderator Anderson Cooper, Clinton listed the NRA, health insurance companies, drug companies, and – finally – “the Iranians” as the actors she’s most pleased to have antagonized. This may strike some as a strange statement from the country’s former chief diplomat – particularly in light of her support, albeit tepid, of the recent Iranian nuclear agreement.
Why would a past Secretary of State – a position dedicated, at least in part, to improving the United States’ relations with other nations – boast of an adversarial relationship with a key Middle Eastern geopolitical power in the aftermath of a historic diplomatic breakthrough?
“Obama was asked the same question Hillary was asked —‘If Iran nukes Israel, what would be your reaction?’ Hillary said, ‘We will obliterate them.’ We . . . will . . . obliterate . . . them. Four words, it’s simple to understand.
CNN | Hillary Clinton backed the Obama administration's Iran nuclear deal
during a speech in Washington on Wednesday, but did so by taking a
cautious tone she defined as "distrust and verify."
Clinton said the Iran deal -- which has drawn fierce opposition from
Republicans and some Democrats -- is not a step toward normalizing
relations with Iran, and she devoted a large portion of her speech at
the Brookings Institution to speaking about the need to protect Israel.
Speaking directly to Iran, Clinton said, "The United States will never
allow you to acquire a nuclear weapon," adding that she "will not
hesitate to take military action if Iran attempts to obtain a nuclear
weapon."
The former secretary of state reiterated that she supported the deal
because it is a critical part "of a larger strategy toward Iran."
"My approach will be distrust and verify," Clinton said. "We should anticipate that Iran will test the next president."
"That won't work if I am in the White House," Clinton added.
freemansperspective | Over the last few months a stream of articles have crossed my screen, all proclaiming the need of governments and banks to eliminate cash. I’m sure you’ve noticed them too.
It is terrorists and other assorted madmen, we are told, who use cash. And so, to protect us from being blown up and dismembered on our very own street corners, governments will have to ban it.
It would actually take some effort to imagine a more obvious, naked attempt at fearmongering. Cash –in daily use for centuries if not millennia– is now, suddenly, the agent of spring-loaded, instant death? And we’re supposed to just accept that line?
But there are good reasons why the insiders are promoting these stories now. The first of them, perhaps, is simply that they can: After 9/11, a massive wave of compliance surged through the West. It may not last forever, but it’s still rolling, and if the entertainment corporations can pump enough fear into minds that want to believe, they may just get them to buy it.
The second reason, however, is the real driver:
Negative Interest Rates
The urgency of their move to ban one of the longest-lasting pillars of daily life means that the backroom elites think it will be necessary soon. It would appear that the central banks, the IMF, the World Bank, the BIS, and all their backers, seethe elimination of cash as a central survival strategy.
The reason is simple: cash would allow people to escape from the one thing that could save their larcenous currency system:negative interest rates.
To make this clear, I like to paraphrase a famous (and good) quote from Alan Greenspan, back from 1966, during his Ayn Randian days:The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.
That was a true statement, and with a slight modification, it succinctly explains the new war on cash:
The preservation of an insolvent currency system requires that the owners of currency have no way to protect it.
zerohedge | Some moredetails from the WSJ: the average 65-year-old borrower has 47% more mortgage debt and 29% more auto debt than 65-year-olds had in 2003.
Some more observations:
Just over a decade ago, student debt was unheard of among 65-year-olds. Today it is a growing debt category, though it remains smaller for them than autos, credit cards and mortgages. On top of that, there are far more people in this age group than a decade ago.
The result: U.S. household debt is vastly different than it was before the financial crisis, when many younger households had taken on large debts they could no longer afford when the bottom fell out of the economy.
The shift represents a “reallocation of debt from young [people], with historically weak repayment, to retirement-aged consumers, with historically strong repayment,” according to New York Fed economist Meta Brown in a presentation of the findings.
Why is this a problem in a world in which cash flow is increasingly scarce? "Older borrowers have historically been less likely to default on loans and have typically been successful at shrinking their debt balances.But greater borrowing among this age group could become alarming if evidence mounted that large numbers of people were entering retirement with debts they couldn’t manage.So far, that doesn’t appear to be the case. Most of the households with debt also have higher credit scores and more assets than in the past."
Assets mostly in the form of equities and bonds, however, those assets will need to be liquidated one way or another to repay what is a record debt load as the Baby Boomer generation grows even old and ever more in debt.
For now, however, the debt repayment cliff has not been hit as banks allow creditors to roll over existing obligations. This means that while debt among the elderly is at record levels, the percentage of this debt that is in some stage of delinquency has been steadily dropping. The NY Fed founds that only 2.2% of mortgage debt was in delinquency, the lowest since early 2007. Credit card delinquencies also declined, while auto loan and student loan delinquencies were unchanged.
WaPo | If you think Bernie Sanders was the big winner in New Hampshire this week, you'd be wrong — at least when it comes to the votes that will really help determine the Democratic presidential nominee.
Sure, the Vermont senator won the Granite State primary in a rout over Hillary Clinton, earning 15 delegates to Clinton's 9. But New Hampshire has eight additional "superdelegates," and six of them back Clinton. The other two haven't declared a preference. So at the moment, Sanders and Clinton both have 15 total delegates, and it'spossible that the former secretary of state could ultimately pull ahead — in a state she lost, 60 percent to 38 percent.
Quick civics lesson: Delegates are the people who attend the national convention and cast the formal votes for the nominee. Most of them are required to vote according to the results of their states' primaries or caucuses, regardless of their personal opinions. They're just there to represent the previously expressed will of the people. But some delegates, known as superdelegates, can cast ballots for whomever they want; they aren't bound by the popular votes in their states. They're usually party leaders, and they usually favor establishment candidates, in this case Clinton.
The delegate accumulation process can seem like an obscure part of our quirky form of democracy, but it could be important this year. Sanders could, in theory, earn a majority of the 1,670 delegates up for grabs in popular voting all over the country but still lose the nomination if most of the 712 superdelegates side with Clinton at the convention.
CNN's Jake Tapper seemed to have this scenario in mind when he interviewed Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz on Thursday:
WaPo | Two powerful organizations within the Democratic establishment announced steps Friday that have the potential to
provide substantial financial firepower to presidential contender Hillary Clinton by drawing on the support of
wealthy donors and corporate interests.
While providing a likely boost to Clinton, both developments also give rival Bernie Sanders fresh fodder to highlight
her relationship with Wall Street and other special interests at a time when the two candidates are locked in an
intense nomination fight.
Priorities USA Action, the main super PAC supporting Clinton, unleashed a $5 million infusion of spending on her
behalf, upending plans to hold its fire until the general election.
The move calls attention to growing concern within
the party’s leadership that her campaign may be in trouble, and it underscores how crucial several upcoming contests
have become in Clinton’s battle with Sanders, a senator from Vermont
In addition, the Democratic National Committee announced that it had rolled back restrictions introduced by
presidential candidate Barack Obama in 2008 that banned donations from federal lobbyists and political action
committees.
Both actions offer the potential for financial benefit for Clinton. But both also could backfire.
Sanders has gained traction with his core argument that special interests have “rigged” the economy against the
lower and middle classes. Although Clinton has repeatedly denied that she has been influenced by donations or
speaking fees from Wall Street, the likely new flow of money to her campaign could add grist to Sanders’s case.
As if to prove the point, the Sanders campaign issued a news release Friday with this headline: “Clinton Wall StreetFunded
Super PAC Enters Democratic Primary Against Sanders.” And later in the day, Sanders’s campaign
communications director, Michael Briggs, called the DNC decision “an unfortunate step backward. We support the
restrictions that President Obama put in place at the DNC, and we hope Secretary Clinton will join us in supporting
the president.”
michaelmoore | Imagine a place where you don’t have to do any homework, and you don’t
have to take those ridiculous standardized tests. Or how ‘bout a place
where your public school lunch is a luxurious four-course meal that you
have the time to enjoy each day. Imagine a country where all college is
free — and it’s impossible to find anyone who has a student loan to pay
off. Can you believe there’s actually a place where teenagers can
easily get birth control with no parental permission, and that when it
comes to getting free health services there’s no issue because, even as
a teen, the society respects that only you should have control over
your own body. Imagine a world where no hall passes are required to go
to the bathroom, where school is not an assembly line (and it doesn’t
start at 8 in the friggin’ morning!). And what if, on top of all of
this, you could vote at the age of 16 and have a real say in your
future.
Well, that place exists. It exists in many countries, all over the
world. In fact, in every advanced industrialized country, one or more
of the above is already happening every single day. But not here in the
U.S.A.
And so I’ve made a movie about all those places, a movie that will take
you on a raucous, hilarious ride through the great life that they’re
having and we’re not. It’s called WHERE TO INVADE NEXT, and it opens
this weekend, February 12th, in theaters across the country.
There’s only one problem: It’s rated “R”.
Now, you might be asking yourself, “Why did the American ratings board
(the MPAA) give my film an ‘R’ rating?” Maybe it has something to do
with all the things I’ve just listed above. Some people would prefer
you not know how teenagers in the rest of the world are treated. Bottom
line: They’re not treated like babies and inmates. They are treated
like full-grown human beings with dignity and rights. Lots of rights.
But here in the USA, the MPAA has deemed my film too dangerous for you
to see on your own. So I’d like to fix that. I’d like you to see my
movie. And I’d like to help you sneak in to do that this weekend.
Now, I’m probably going to have a shitstorm rain down upon me for doing
this. I don’t care. Wrong is wrong, and it is wrong to not let you see
this movie. The theaters or the movie studios or the censors may not
like what I’m about to suggest, but they’re just going to have to deal
with it. It is insulting to you as a 15 or 16-yr to be told you can’t
handle the truth. What year is this — 1952?
By now, you probably know all the ways to sneak into an “R”-rated movie
— buy a ticket to another film then sneak in; go in to the PG film you
bought a ticket for then go out to get popcorn and “forget” your ticket
so you can then head in to the “R”-rated film; etc.
wikipedia |Adiabatic quantum computation(AQC) relies on theadiabatic theoremto do calculations[1]and is closely related to, and may be regarded as a subclass of,quantum annealing.[2][3][4][5]First, a (potentially complicated)Hamiltonianis found whose ground state describes the solution to the problem of interest. Next, a system with a simple Hamiltonian is prepared and initialized to the ground state. Finally, the simple Hamiltonian is adiabatically evolved to the desired complicated Hamiltonian. By the adiabatic theorem, the system remains in the ground state, so at the end the state of the system describes the solution to the problem. Adiabatic Quantum Computing has been shown to be polynomially equivalent to conventional quantum computing in the circuit model.[6]The time complexity for an adiabatic algorithm is the time taken to complete the adiabatic evolution which is dependent on the gap in the energy eigenvalues (spectral gap) of the Hamiltonian. Specifically, if the system is to be kept in the ground state, the energy gap between the ground state and the first excited state ofprovides an upper bound on the rate at which the Hamiltonian can be evolved at time.[7]When the spectral gap is small, the Hamiltonian has to be evolved slowly. The runtime for the entire algorithm can be bounded byWhereis the minimum spectral gap for.
AQC is a possible method to get around the problem ofenergy relaxation. Since the quantum system is in the ground state, interference with the outside world cannot make it move to a lower state. If the energy of the outside world (that is, the "temperature of the bath") is kept lower than the energy gap between the ground state and the next higher energy state, the system has a proportionally lower probability of going to a higher energy state. Thus the system can stay in a single system eigenstate as long as needed.
TheD-Wave Oneis a device made by a Canadian companyD-Wave Systemswhich describes it as doing quantum annealing.[13]In 2011,Lockheed-Martinpurchased one for about US$10 million; in May 2013,Googlepurchased aD-Wave Twowith 512 qubits.[14]As of now, the question of whether the D-Wave processors offer a speedup over a classical processor is still unanswered. Tests performed by researchers atUSC,ETH Zurich, andGoogleshow that as of now, there is no evidence of a quantum advantage.[15][16]
wikipedia |A topological quantum computeris a theoreticalquantum computer that employs two-dimensionalquasiparticlescalledanyons, whoseworld linescross over one another to formbraidsin a three-dimensionalspacetime(i.e., one temporal plus two spatial dimensions). These braids form thelogic gatesthat make up the computer. The advantage of a quantum computer based on quantum braids over using trapped quantum particles is that the former is much more stable. The smallest perturbations can cause a quantum particle todecohereand introduce errors in the computation, but such small perturbations do not change the braids'topological properties. This is like the effort required to cut a string and reattach the ends to form a different braid, as opposed to a ball (representing an ordinary quantum particle in four-dimensional spacetime) bumping into a wall.Alexei Kitaevproposed topological quantum computation in 1997. While the elements of a topological quantum computer originate in a purely mathematical realm, experiments infractional quantum Hall systemsindicate these elements may be created in the real world usingsemiconductorsmade ofgallium arsenideat a temperature of nearabsolute zeroand subjected to strongmagnetic fields.
Another way of phrasing Landauer's principle is that if an observer loses information about a physical system, the observer loses the ability to extract work from that system.
At 20 °C (room temperature, or 293.15 K), the Landauer limit represents an energy of approximately 0.0172 eV, or 2.75 zJ. Theoretically, room‑temperature computer memory operating at the Landauer limit could be changed at a rate of one billion bits per second with only 2.85 trillionths of a watt of power being expended in the memory media. Modern computers use millions of times as much energy.[3][4][5]
If no information is erased, computation may in principle be achieved which isthermodynamically reversible, and require no release of heat. This has led to considerable interest in the study ofreversible computing.
Recently, physical experiments have tested Landauer's principle and confirmed its predictions
educationright |
This also helps to make sense of what has struck me as most
incomprehensible about the reparations movement -- its complete
disregard for the simplest, most mundanely pragmatic question
about any political mobilization: How can we imagine building a
political force that would enable us to prevail on this issue? As
with earlier Pan-Africanist ideologues, internationalist rhetoric
is in part a sleight-of-hand attempt to sidestep that question by
abstracting to a larger black universe.
But the question ultimately does not arise because reparations
talk is rooted in a different kind of politics, a politics of
elite-brokerage and entreaty to the ruling class and its official
conscience, the philanthropic foundations, for racial side-
payments. Robinson makes this appeal unambiguously: "Until
America's white ruling class accepts the fact that the book never
closes on massive unredressed social wrongs, America can have no
future as one people." Lest there be any doubt about the limited
social vision that makes such an entreaty plausible, he brushes
away the deepest foundations of American inequality: "Lamentably,
there will always be poverty." His beef is that black Americans
are statistically overrepresented at the bottom. It is significant
as well that Jim Forman's 1969 demand was crafted at a conference
funded and organized by liberal religious foundations. This is a
protest politics that depends on the good will of those who hold
power. By definition, it is not equipped to challenge existing
relations of power and distribution other than marginally, with
token gestures.
There's a more insidious dynamic at work in this politics as well,
which helps to understand why the reparations idea suddenly has
spread so widely through mainstream political discourse. We are in
one of those rare moments in American history -- like the 1880s
and 1890s and the Great Depression -- when common circumstances of
economic and social insecurity have strengthened the potential for
building broad solidarity across race, gender and other identities
around shared concerns of daily life, concerns that only the
minority of comfortable and well-off can dismiss in favor of
monuments and apologies and a politics of psychobabble. Concerns
like access to quality health care, the right to a decent and
dignified livelihood, affordable housing, quality education for
all. These are objectives that can be pursued effectively only by
struggling to unite a wide section of the American population who
experience those concerns most acutely, the substantial majority
of this population who have lost those essential social benefits
or live in fear of losing them. And isn't it interesting that at
such a moment the corporate-dominated opinion-shaping media
discover and project a demand for racially defined reparations
that cuts precisely against building such solidarity? And isn't it
also interesting that Randall Robinson, mainstream poster boy for
reparations advocacy, is a member of the Rockefeller family's
Council on Foreign Relations?
I know that many activists who have taken up the cause of
reparations otherwise hold and enact a politics quite at odds with
the limitations that I've described here. To some extent, I
suspect their involvement stems from an old reflex of attempting
to locate a progressive kernel in the nationalist sensibility. It
certainly is an expression of a generally admirable commitment to
go where people seem to be moving. But we must ask: What people?
And where can this motion go? And we must be prepared to recognize
what can be only a political dead end -- or worse.
democracynow | AMY GOODMAN: That was Bernie Sanders speaking at the Black and Brown
Forum in Iowa in January. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
also said at the forum she didn’t support reparations for slavery.
Following the forum, Ta-Nehisi Coates challenged Sanders’ position in
an article for The Atlantic entitled "Why Precisely Is Bernie Sanders
Against Reparations?" In the piece, he wrote, quote, "Unfortunately,
Sanders’s radicalism has failed in the ancient fight against white
supremacy. ... This is the 'class first' approach, originating in the
myth that racism and socialism are necessarily incompatible," end-quote.
The piece has sparked both praise and controversy from across the
political spectrum. In one response, University of Illinois professor
Cedric Johnson wrote in a piece for Jacobin magazine, quote, "Coates’s
latest attack on Sanders, and willingness to join the chorus of
red-baiters, has convinced me that his particular brand of antiracism
does more political harm than good, further mystifying the actual
forces at play and the real battle lines that divide our world,"
end-quote.
This comes as both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders’ campaigns shift
attention away from New Hampshire toward South Carolina, where black
voters could decide the primary.
Well, to discuss the 2016 presidential campaign and the case for
reparations, we are joined by Ta-Nehisi Coates, the national
correspondent for The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics
and social issues. He’s the author of Between the World and Me, which
is a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. He won the 2014
George Polk Award for his Atlantic cover story, "The Case for
Reparations."
Citizenship, Criticism, and Communism
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4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
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He ...