whitehouse | This morning, President Biden tested positive for COVID-19. He is fully
vaccinated and twice boosted and experiencing very mild symptoms. He
has begun taking Paxlovid. Consistent with CDC guidelines, he will
isolate at the White House and will continue to carry out all of his
duties fully during that time. He has been in contact with members of
the White House staff by phone this morning, and will participate in his
planned meetings at the White House this morning via phone and Zoom
from the residence.
Consistent with White House protocol for
positive COVID cases, which goes above and beyond CDC guidance, he will
continue to work in isolation until he tests negative. Once he tests
negative, he will return to in-person work.
Out of an abundance
of transparency, the White House will provide a daily update on the
President’s status as he continues to carry out the full duties of the
office while in isolation.
Per standard protocol for any positive
case at the White House, the White House Medical Unit will inform all
close contacts of the President during the day today, including any
Members of Congress and any members of the press who interacted with the
President during yesterday’s travel. The President’s last previous
test for COVID was Tuesday, when he had a negative test result.
ria.novosti |If
Ukraine receives long-range weapons from Western countries, then the
geographical tasks of the special operation of the Russian troops will
change, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with
Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of RT and the Rossiya Segodnya
media group.
"The President said very clearly, as you quoted him, -
denazification, demilitarization in the sense that there are no threats
to our security, military threats from the territory of
Ukraine , this task remains," the minister stressed.
At the same time, he recalled that during the meeting of
the negotiators in Istanbul at the end of March, the situation on this
issue was significantly different.
"Now the geography is different. It is far from being only the DPR
and LPR, it is also the Kherson region, the Zaporozhye region and a
number of other territories, and this process continues, and continues
consistently and persistently," the head of Russian diplomacy added.
He pointed out that as the West, in impotent rage or in a desire to
make the situation as bad as possible, pumps more and more long-range
weapons into Ukraine, for example, HIMARS, the geographical objectives
of the special operation will move even further from the current line.
“Because we cannot allow the part of Ukraine that Zelensky will
control or whoever replaces him to have weapons that will pose a direct
threat to our territory and the territory of those republics that have
declared their independence, those who want their future decide for
yourself," he concluded.
Note to Washington: If you deliver HIMARS missile to Ukraine with an
extended (300km instead of 80km) range, Russia will have to move further
into Ukraine to secure its own and the Donbas republics borders.
This comes after calls in Ukraine to hit the bridge over the Kerch
street that connects Crimea with Russia with extended range HIMARS
missiles. The nearest point of the area which the Ukraine still holds is
some 260 kilometer away from the bridge.
indianpunchline | If the metaphor of the “Great Game” can be applied to the Ukrainian
crisis, with the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation
(NATO) at it core, it has begun causing reverberations across the entire
Eurasian space. The great game lurking in the shade in the Caucasus and
Central Asian regions in recent years is visibly accelerating.
The
edge of the game is above everything else the targeting of Russia and
China by the United States. This unfolding game cannot be
underestimated, as its outcome may impact the shaping of a new model of
the world order.
Starting
with the Caspian Summit in Ashgabat on June 29, the inter-connected
templates of the great game in the Caucasus began surfacing. The fact
that the summit was scheduled at all despite the raging conflict in
Ukraine — and that Russian President Vladimir Putin took time out to
attend it — testified to the high importance of the event.
Basically,
the presidents of the 5 littoral states — Kazakhstan, Iran,
Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan and Russia — synchronised their watches, based
on the Convention on the Legal Status of the Caspian Sea — the Constitution of the Caspian Sea — that was signed at their last summit in 2018. While doing so,they considered the current international situation and geopolitical processes worldwide.
The Caspian Summit was held just 5 weeks after Russian forcesgained
control of Mariupol port city (May 21), which established its total
supremacy over the Sea of Azov and the Kerch Strait in eastern Crimea.
Kerch Strait has a strategic role in Russian policies, being the narrow
maritime gateway (5 kms in length and 4.5 km. wide at the narrowest
point) which links the Black Sea via the Sea of Azov to Russia’s major
waterways including the Don and the Volga.
In
effect, it is yet to sink in that in the geopolitics of the entire
Eurasian landmass, the liberation of Mariupol by Russian forceswas
a pivotal event in the great game, since the Kerch Strait ensures
maritime transit from the Black Sea all the way to Moscow and St
Petersburg, not to mention the strategic maritime route between the
Caspian Sea (via the Volga-Don Canal) to the Black Sea and the
Mediterranean.
United Deep Waterway System of European Russia linking Sea of Azov and Caspian Sea to Baltic Sea and the Northern Sea Route
Now,
to get the “big picture” here, factor in that Volga River also links
the Caspian Sea to the Baltic Sea as well as the Northern Sea Route (via
the Volga–Baltic Waterway). Suffice to say, Russia has gained control
of an integrated system of waterways, which connects the Black Sea and
the Caspian Sea to the Baltic and the Northern Sea Route (which is a
4800 km long shipping lane that connects the Atlantic with the Pacific
Ocean, passing along the Russian coasts of Siberia and the Far East.)
No
doubt, it is a stupendous consolidation of the so-called “heartland” —
per Sir Halford Mackinder’s theory (1904) that whoever controls Eastern
Europe controls the Heartland and controls the “world island.”
Looking
back, therefore, there is no question that the reunion of Crimea with
the Russian Federation in 2014 was a major setback for the US and NATO.
Putin caught Washington and its allies by total surprise. It complicated
their objective to integrate Ukraine into the NATO.
Today a gay patient in his 30s showed up in the office. He is healthy and very athletic. He is a “boy” to another older gay man.
They travel the world and are into serious gay fetish play. Spanking, bondage, discipline etc.
Patient has had fever and chills and horrible headache for 3 days. A
reticulonodular rash has developed but no vesicles yet. They have been
playing in clubs, parties, and orgies in 4 major cities the past 2
weeks.
There are so many things in that diagnostic differential but of course monkeypox is right up there.
And of course NO TESTING IS AVAILABLE. I called all levels of health
department and even CDC today. The CDC is voice mail hell. Never talked
to a human. It took several hours for a health dept human but by then
the patient was already gone potentially spreading the wealth
everywhere. They are acting as if I was talking about the Martian Flu.
Again, we have known about this two months now, and it was like I was
asking for the Holy Grail. Testing? “I need to call so and so……not
sure…..but I’ll get right back to you……..”. And don’t get me started
about their handling of the quarantine.
I have no idea if he is really a case. Multiple tests are pending.
But not monkeypox. There is apparently no blood test for that. You have
to swab the vesicles. But what if we do not have vesicles yet? Or if a
patient may be past the vesicular stage? Crickets.
I would like to think there is a baseline competence. But that is too much an ask right now.
Again two months all over the news and this is what we have.
We are a completely unserious nation.
Remember that IM Doc is in a wealthy destination in Flyover.
Apparently the local public health officials not only think that
monkeypox is exclusively a gay STD, but also that they can’t have it
locally because there are no gay men in their part of the world. Did
they miss Brokeback Mountain? Or the private jet landing schedule?
On top of that, the local public health officials appear unable to
use a search engine. In fact, there are monkeypox tests, but as IM Doc
did correctly infer, they can’t be used before the vesicles stage, which
is 2-4+ days after lesions start forming. Oh, and monkeypox patients
are contagious as soon as they start having lesions and potentially also
during the prodome period, before rash starts.
nakedcapitalism | The Military Summary channel has observed that once Russia secures
Donbass, there are no major lines of defense to the west until the
Dnieper. That may also explain the claim he made in his latest report (at 12:50),
that Zelensky told the troops in Donass that the US told him if they
lose the so-called Zaluzny defense line (Kramatorsk and Sloviansk are on
this line) that it would be considered to be the total collapse of
Ukraine forces and no more Western support would be forthcoming. I doubt
that politically that the US can totally abandon Ukraine but they can
certainly send only eyewash, and more importantly, stop funding the
Ukraine government, which has become a money pit.
tThe remaining major troop concentration is around Kiev. The question is what Russia does next.
My belief is still that Russia will give priority to taking Odessa
unless there are logistical considerations that argue against that. The
Ukraine military is so close to collapse that Russian forces going to
Odessa sooner rather than later is a real possibility. It’s the
psychologically most important target for the Russian people, and
economically more valuable than Kiev. The West would recognize that
Russia getting control of what was Ukraine’s entire Black Sea coast as
an enormous loss.
I suspect what Russia decides to do with or about Ukraine to the west
of the Dnieper is event dependent. However, the West has decided to tie
itself even more tightly to the Ukraine albatross. I had said to
Lambert that it was not impossible for Russia to have decisively won (as
in taken Odessa) by sometime in October, but even with the Western
forces clearly unable to rout Russia, that Europe and the US would keep
its citizens cold and hungry this winter just to spite Russia.
The EU will not withdraw the sanctions, imposed on Russia
over the situation in Ukraine, if Moscow and Kiev sign peace treaty on
Russia’s terms, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said in his article for
the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagzeitung, published Sunday.
“The part of the new reality is that the EU has also consolidated. It
has reacted to the Russian aggression quite unanimously and imposed
unprecedentedly harsh sanctions,” Scholz said. “We knew it from the
start that we will potentially have to keep these sanctions for a long
time.”
“And it is also clear that not a single one of these sanctions will
be withdrawn in case of peace, dictated by Russia,” he continued. “There
is no other path for an agreement with Ukraine for Russia than the one
that could be accepted by the Ukrainians.”
It does not seem to occur to Sholtz that even Ukrainians who are not
that keen about Russia would choose having Russian or Russian-lite rule
over the West’s plan of fighting to the last Ukrainian. It also seems
likely that Russia will hold referendums, again to legitimate its
actions in the court of non-collective-West opinion. But of course those
will be deemed to be bogus even if the most reputable independent
observers say otherwise.
So this is not going to end well for the West. But you knew that already if you were paying attention.
foreignaffairs |As the world looks on while Ukrainians fight
for their lives and their freedom, many feel a burning desire to do more
to support them. The problem is not a lack of forces or resources—it is
fear of provoking a wider, perhaps nuclear, war with Russia. That fear
is why U.S. President Joe Biden and other NATO leaders have consistently
made clear that they will not intervene directly in the conflict,
instead limiting their help to weapons, money, intelligence, and
sanctions. As devastating as events in Ukraine are today, a nuclear war
with Russia could kill more people than Ukraine’s entire population of
roughly 44 million.
NATO
leaders understand that they must walk this fine line between aiding
Ukraine and risking war with Russia, but they have no theory of how to
do it. The German and French governments hem and haw about whether to
provide Ukraine with tanks. When Poland proposed a plan to transfer
MiG-29 fighter aircraft to Ukraine, the United States refused. U.S.
Defense Department spokesperson John Kirby warned that it “raises
serious concerns for the entire NATO alliance” and therefore was not
“tenable.” Yet the United States was already shipping Javelin antitank
missiles and Stinger surface-to-air missiles. Soon after, it began
sending other weapons, including M777 howitzers and now HIMARS
multiple-rocket launchers. What is the difference? Those weapons do more
to strengthen Ukraine’s combat power than MiG-29s, so the theory cannot
be that Russia reacts more strongly to policies that do more harm to
its interests. Why, then, missiles and artillery but not planes? The
answer is that there is no answer. It is simply arbitrary.
NATO needs a strategy predicated on a theory of what it can do to aid Ukraine
without widening the war to a direct conflict between it and Russia.
Lessons from past crises point to the principles that should guide such a
strategy. History shows that NATO would recklessly risk war only by
crossing two Russian redlines: openly firing on Russian forces or
deploying organized combat units under NATO-member flags into Ukraine.
As long as NATO stops short of unmistakably crossing those lines, it can do more to help Ukraine at an acceptable risk of war.
Arms transfers and sanctions are both wholly
consistent with this approach, so it is tempting to conclude that NATO
members are doing all they can. They are not. They should build on
current policies by dispensing with arbitrary limits on the types of
conventional weapons they are providing Ukraine and expanding sanctions.
Moreover, there is a third way to support Ukraine besides arms and
sanctions—one that NATO is neglecting. It is time for NATO to encourage,
organize, and equip its soldiers to volunteer to fight for Ukraine.
amgreatness | Rep. Adam Schiff tucked an amendment into the National Defense Authorization Act
that would prohibit any evidence collected in violation of the Posse
Comitatus Act from being used in investigations. Why?
But if the military engaged in any
civilian law enforcement activity, including surveillance or
intelligence collection, before or during January 6, it would represent
an egregious violation of the military’s code of conduct and federal
law. Under the Posse Comitatus Act,
military personnel cannot be used as local cops or investigators:
“Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized
by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any part of the
Army, the Navy, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, or the Space Force as a
posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under
this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.” (Certain
exclusions, such as the president’s invocation of the Insurrection Act
and any use of the National Guard, apply.)
The law is both vague and specific at
the same time—which brings us to Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.).
Irrefutably the least trustworthy member of Congress, Schiff tucked an amendment
into the massive National Defense Authorization Act that would prohibit
any evidence collected in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act from
being used in a number of proceedings, including criminal trials and
congressional investigations.
The amendment’s timing, like everything else related to the infamous Russian collusion huckster, evidence forger, and nude photo seeker
(to name a few of Schiff’s special talents), is highly suspect. Why
would Schiff need to outlaw evidence collected unlawfully? Why is Schiff
relying on this relatively arcane statute passed during Reconstruction
that is rarely, if ever, enforced?
“No one has ever been convicted of violating PCA to my knowledge,” Dr. Jeffrey Addicott, a 20-year member of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps and director of the Warrior Defense Project at St. Mary’s College, told American Greatness last week.
What is Adam Schiff, on behalf of the
Biden regime and Trump foes in the U.S. military, including Chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, trying to hide?
It is not a coincidence that Schiff
introduced the amendment just a few months before a predicted Republican
landslide in November, which will give control of Congress back to the
GOP. House Minority Leader and presumptive Speaker of the House Kevin
McCarthy is planning to conduct multiple investigations into the Biden
regime next year including of the deadly and distrasrous withdrawal from
Afghanistan; the Daily Caller reported
this week that Republican lawmakers are “flooding the Biden
administration with ‘hundreds of preservation notices’ asking that
relevant documents be preserved.”
But one can easily see how Schiff’s
amendment could be used as legislative cover to prevent production of
any materials from Biden’s Department of Defense. After all, according
to a 2018 congressional analysis
of Posse Comitatus, “compliance [of the act] is ordinarily the result
of military self-restraint.” So, too, is enforcement: “The act is a
criminal statute under which there has been but a handful of known
prosecutions,” the same report explained.
theconservativetreehouse | The FISA court identified and quantified
tens-of-thousands of search queries of the NSA/FBI database using the
FISA-702(16)(17) system. The database was repeatedly used by persons
with contractor access who unlawfully searched and extracted the raw
results without redacting the information and shared it with an unknown
number of entities.
The outlined process certainly points toward a political spying and
surveillance operation. When the DOJ use of the IRS for political
information on their opposition became problematic, the Obama
administration needed another tool. It was in 2012 when they switched
to using the FBI databases for targeted search queries.
This information from Jim Jordan and Matt Gaetz had the potential to
be extremely explosive. However, the absence of any follow-up
reporting, or even debunking from the traditional guardians of the DC
swamp is weird. What’s going on?
I wrote about these suspicions in depth throughout 2017, 2018 and eventually summarized in 2019:
theconservativetreehouse |I am going to explain how the Intelligence Branch works: (1) to
control every other branch of government; (2) how it functions as an
entirely independent branch of government with no oversight; (3) how and
why it was created to be independent from oversight; (4) what is the
current mission of the IC Branch, and most importantly (5) who operates
it.
The Intelligence Branch is an independent functioning branch of
government, it is no longer a subsidiary set of agencies within the
Executive Branch as most would think. To understand the Intelligence
Branch, we need to drop the elementary school civics class lessons about
three coequal branches of government and replace that outlook with the
modern system that created itself.
The Intelligence Branch functions much like the State Dept, through a
unique set of public-private partnerships that support it. Big Tech
industry collaboration with intelligence operatives is part of that
functioning, almost like an NGO. However, the process is much more
important than most think. In this problematic perspective of a corrupt
system of government, the process is the flaw – not the outcome.
There are people making decisions inside this little known,
unregulated and out-of-control branch of government that impact every
facet of our lives.
None of the people operating deep inside the Intelligence Branch were
elected; and our elected representative House members genuinely do not
know how the system works. I assert this position affirmatively because I
have talked to House and Senate staffers, including the chiefs of staff
for multiple House & Senate committee seats. They are not malicious
people; however, they are genuinely clueless of things that happen
outside their silo. That is part of the purpose of me explaining it,
with examples, in full detail with sunlight.
msn | Sen. Josh Hawley predicts the overturning of Roe v. Wade
will cause a 'major sorting out across the country' and allow the GOP to
'extend their strength in the Electoral College'
Sen. Josh Hawley predicted that the overturning of Roe v. Wade will help Republicans in the long run.
He argued the decision would polarize the country in a way that benefits Republicans in the Electoral College.
He also said the alliance between big business and social conservatives that underpins the GOP is now "over."
"I
really do think that this is going to be a watershed moment in American
politics," he said on a call with reporters on Friday. "The first
decision — the 1973 Roe decision — fundamentally reshaped American
politics, it ushered in the rise of the Christian conservative movement,
it led to the forming of what became the Reagan coalition in 1980."
Time | While people of color, individually and as groups, have been helped
by affirmative action in the subsequent years, data and studies suggest
women — white women in particular — have benefited disproportionately. According to one study,
in 1995, 6 million women, the majority of whom were white, had jobs
they wouldn’t have otherwise held but for affirmative action.
Another study
shows that women made greater gains in employment at companies that do
business with the federal government, which are therefore subject to
federal affirmative-action requirements, than in other companies — with
female employment rising 15.2% at federal contractors but only 2.2%
elsewhere. And the women working for federal-contractor companies also
held higher positions and were paid better.
Even in the private sector, the advancements of white women eclipse those of people of color. After IBM established
its own affirmative-action program, the numbers of women in management
positions more than tripled in less than 10 years. Data from subsequent
years show that the number of executives of color at IBM also grew, but not nearly at the same rate.
wikipedia | As chairman of the United States House Committee on Rules starting in 1954,[5]
Smith controlled the flow of legislation in the House. An opponent of
racial integration, Smith used his power as chairman of the Rules
Committee to keep much civil rights legislation from coming to a vote on
the House floor.
He was a signatory to the 1956 Southern Manifesto that opposed the desegregation of public schools ordered by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education
(1954). A friend described him as someone who "had a real feeling of
kindness toward the black people he knew, but he did not respect the
race."[6]
When the Civil Rights Act of 1957
came before Smith's committee, Smith said, "The Southern people have
never accepted the colored race as a race of people who had equal
intelligence and education and social attainments as the whole people of
the South."[7] Others noted him as an apologist for slavery who used the Ancient Greeks and Romans in its defense.[6]
Speaker Sam Rayburn tried to reduce his power in 1961, with only limited success.
Smith delayed passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
One of Rayburn's reforms was the "Twenty-One Day Rule" that required a
bill to be sent to the floor within 21 days. Under pressure, Smith
released the bill.
Two days before the vote, Smith offered an amendment to insert "sex" after the word "religion" as a protected class of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Congressional Record
shows Smith made serious arguments, voicing concerns that white women
would suffer greater discrimination without a protection for gender.[8] Reformers, who knew Smith was hostile to civil rights for blacks, assumed that he was doing so to defeat the whole bill.[9][10]
In 1968, Leo Kanowitz wrote that, within the context of the anti-civil
rights coalition making "every effort to block" the passage of Title
VII, "it is abundantly clear that a principal motive in introducing
["sex"] was to prevent passage of the basic legislation being considered
by Congress, rather than solicitude for women's employment rights."[11] Kanowitz notes that Representative Edith Green,
who was one of the few female legislators in the House at that time,
held that view that legislation against sex discrimination in employment
"would not have received one hundred votes," indicating that it would
have been defeated handedly.
In 1964, the burning national issue was civil rights for blacks.
Activists argued that it was "the Negro's hour" and that adding women's
rights to the bill could hurt its chance of being passed. However,
opponents voted for the Smith amendment. The National Woman's Party (NWP) had used Smith to include sex as a protected category and so achieved their main goal.[12]
The prohibition of sex discrimination was added on the floor by
Smith. While Smith strongly opposed civil rights laws for blacks, he
supported such laws for women. Smith's amendment passed by a vote of 168
to 133.[10][13][14]
Smith expected that Republicans,
who had included equal rights for women in their party's platform since
1940, would probably vote for the amendment. Some historians speculate
that Smith, in addition to helping women, was trying to embarrass Northern Democrats, who opposed civil rights for women since labor unions opposed the clause.[8]
therealnews | So 64 years ago, Brown vs. Board of Education found that separate and
unequal education systems for African Americans was unconstitutional.
You argue that many Virginians initially actually accepted this
decision, but a public campaign was launched to sway public opinion
against it. Can you talk about that? You start off the first chapter of
your book with this history, talking about how students and teachers in
Virginia, led by students, weren’t organized to be part of Brown. And
then the public response against it.
NANCY MACLEAN:Yeah, in the state of Virginia
in 1951 there was an extraordinarily inspiring event that is really, in
a way, a precursor to some of what we’re seeing now with the teachers
strikes, and student and teacher mobilizations for good public
education. In that strike in 1951 in Prince Edward County, Virginia, a
young woman named Barbara Rose Johns joined with her favorite teacher,
and the two of them worked together, kind of strategized for a strike, a
student strike, to demand a better high school for the black children
of Prince Edward County. At that point many of the students were taking
classes in tar paper shacks. They did not have indoor plumbing, in many
cases, while the white school was the extraordinary state of the art
facility. And so the 200 students in this high school went out on a 100
percent solid students strike for a better high school.
It was an incredibly inspiring event with the support of over
90 percent of their parents, the local black clergy, and NAACP. And what
they wanted was a chance to learn, to grow, to have the same
opportunities as other children in their cohort and their era and their
community. And they only went back to school when the NAACP agreed to
take their course. I’m sorry, to take their case against discrimination
to the courts. And at that point the students went back to school, and
this case from Prince Edward County became one of the five eventually
folded into Brown vs. Board of Education.
Fast forward a bit, and after the Brown decision was issued by
the court, Virginia’s extremely conservative white elite began in 1955
and ’56 to do everything it could to undermine the success of that
decision, and to deny black children and communities the constitutional
rights that had just been recognized by the court. The way that they did
this was through a program called massive resistance, and they led the
program of massive resistance and goaded the wider white South onto it.
And one element of that massive resistance was state-funded tuition
grants, what we today would call vouchers, to enable white parents to
pull their children from public schools to private schools that would be
beyond the reach of the Federal Court’s ruling that segregation was
unconstitutional.
So that’s actually how I got into this story, and it was a
story that led me to the surprising discovery that essentially the
entire American right, and particularly of interest, this free market
fundamentalist right that was just beginning to get organized in those
years, supported these tax-funded school vouchers. And even, in many
cases, supported the school closures in Prince Edward County to prevent
the Brown decision from being implemented.
So that was fascinating to me. And I discovered that Milton
Friedman, the Chicago school free market economist, had issued his first
manifesto for such vouchers in 1955 in the full knowledge of how it
could be used by the white segregationists of the South. And then I also
stumbled onto a report by this James McGill Buchanan that we were
discussing earlier, who essentially tried to pull the segregationist
chestnuts out of the fire in early 1959, when a massive mobilization of
moderate white parents had come together to try to save the schools from
these school closures, and the bleeding of these tax monies out to
private schools. And after the courts had ruled against school closures
of schools that were planning to desegregate in Virginia. So that’s how
Buchanan got on my radar. But what I realized was that this was a much
deeper story about the right’s radical antipathy to public education
precisely because it was public.
And here I think it’s important to point out that when this
was happening in the late 1950s, American schools were the envy of the
developed world. We lead the world in the efficacy of our public
education system. Our schools were a model for the wider world. And yet
this right was attacking public education even then. And as important,
teachers were not organized then. There were no recognized teachers
unions. There was no collective bargaining structure for teachers in
those years. The right was attacking public education as a monopoly,
saying that it denied choice, all the kinds of things that they say now
against public education, and they were doing this at a time when
teachers had no collective power.
So the antipathy that we see on the right toward teachers
unions today, toward public education, is not really because of any
failing on their part. It is ideological. It is dogmatic. It is an
antipathy to public education precisely because it is public.
politico | In May 1969, a group of African-American parents in Holmes County,
Mississippi, sued the Treasury Department to prevent three new
whites-only K-12 private academies from securing full tax-exempt status,
arguing that their discriminatory policies prevented them from being
considered “charitable” institutions. The schools had been founded in
the mid-1960s in response to the desegregation of public schools set in
motion by the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. In
1969, the first year of desegregation, the number of white students
enrolled in public schools in Holmes County dropped from 771 to 28; the
following year, that number fell to zero.
In Green v. Kennedy (David Kennedy was secretary of the
treasury at the time), decided in January 1970, the plaintiffs won a
preliminary injunction, which denied the “segregation academies”
tax-exempt status until further review. In the meantime, the government
was solidifying its position on such schools. Later that year, President
Richard Nixon ordered the Internal Revenue Service to enact a new
policy denying tax exemptions to all segregated schools in the United
States. Under the provisions of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which
forbade racial segregation and discrimination, discriminatory schools
were not—by definition—“charitable” educational organizations, and
therefore they had no claims to tax-exempt status; similarly, donations
to such organizations would no longer qualify as tax-deductible
contributions.
Paul Weyrich, the late religious conservative political activist and co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, saw his opening.
In the decades following World War II, evangelicals, especially
white evangelicals in the North, had drifted toward the Republican
Party—inclined in that direction by general Cold War anxieties,
vestigial suspicions of Catholicism and well-known evangelist Billy
Graham’s very public friendship with Dwight Eisenhower and Richard
Nixon. Despite these predilections, though, evangelicals had largely
stayed out of the political arena, at least in any organized way. If he
could change that, Weyrich reasoned, their large numbers would
constitute a formidable voting bloc—one that he could easily marshal
behind conservative causes.
“The new political philosophy must be defined by us [conservatives]
in moral terms, packaged in non-religious language, and propagated
throughout the country by our new coalition,” Weyrich wrote in the
mid-1970s. “When political power is achieved, the moral majority will
have the opportunity to re-create this great nation.” Weyrich believed
that the political possibilities of such a coalition were unlimited.
“The leadership, moral philosophy, and workable vehicle are at hand just
waiting to be blended and activated,” he wrote. “If the moral majority
acts, results could well exceed our wildest dreams.”
But this hypothetical “moral majority” needed a catalyst—a standard
around which to rally. For nearly two decades, Weyrich, by his own
account, had been trying out different issues, hoping one might pique
evangelical interest: pornography, prayer in schools, the proposed Equal
Rights Amendment to the Constitution, even abortion. “I was trying to
get these people interested in those issues and I utterly failed,”
Weyrich recalled at a conference in 1990.
The Green v. Connally ruling provided a necessary first step: It captured the attention of evangelical leaders , especially
as the IRS began sending questionnaires to church-related “segregation
academies,” including Falwell’s own Lynchburg Christian School,
inquiring about their racial policies. Falwell was furious. “In some
states,” he famously complained, “It’s easier to open a massage parlor
than a Christian school.”
One such school, Bob Jones University—a fundamentalist college in
Greenville, South Carolina—was especially obdurate. The IRS had sent its
first letter to Bob Jones University in November 1970 to ascertain
whether or not it discriminated on the basis of race. The school
responded defiantly: It did not admit African Americans.
Although Bob Jones Jr., the school’s founder, argued that racial
segregation was mandated by the Bible, Falwell and Weyrich quickly
sought to shift the grounds of the debate, framing their opposition in
terms of religious freedom rather than in defense of racial segregation.
For decades, evangelical leaders had boasted that because their
educational institutions accepted no federal money (except for, of
course, not having to pay taxes) the government could not tell them how
to run their shops—whom to hire or not, whom to admit or reject. The
Civil Rights Act, however, changed that calculus.
Bob Jones University did, in fact, try to placate the IRS—in its own
way. Following initial inquiries into the school’s racial policies, Bob
Jones admitted one African-American, a worker in its radio station, as a
part-time student; he dropped out a month later. In 1975, again in an
attempt to forestall IRS action, the school admitted blacks to the
student body, but, out of fears of miscegenation, refused to admit unmarried African-Americans.
The school also stipulated that any students who engaged in interracial
dating, or who were even associated with organizations that advocated
interracial dating, would be expelled.
The IRS was not placated. On January 19, 1976, after years of
warnings—integrate or pay taxes—the agency rescinded the school’s tax
exemption.
For many evangelical leaders, who had been following the issue since Green v. Connally,
Bob Jones University was the final straw. As Elmer L. Rumminger,
longtime administrator at Bob Jones University, told me in an interview,
the IRS actions against his school “alerted the Christian school
community about what could happen with government interference” in the
affairs of evangelical institutions. “That was really the major issue
that got us all involved.”
chrishedges |The United States, as the near unanimous vote to provide nearly
$40 billion in aid to Ukraine illustrates, is trapped in the death
spiral of unchecked militarism. No high speed trains. No universal
health care. No viable Covid relief program. No respite from 8.3 percent
inflation. No infrastructure programs to repair decaying roads and
bridges, which require $41.8 billion to fix the 43,586 structurally deficient bridges, on average 68 years old. No forgiveness of $1.7 trillion in student debt. No addressing income inequality. No program to feed the 17 million
children who go to bed each night hungry. No rational gun control or
curbing of the epidemic of nihilistic violence and mass shootings. No
help for the 100,000 Americans who die each year of drug overdoses. No minimum wage of $15 an hour to counter 44 years of wage stagnation. No respite from gas prices that are projected to hit $6 a gallon.
The
permanent war economy, implanted since the end of World War II, has
destroyed the private economy, bankrupted the nation, and squandered
trillions of dollars of taxpayer money. The monopolization of capital by
the military has driven the US debt to $30 trillion,
$ 6 trillion more than the US GDP of $ 24 trillion. Servicing this debt
costs $300 billion a year. We spent more on the military, $ 813 billion for fiscal year 2023, than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined.
We
are paying a heavy social, political, and economic cost for our
militarism. Washington watches passively as the U.S. rots, morally,
politically, economically, and physically, while China, Russia, Saudi
Arabia, India, and other countries extract themselves from the tyranny
of the U.S. dollar and the international Society for Worldwide Interbank
Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a messaging network banks and
other financial institutions use to send and receive information, such
as money transfer instructions. Once the U.S. dollar is no longer the
world’s reserve currency, once there is an alternative to SWIFT, it will
precipitate an internal economic collapse. It will force the immediate
contraction of the U.S. empire shuttering most of its nearly 800
overseas military installations. It will signal the death of Pax
Americana.
There were three
restraints to the avarice and bloodlust of the permanent war economy
that no longer exist. The first was the old liberal wing of the
Democratic Party, led by politicians such as Senator George McGovern,
Senator Eugene McCarthy, and Senator J. William Fulbright, who wrote The Pentagon Propaganda Machine.
The self-identified progressives, a pitiful minority, in Congress
today, from Barbara Lee, who was the single vote in the House and the
Senate opposing a broad, open-ended authorization allowing the president
to wage war in Afghanistan or anywhere else, to Ilhan Omar now
dutifully line up to fund the latest proxy war. The second restraint was
an independent media and academia, including journalists such as I.F
Stone and Neil Sheehan along with scholars such as Seymour Melman,
author of The Permanent War Economy and Pentagon Capitalism: The Political Economy of War. Third,
and perhaps most important, was an organized anti-war movement, led by
religious leaders such as Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr. and Phil
and Dan Berrigan as well as groups such as Students for a Democratic
Society (SDS). They understood that unchecked militarism was a fatal
disease.
newstatesman | The tendency to treat political struggles and disagreements as forms
of conspiracy is not only a polarising feature of the current moment,
but also, paradoxically, a stabilising one. American political
development over the past several decades has not merely been divided
into opposing camps, around, for example, questions of race and gender
equality, reproductive rights, or gun ownership; it has also been locked
into a dynamic of partisan competition that encourages threat
inflation, yielding important contributions from both parties to
expansively coercive institutions, in the name of collective security.
From the early Cold War, US partisanship revolved around which party was
better prepared to fight communism, leading to covert actions, proxy
wars and full-scale military invasions, culminating in a disastrous,
immoral war in Vietnam. By the 1970s, this morphed into a question of
which party was tougher on crime – a policy orientation that delivered a
regime of mass incarceration unprecedented in world history. The attacks of 9/11
raised the question of which party would keep the American “homeland”
safe from foreign predators, leading to two more decades of fruitless
war in the Middle East and west Asia, and a deportation delirium that
has swept up millions. What if the banal revelation at the end of the US
wars on communism, crime and terror is simply that Americans are their
own worst enemies?
The spectre of civil war might be better
understood as a metaphor for waning confidence in the (liberal) US
empire. The breakdown of the “rules-based international order” as a
regulative ideal is part of an attrition of what Raymond Geuss has called the “sheltered internal space of… Homo liberalis”
fashioned during the post-1945 golden age of American pluralism, rising
affluence, increasing tolerance and expanding civil rights. The “Great
Society”, the name that was given to the effort to institute social
democratic liberalism inside the US, and the civil rights revolution
that made the country a formal multi-racial democracy for the first time
in its history, was its high watermark. With the war in Vietnam raging,
and the protests of impoverished black residents and rising crime
roiling American cities, however, President Lyndon Johnson concluded
that the US now faced a “war within our own boundaries”, before abdicating instead of pursuing a second full term. Americans have been talking about civil war ever since.
Why did the NGO borg pivot to niche identities? Because the cause of substantive black equality is so much harder than declaring the gender binary defunct through acts of bureaucratic stipulation and language change
In these same years, a conception of politics as civil war by other
means captured the imagination of the modern US right on its ascent to
power. The politician and GOP presidential candidate Barry Goldwater
laid down the gauntlet in the 1960s with a famous declaration that “extremism in defence of liberty is no vice”.
Ronald Reagan was his successful heir, rising to the presidency while
declaring himself a “state’s righter” against an overweening federal
government. Shrinking the welfare state would go hand in hand with
expanding the carceral state: “running up the battle flag”, as Reagan
put it, against a feral, drug-abusing, black “underclass”. In 1994,
forging the first GOP majority in both the House of Representatives and
the Senate in four decades, Newt Gingrich made these inner war analogies
explicit. Our politics is a “war [that] has to be fought with the scale and duration and savagery that is only true of civil wars”, he argued. “While
we are lucky in this country that our civil wars are fought at the
ballot box, not on the battlefield, nonetheless, it is a true civil war.” Trump’s “American carnage” was something of a belated echo.
The modern GOP has avidly fought Gingrich’s version of civil war at
the ballot box and in the courts, leveraging counter-majoritarian
institutions and using the individual states as laboratories for
reactionary politics: advancing model legislation against public
regulations; periodically mobbing local school boards; gerrymandering
congressional districts; undermining public unions; funnelling federal
spending on health, welfare and police via block grants to maximise
state discretion; defending a right of foetal personhood that trumps a
woman’s right to bodily autonomy; making it more difficult to register
to vote and to cast a vote; stimulating white revanchism and moral
outrage against expressions of public disorder and anti-normative
behaviour at every opportunity.
In the process, they successfully captured the commanding heights of
the judiciary, and have now successfully rolled back landmark,
50-year-old national civil rights gains: striking down federal
voting-rights protections, ending a national right to abortion and
overturning legal protections for criminal suspects in police custody.
Winning two of the last five national presidential elections with a
minority of the popular vote, and deploying the Senate filibuster during
periods in the congressional minority, the GOP has pursued civil war by
other means as a well-honed and effective strategy.
In the face of this challenge, it is difficult to judge the
Democratic Party as anything more than a feckless, mildly recalcitrant
partner. Over the past 40 years, it has alternatively sought to ratify,
in gentler tones, GOP-driven projects and demands to lower corporate
taxes, get tough on crime, end welfare as we know it, expand the ambit
of deportation and sustain open-ended military authorisations. It has
sought to placate vulnerable constituents with forms of symbolic
recognition and modest regulatory action, often undergirded by weak
executive authority and moral sentiment. It is the undeniably saner and
more constructive of the two electoral options Americans are forced to
choose between. But it also operates an effective pincer movement
against alternatives further to the left that seek to transform skewed
imbalances in the power of capital and labour, police authority and
public safety. When constituents choose to fight, for example, against
police abuse, or for labour rights, Democrats are missing in action, or
else warning against unpopular opinions that will awaken the monster on
the right. Forever counselling that we choose the lesser evil, they have
instead grown habituated to living with the fox inside the chicken
coop.
nplusonemag | Turning points in history require distance to understand their full
complexity. For Watergate, the initial arrests of which mark their
fiftieth anniversary this summer, there is yet no similar judgment on
the magnitude of Woodward’s telling in The Origins of the New South.
The historical insights of one era have been lost to the journalistic
instincts of another. Whereas we understand how a growing country in the
late 19th century could be brought together by open collusion of
business interests, we give little attention today to how changing
commercial opportunities during the Vietnam War might have torn apart
the political accommodations that followed World War II. Watergate’s
place in this history today is but a hairline fracture to the New Deal
Order; a symbol rather than a decisive moment. This is a serious
misinterpretation that leaves unexamined the universal business
consensus behind Richard Nixon in both 1968 and 1972.
Watergate
was nothing less than the visible manifestation of a hypogeal
realignment. A basic continuity in American trade and financial policy
has persisted ever since the Nixon–Ford Administrations. In foreign
policy, the historian Bruce Cummings faithfully describes the period
after Watergate as “Nixonism without Nixon.” Most potently for a present
reacquainted with the discomforts of inflation, planned recessions and
stagnation remain the preferred tool among policy experts for regulating
growth since our trust in price freezes and direct controls on wages
and prices has never recovered from the Nixon scandal. The narrowing of
our understanding of the import of the investigations that followed the
1972 campaign to the quirky personality and outrageous private
pronouncements of Richard Nixon himself leaves these legacies
unexplained.
The break-in’s fiftieth anniversary marks a new
occasion for taking stock. Alongside a fiftieth anniversary edition of
Bob Woodward (no relation) and Carl Bernstein’s canonical account of the
investigation at the Washington Post, Washington journalists
Garrett M. Graff and Jefferson Morley each published their own updated
investigations into the presidential entanglements of the early 1970s
this year. Yet to the disappointed eye of the trained historian there is
no semblance of a synthesis on the horizon: the basic contours of
interpretation remain those set during the spectacle itself, in the
Senate hearings and their exclusions. If there is debate about the
subject of these books, it will unfold on those vintage terms of 1973
and 1974—the pliability of patriotic fervor and its tendency towards
fascism; the roles of fear and vanity in political leadership; the
importance of the CIA and its exact role in the burglary and the
cover-up. In its narrow focus on process—the motions by which the 37th
President violated civil liberties, extorted donors, lied to Congress,
and obstructed justice—Watergate’s prevailing interpretation also
invites an easy analytic leap to Donald Trump. The neat portability of
this historical analogy obscures not only the historical significance of
the Nixon helmsmanship at a critical moment of capitalist
transformation, but our own understanding of economic interests today
and their relationship to modern party politics. Woodward and Bernstein
give this reductive interpretation of the present their own authorial
imprimatur: “Both Nixon and Trump have been willing prisoners of their
compulsions, to dominate, and to gain and hold political power through
virtually any means.”
theatlantic | Of course, the U.S. is unique.
And just as we have the world’s most advanced economy, military, and
technology, we also have its most advanced oligarchy.
In
a primitive political system, power is transmitted through violence, or
the threat of violence: military coups, private militias, and so on. In
a less primitive system more typical of emerging markets, power is
transmitted via money: bribes, kickbacks, and offshore bank accounts.
Although lobbying and campaign contributions certainly play major roles
in the American political system, old-fashioned corruption—envelopes
stuffed with $100 bills—is probably a sideshow today, Jack Abramoff
notwithstanding.
Instead, the
American financial industry gained political power by amassing a kind
of cultural capital—a belief system. Once, perhaps, what was good for
General Motors was good for the country. Over the past decade, the
attitude took hold that what was good for Wall Street was good for the
country. The banking-and-securities industry has become one of the top
contributors to political campaigns, but at the peak of its influence,
it did not have to buy favors the way, for example, the tobacco
companies or military contractors might have to. Instead, it benefited
from the fact that Washington insiders already believed that large
financial institutions and free-flowing capital markets were crucial to
America’s position in the world.
One
channel of influence was, of course, the flow of individuals between
Wall Street and Washington. Robert Rubin, once the co-chairman of
Goldman Sachs, served in Washington as Treasury secretary under Clinton,
and later became chairman of Citigroup’s executive committee. Henry
Paulson, CEO of Goldman Sachs during the long boom, became Treasury
secretary under George W.Bush. John Snow, Paulson’s predecessor, left to
become chairman of Cerberus Capital Management, a large private-equity
firm that also counts Dan Quayle among its executives. Alan Greenspan,
after leaving the Federal Reserve, became a consultant to Pimco, perhaps
the biggest player in international bond markets.
These
personal connections were multiplied many times over at the lower
levels of the past three presidential administrations, strengthening the
ties between Washington and Wall Street. It has become something of a
tradition for Goldman Sachs employees to go into public service after
they leave the firm. The flow of Goldman alumni—including Jon Corzine,
now the governor of New Jersey, along with Rubin and Paulson—not only
placed people with Wall Street’s worldview in the halls of power; it
also helped create an image of Goldman (inside the Beltway, at least) as
an institution that was itself almost a form of public service.
Wall
Street is a very seductive place, imbued with an air of power. Its
executives truly believe that they control the levers that make the
world go round. A civil servant from Washington invited into their
conference rooms, even if just for a meeting, could be forgiven for
falling under their sway. Throughout my time at the IMF, I was struck by
the easy access of leading financiers to the highest U.S. government
officials, and the interweaving of the two career tracks. I vividly
remember a meeting in early 2008—attended by top policy makers from a
handful of rich countries—at which the chair casually proclaimed, to the
room’s general approval, that the best preparation for becoming a
central-bank governor was to work first as an investment banker.
A
whole generation of policy makers has been mesmerized by Wall Street,
always and utterly convinced that whatever the banks said was true. Alan
Greenspan’s pronouncements in favor of unregulated financial markets
are well known. Yet Greenspan was hardly alone. This is what Ben
Bernanke, the man who succeeded him, said in 2006:
“The management of market risk and credit risk has become increasingly
sophisticated. … Banking organizations of all sizes have made
substantial strides over the past two decades in their ability to
measure and manage risks.”
Of
course, this was mostly an illusion. Regulators, legislators, and
academics almost all assumed that the managers of these banks knew what
they were doing. In retrospect, they didn’t. AIG’s Financial Products
division, for instance, made $2.5 billion in pretax profits in 2005,
largely by selling underpriced insurance on complex, poorly understood
securities. Often described as “picking up nickels in front of a
steamroller,” this strategy is profitable in ordinary years, and
catastrophic in bad ones. As of last fall, AIG had outstanding insurance
on more than $400 billion in securities. To date, the U.S. government,
in an effort to rescue the company, has committed about $180 billion in
investments and loans to cover losses that AIG’s sophisticated risk
modeling had said were virtually impossible.
Wall
Street’s seductive power extended even (or especially) to finance and
economics professors, historically confined to the cramped offices of
universities and the pursuit of Nobel Prizes. As mathematical finance
became more and more essential to practical finance, professors
increasingly took positions as consultants or partners at financial
institutions. Myron Scholes and Robert Merton, Nobel laureates both,
were perhaps the most famous; they took board seats at the hedge fund
Long-Term Capital Management in 1994, before the fund famously flamed
out at the end of the decade. But many others beat similar paths. This
migration gave the stamp of academic legitimacy (and the intimidating
aura of intellectual rigor) to the burgeoning world of high finance.
whitehouse | Yes, I fully coincide with what you have proposed, President Biden.
And I could summarize everything we’ve been saying in five basic items
of cooperation.
Number one, since the energy crisis started, Mexico has used 72
percent of its crude and fuel oil exports to United States refineries —
800,000 barrels a day.
Therefore, we decided that while we’re waiting for prices of gasoline
to go down in the United States — and I hope that Congress approves or
passes your proposal, Mr. President —
PRESIDENT BIDEN: It has gone down for 30 days in a row. (Laughs.)
PRESIDENT LÓPEZ OBRADOR: (As interpreted.) — of lowering — lowering prices, yes. That’s it.
In the meantime, while we’re waiting for prices to go down, we have
decided that it was necessary for us to allow Americans who live close
to the borderline so that they could go and get their gasoline on the
Mexican side at lower prices.
And right now, a lot of the drivers — a lot of the Americans — are
going to Mexico, to the Mexican border, to get their gasoline.
However, we could increase our inventories immediately. We are
committed to guaranteeing twice as much supply of fuel. That would be
considerable support.
Right now, a gallon of regular costs $4.78 average on this side of the border. And in our territory, $3.12.
Let me clarify something, and I also want to take advantage of this
opportunity to thank you, Mr. President. Most of this gasoline, we are
producing it in the Pemex refinery that you allowed us to buy in Deer
Park, Texas.
Two, we are putting at the disposal — or sending at the disposal of
your administration over 1,000 kilometers of gas pipelines throughout
the southern border with Mexico to transport gas from Texas to New
Mexico, Arizona, and California for a volume that can generate up to 750
megawatts of electric energy and supply about 3 million people.
Three, even though the USMCA has made progress for the elimination of
tariffs, there are still some others that could be immediately
suspended. And we could do the same with some regulations, regulatory
measures, and tedious procedures or red tape in terms of trade related
to foodstuffs and other products so that we can lower prices for
consumers in both our countries, always being very careful in the
protection of health and the environment.
Four, starting a private-public investment plan between our two
countries to produce all those goods that will be strengthening our
markets so that we can avoid having importations from other regions or
continents.
In our country, we shall continue producing oil throughout the energy
transition. With the U.S. investors, we are going to be establishing
gas-liquefying plants, fertilizer plants, and we shall continue
promoting the creation of solar energy parks in the state of Sonora and
other border states as well.
And we’re going to accomplish this with the support of thermal
electric plants and also through transmission lines to produce energy in
the domestic market, as well as for exports, to neighboring states in
the American union, as for instance, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and
California.
It’s also important to mention that, two months ago, we took the
sovereign decision of nationalizing lithium in Mexico. This is a
fundamental mineral, a fundamental input to advance in our purpose not
to depend on fossil fuels. And this will be available for the
technological modernization of the automotive industry among our great
countries — the countries of the USMCA.
Five, orderly migration flow and allowing arrival in the United
States of workers, technicians, and professionals of different
disciplines. I’m talking about Mexicans and Central Americans with
temporary work visas to ensure not paralyzing the economy because of the
lack of labor force.
The purpose of this plan would be to support and to have the right
labor force that will be demanded by the plan you proposed and that was
passed by Congress of using $1 trillion for the construction of
infrastructure works.
And it’s also indispensable that I say this in a very sincere fashion
in the most respectful manner: It is indispensable for us to regularize
and give certainty to migrants that have for years lived and worked in a
very honest manner, and who are also contributing to the development of
this great nation.
I know that your adversaries — the conservatives — are going to be
screaming all over the place, even to Heaven. They’re going to be
yelling at Heaven. But without a daring, a bold program of development
and wellbeing, it will not be possible to solve problems. It will not
be possible to get the people’s support.
In the face of this crisis, the way out is not through conservatism.
The way out is through transformation. We have to be bold in our
actions. Transform not maintain the status quo.
On our part, we’re acting in good faith, with all transparency,
because there shouldn’t be selfishness between countries, peoples that
are neighbors and friends. On the other hand, integration does not
signify hegemony or subjugation.
And, President Biden, we trust you because you respect our
sovereignty. We are willing to continue working with you for the
benefit of our peoples. Count with our support — count on our support
and solidarity always.
mexiconewsdaily | Back in the late 1980s and leading up to the North American Free
Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the PYMES (small and medium size companies) did
not understand the effects of the opening of the Mexican economy to
foreign investment.
My two Mexican partners and I attended a conference where the speaker
kept repeating, “Hope for the best but prepare for the worst.” We
followed the advice and survived, but many in the middle class did not
and soon found themselves facing bankruptcy.
Today Mexico is facing the same problem and those most affected are
the 47% (AMLO’s latest figures) of those living below the poverty line
and are paying no attention. The key word is corn. To summarize: The
four largest exporting countries of corn are the United States,
Argentina, Brazil, and Ukraine. The second largest importer of corn in
the world is Mexico, where the product is the most important food staple
for the making of tortillas.
They are also not aware that parts of the Midwest of the United
States where corn is harvested have been suffering from drought, nor are
they aware that President Biden insists that the growers of corn turn
this into ethanol as a substitute in light of growing gasoline prices.
The poor may be aware that there is a war going on between Russia and
Ukraine but have no idea that globally this has affected the supply of
corn in the world.
Those Mexicans living below the poverty line, what the sociologist
Oscar Lewis called “The Culture Of Poverty” based on two books titled The Children of Sanchez and Five Families, are
totally unaware of these global realities that will inevitably have a
serious effect on their well-being. The word partial famine comes to
mind.
What does this have to do with the expat community? It behooves every
one of us to talk to those Mexicans who work for us and explain these
realities by advising them to save as much money as possible for the
upcoming crisis. As an example, my gardener and handyman has many
part-time jobs so he can invest in building a home for his wife and
three-year-old daughter.
I told him, “Stop investing your money in a new home for the time
being and concentrate on feeding your family. Hope for the best, but
prepare for the worst.”
I hope he listens, but I have my doubts. It’s the effort that counts.
Beldon Butterfield is a writer and former publisher and media representative. He is retired and lives in San Miguel de Allende.
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