Which matters most? Race or class?

On almost any level of American society, you’re better off being white than being black.

Even if you’re President of the United States.

Barack Obama could never have gotten away with the sordid personal behavior of Bill Clinton or the manifest ignorance of George W. Bush. (I leave out Donald Trump because he’s in a category all his own.)

Source: Demos.

Clinton, Bush and Obama all were targets of vituperative attacks, but the attacks on Obama were on a different level than the other two.

On a lower level of society, there is a great deal of racial discrimination in the restaurant industry.  Black employees are most commonly found in the kitchen; white employees are the ones who serve the public.

So does that mean Barack Obama and black dishwashers are in one category, and Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and white waiters and waitresses are in another?

Barack Obama is a rich celebrity.  He lives in an $11.75 million house in Martha’s Vineyard.  He has nothing in common with a dishwasher.

The Obamas are good friends with the Bushes, who are good friends of the Clintons, who used to be good friends of the Trumps. 

They all have more in common with each other and with other rich celebrities than any of them does with an hourly worker of any race.

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Click to enlarge.

So which matters most?  The vertical lines that separate Americans of different races or the horizontal lines that separate Americans of different economic classes?

If you look at different jobs, you see that a disproportionate amount of the dirty, low-wage work of American society is done by the descendants of enslaved black people and conquered Mexicans and Puerto Ricans.  It is not a coincidence that the descendants of enslaved and conquered people are at the bottom of the economic ladder.

The lines are diagonal lines.  Race and social class can’t be separated.  You find people of every race on every level of American society—but not equally.

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Racism and prejudice are almost always factors in racial inequality.  Nowadays, they are seldom the only factors.

• The Republican Party in many states has been illegally purging black citizens from voter registration rolls and making it more difficult for them to vote.  But I don’t think that is because they think blacks are an inferior race.  It is because the vast majority of them vote Democratic.

Click to enlarge.

These same Republicans are perfectly happy with Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina or Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

• Police killings of black people are proportionately greater than police killings of white people.  One reason is that some police are racist and many are racially prejudiced.  But it’s also a fact that police in general treat poor people worse than they do rich people and middle-class people.

And there are also big differences in police departments across the country based on training and policies.  And the inconvenient fact is that a disproportionate number of violent crimes are committed by black people.

Click to enlarge.

But I don’t think these other factors explain away racial prejudice.  Like a lot of things, the issue is complex.

• Black people were targeted for the sale of subprime mortgages in the run-up to the 2008 recession.  But I don’t think this was because the financial speculators had an implicit against them because of their race.

Rather it was because they were more financially vulnerable than equivalent white people, for historical reasons that are rooted in racism.

If you look at reasons for inequality in the USA, there is very often a racial angle, but there also is almost always a money angle.

Book note: Ida B. Wells’ autobiography

Last year Ida B. Wells, a black woman who died in 1931, received a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for her investigative reporting about lynching.

She lived in a time when white people could not only kill black people with impunity, but commonly turned the killing into a public spectacle.  She was a pioneer and one of the few who reported on this.

Black people deemed guilty of crimes, rather than being put on trial, were hanged, mutilated, burned alive or tortured to death while crowds looked on.  Lynchings were sometimes written up in local newspapers.  Public schools were let out at least once so that children could witness the spectacle.

Wells fearlessly went to the scenes of lynchings and riots in order to get an accurate picture of what really occurred, and her work brought the crime of lynching to the attention of the wider world.

Click to enlarge.

To learn more, I read her autobiography, which recently has been reissued.  She said she wrote it in order to provide a factual record of black struggles, and so there is little in it of her personal reflctions or feelings. She led an interesting life, but wrote about it in very prosaic way. 

Ida B. Wells was born in 1862 in Holly Springs, Mississippi, the daughter of slaves and technically a slave herself.  

Her father, James Wells, was the son of a white slave owner and an enslaved black woman. The owner’s wife had no children and, when the owner died, his widow had Wells’ mother stripped naked and whipped. 

Her mother, Elizabeth, was born on a plantation in VIrginia and “sold South.”  She never was able to reconnect with her parents and siblings. Such were the realities of slavery.

Ida B. Wells’ parents were strict and loving, with high standards of personal behavior and a strong sense of independence.  They saw to it that their children got every educational opportunity offered by Reconstruction..

They died in a yellow fever epidemic, along with many of Wells’ siblings, when she was 16.  She went to work as a school teacher, supporting four younger siblings.

Over time she wrote for church publications, realized she had a talent for writing and became a  journalist.  This became a full-time job after she was fired from her teaching job for criticizing conditions in segregated black schools.

While in her 20s, she challenged segregation in a lawsuit, a decade before the Plessy vs. Ferguson legalizing “separate but equal” segregation.  She was traveling on a first-class train ticket, and a train conductor tried to force her to leave the first-class car and go to the smoking car.

She refused and resisted, and it took three men to eject her from the car.  She sued on the grounds she was denied what she paid for, was successful in a lower court and was offered a generous settlement if she would not contest an appeal.  Even though she could really have used the money, she refused, and lost the appeal.

The year 1892 found her in Memphis, Tennessee, the editor and part-owner of a newspaper called the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight in Memphis, Tennessee.  It had a wide readership among African-Americans.  Illiterate black people bought it and had it read to them, and it was printed on special pink paper so they could read it.

Three black friends of hers, the owner of the People’s Grocery Store and two employees, were lynched by a mob.  She wrote many articles in protest, supported a boycott of white-owned businesses and advocated that black people leave Memphis for the new territory of Oklahoma, which many did.

She said she had been led to believe that lynching was a response to rape and other violent crime, but she began an investigation into lynchings and found that, as with her friends, they were often provoked by black people competing successfully with white people.

She also found that alleged rape cases were actually consensual relationships between black men and white women.  When she published this in her newspaper, an enraged mob destroyed the newspaper offices and press.  She was out of town at a A.M.E. Church conference at the time, and was warned she would be killed if she tried to come back.

Where ‘woke’ and ‘racist’ agree

Four cellists on just one cello

Click on Weiner Celloensemble 5 +1 to reach their web site.

The passing scene: March 26, 2021

Here are links to some articles I found interesting, and maybe you will, too.

The US Intelligence Community, Flouting Laws, Is Increasingly Involving Itself in Domestic Politics by Glenn Greenwald.

“A letter from House Intelligence Committee members demands answers from the DNI about illegal breaches of the wall guarding against CIA and NSA domestic activity.”

When the CIA was chartered in 1947, it was prohibited from spying on Americans, in part because President Truman was afraid it would get involved in politics.  In the 1960s, the CIA was caught spying on U.S. political activists.  Now it is happening again in the name of a “war on domestic terrorism.”

A Biden Appointee’s Troubling Views on the First Amendment by Matt Taibbi for TK News.

“Columbia law professor Timothy Wu wonders if the First Amendment is ‘obsolete’ and believes in ‘returning this country to the kind of media environment that prevailed in the 1950s’.”

There is a contradiction between the view of Timothy Wu, an appointee to the National Economic Council, that anti-trust enforcement should be a priority in the Biden administration, and his view that Facebook, Google and other social media companies have a responsibility to protect the pubic from false statements.  These companies need monopoly power in order to carry out that mission.

If you give a private corporation or government agency the power and mandate to monitor communication to separate truth from lies, what you’re doing is giving that corporation or that agency a monopoly on lying.

Biden Team Prepares $3 Trillion in New Spending for the Economy by Jim Tankersley for the New York Times.  (Hat tip to Steve from Texas.)

“A pair of proposals would invest in infrastructure, education, workforce development and fighting climate change, with the aim of making the economy more productive.”

The consensus in the Biden administration appears to be that President Obama was too cautious in fighting the 2008 recession, and that they will not repeat that mistake.

Good!  But can he overcome Republican opposition in the Senate?  What about monopoly power, financial fraud, international competitiveness and other problems that can’t be solved simply by flooding the economy with money?  Still, it’s early days and a good start.

Does Biden Really Want to End the Forever Wars? by Jack Goldsmith and Samuel Moyn for The New York Times.  (Hat tip to Steve from Texas) 

“If he does, he must work with Congress and go far beyond narrowing old permission slips for conflict.”

Betteridge’s Law of Headlines: If a headline asks a question, the answer is “no.”

Patriarchy was a positive ideal, now fading

Patriarchy is a way of thinking about things that was accepted in every major civilization, until now.

The basic idea of patriarchy is that society is, and should be, organized on the model of the extended patriarchal family, guided by a powerful and wise father.

The patriarch had a responsibility to guide and protect the family.  In return, his children and dependents were obligated to obey him.

This was the rationale for the authority of Emperors, Kings, Popes and Caliphs, who supposedly stood in relation to their peoples as loving fathers to their children.

It was the moral basis of royal dynasties, feudal lords, family businesses and humble peasant households.

Not only society, but the whole universe was supposedly organized on a patriarchal basis. 

Jews, Christians and Muslims worship a Heavenly Father, a powerful, wise and good parent who loves us and watches over us, and expects our love and obedience in return.

The senior gods of the Greco-Roman and Hindu pantheons were patriarchal fathers who headed extended families.

There were places for women in many of these religions—the Virgin Mary and various saints in Orthodox and Catholic Christianity, goddesses in the pagan pantheons, but always in a subordinate place to a father figure..

The five filial relationships of Confucianism—son to father, student to teacher, younger brother to older brother, younger friend to older friend, and subject to ruler—are patriarchal relationships. Notice they are all male-to-male relationships.

All the relationships are parallel to the father-son relationship.  The father (teacher, elder, ruler) protects and guides the son (student, youth, subject) who gives loyalty and obedience in return.

Many different societies believed in a version of the Great Chain of Being—a hierarchical ladder stretching down from God through kings and aristocrats to humble peasants, who, however, exercised patriarchal authority over their wives and children.

The patriarchal hierarchy could be a system of amoral naked power.  Thomas Piketty, in Capital and Ideology, mentioned a medieval French aristocrat who punished rebels by cutting off their hands and feet and returning them to their families.

Even when the patriarchs lived up to their moral code, the system was still oppressive in many ways.  I wouldn’t want to go back to the old ways. 

But there was something valuable there, a relationship of responsibility and loyalty, that has been lost.

Our problem today is that our institutions are still organized as patriarchal hierarchies.  But the people in charge of them no longer have confidence in patriarchal authority or exercise patriarchal responsibility—neither paternal responsibility for those in their charge nor loyalty to any authority above them.

Education and the mirage of equal opportunity

It’s common to hear people say that they don’t believe in economic equality, but they do believe in equality of opportunity.

But one of the points of getting a lot of money and a high social position is to give your children advantages over other people’s children.

One of the ways of doing that is to enroll your children in elite private schools. I read an article by Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic about how students who attend the top private schools get a head start in life that’s almost impossible, or at least very, very difficult, for anybody else to overtake—even students in highly selective public schools.

In a just society, there wouldn’t be a need for these expensive schools, or for private wealth to subsidize something as fundamental as an education.  We wouldn’t give rich kids and a tiny number of lottery winners an outstanding education while so many poor kids attend failing schools.

In a just society, an education wouldn’t be a luxury item.  We have become a country with vanishingly few paths out of poverty, or even out of the working class.  We’ve allowed the majority of our public schools to founder, while expensive private schools play an outsize role in determining who gets to claim a coveted spot in the winners’ circle.

Many schools for the richest American kids have gates and security guards; the message is you are precious to us.  Many schools for the poorest kids have metal detectors and police officers; the message is you are a threat to us.

Public-school education—the specific force that has helped generations of Americans transcend the circumstances of their birth—is profoundly, perhaps irreparably, broken. In my own state of California, only half of public-school students are at grade level in reading, and even fewer are in math. When a crisis goes on long enough, it no longer seems like a crisis. It is merely a fact.

Source: The Atlantic

The Chronicle of Higher Education meanwhile reported on how colleges are doubling down on efforts to keep black students from failing and dropping out. 

This could be good.  I think many affirmative action programs push young black people into positions where they’re over their heads, then leave them to flounder and blame them for their failure.

More mentoring, and more attention to the individual and less to improving numbers, would help. 

But what may very well happen is that colleges will increase recruitment, retention and graduation numbers for African American students while doing little to improve their actual education, and while also ignoring disadvantaged students who are white or in other non-black racial categories.

In the long run, expecting less of African-American students won’t help them.  It will devalue their degrees and send them into the world not knowing how poorly-prepared they are.

I’m reminded of Goodhart’s Law – “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure” – because people will figure out how to game the system. Or, as W. Edwards Deming put it, “Give a manager a numerical target, and he’ll meet it, even if he has to destroy the company to do so.”

LINKS

Private Schools Are Indefensible by Caitlin Flanagan for The Atlantic.  “Elite schools breed entitlement, entrench inequality—and then pretend to be engines of social change.”

The Antiracist College by Tom Bartlett for the Chronicle of Higher Education.  “This may be a watershed moment in the history of higher education and race.”

The passing scene: March 22, 2021

Here are some articles I think are interesting.  Maybe you will, too.

Steve Donziger Ecuador Case: Q&A With Human Rights Lawyer Under House Arrest by Jack Holmes for Esquire.  This lawyer won a lawsuit against Texaco (since acquired by Chevron), which lasted from 1993 to 2011, on behalf of farmers and indigenous people who lived in the Amazon rain forest, who accused the company of dumping cancer-causing toxic waste where they lived.  THey won a $9.8 billion award.  Chevron refused to pay and counter-sued their lawyer. Awaiting a verdict, he has been under house arrest for more than 580 days for refusing to hand over his computer and phone with confidential lawyer-client information on them.  Incredible!

How the West Lost COVID by David Wallace-West for New York magazine.  “How did so many rich countries get it so wrong?  How did others get it so right?”  This is the best article I’ve read on this particular topic.

Your Face Is Not Your Own by Kashmir Hill for the New York Times. “When a secretive start-up scraped the Internet to build a facial-recognition tool, it tested a legal and ethical limit—and blew the future of privacy in America wide open.”  (Hat tip to O.)

Nina Turner: “Good ideas are not enough.  We need to marry our ideas to power”, an interview for Jacobin magazine.  (Hat tip to Bill Harvey)

New study shows microplastics turn into ‘hubs’ for pathogens, antibiotic-resistant bacteria by Jesse Jenkins of New Jersey Institute of Technology.

The Crow Whisperer by Lauren Markham for Harper’s magazine.  “What happens when we talk to animals?” 

How did the octopus get to be so smart?

The Earth’s first intelligent life-form was not a primate or a dolphin.

Biden says he told Putin he doesn’t have a soul

There are a number of disturbing things about President Biden’s interview on ABC News last Wednesday.  One is that he plans to retaliate against Russia over something that has not been defined and for which there is no evidence.

Another is his lack of discipline in his speech, and how easily he was led to say things that have important diplomatic repercussions.  He talked to George Sephanopoulos as if he were talking to a good friend in private over drinks, not to a reporter on public record.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Director of National Intelligence came out with a report today saying that Vladimir Putin authorized operations during the election to under — denigrate you, support President Trump, undermine our elections, divide our society. What price must he pay?

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: He will pay a price. I, we had a long talk, he and I, when we — I know him relatively well. And I– the conversation started off, I said, “I know you and you know me.  If I establish this occurred, then be prepared.”

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: You said you know he doesn’t have a soul.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I did say that to him, yes. And — and his response was, “We understand one another.”  It was– I wasn’t being a wise guy.  I was alone with him in his office.  And that — that’s how it came about. It was when President Bush had said, “I looked in his eyes and saw his soul.”  I said, “Looked in your eyes and I don’t think you have a soul.”  And looked back and he said, “We understand each other.”  Look, most important thing dealing with foreign leaders in my experience, and I’ve dealt with an awful lot of ’em over my career, is just know the other guy. Don’t expect somethin’ that you’re– that — don’t expect him to– or her to– voluntarily appear in the second editions of Profiles in Courage.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: So you know Vladimir Putin. You think he’s a killer?

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Uh-huh. I do.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: So what price must he pay?

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: The price he’s gonna pay we’ll– you’ll see shortly.  I’m not gonna– there’s– by the way, we oughta be able that ol’ — that trite expression “walk and chew gum at the same time,” there’re places where it’s in our mutual interest to work together.  That’s why I renewed the START agreement with him.  That occurred while he’s doin’ this. But that’s overwhelmingly in the interest of humanity, that we diminish the prospect of a nuclear exchange.  But that and SolarWinds as well.  He’s been — they’ve done some mischievous things, to say the least.  And so we’re gonna have — I’m not gonna announce what I’m doing, but he’s gonna understand that —

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: How about Mohammad —

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: — it’s not free.

Source: ABC News

What’s all this about looking Vladimir Putin in the eye?  Is there a ZOOM connection between the White House and the Kremlin?

What’s all this about being alone with Putin?  Was he able to speak to Putin without an interpreter?

What gives an American President standing to accuse any other foreign leader of being a “killer”?  Doesn’t he remember that the U.S. has been waging war by means of assassination since the George W. Bush administration?  Doesn’t he remember that President Obama boasted of being “pretty good at killing people”?

Did he really tell Putin that he doesn’t have a soul?  How does that help where “there are places where it’s in our mutual interest to work together?”

This is much like the kind of interview Ronald Reagan might have given in his declining years.

If President Biden goes along with ramping up a new cold war with Russia and China, while continuing to wage other big and little wars all over the world, then his other announced goals won’t be achieved and probably won’t matter.

It’s early days yet, so Biden’s course is not set.  It is encouraging that he is at least willing to renew the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), which President Trump refused to do.  One can hope.

A weak labor union for Amazon workers?

An organizing drive for Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama, may amount to less than it’s cracked up to be.

More than 3,000 out of 5,800 warehouse workers have signed cards in favor of a vote for representation by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWReDSU).  Workers have until March 29 to send in ballots.

But when reporters for the World Socialist Web Site asked the RWDSU what the union’s demands will be, spokesmen said that will have to wait until negotiations begin.  Serious unions always organize around a set of demands.

There is broad support among Amazon workers to abolish the oppressive rate system, which requires workers to perform a task as often as every six to nine seconds. The constant pressure to “make rate” is not only unsafe and physically exhausting. It is also degrading, demeaning, and injurious to workers’ mental health and well-being.

A popular phrase among Amazon workers is, “We are not robots!”

There is also powerful support for higher wages, the changes necessary to reduce injuries, adequate compensation for injured workers, and an end to the tyrannical surveillance regime that records and logs every second of a worker’s day.

During the pandemic, Amazon workers staged walkouts and demonstrations to demand countermeasures against the spread of the virus.  Workers demanded up-to-the-minute information on infections in their workplaces.  When management refused to provide that information, they organized on social media and collected it themselves.

When Amazon workers formed an independent rank-and-file committee in Baltimore in December … … workers demanded an end to the abusive management speed-ups and the regime of harassment around so-called “time off task” (TOT).  Workers also demanded the reinstatement of hazard pay, real scientific contact tracing, paid time off for sick workers, accessible coronavirus tests, and the closure of facilities for necessary cleaning.

Last week the RSDWU even disavowed a call for a one-week boycott of Amazon, the WSWS reported.

When a union contract is in force, union members renounce their right to strike or take job actions.  A weak contract with a weak union would benefit Amazon more than its employees.

So maybe there’s less to President Biden’s and Senator Marco Rubio’s support for Amazon unionization than meets the eye.

LINKS

The unionization campaign at Amazon: A top-down operation, with no program for workers by Tom Carter and Jerry White for the World Socialist Web Site.

Radical Anti-Racist Unionism Has a History in Bessemer, Alabama by Willem Morris for Jacobin.  [Added 3/18/2021]

RWDSU Disavows Boycott Amazon by Kris LaGrange for ucommblog.  (Hat tip to Bill Harvey) There are tactical and legal reasons why the union does not support the boycott, but there’s no reason why others can’t.  As for myself, I already avoid patronizing Amazon.  [Added 3/19/2021]

Amazon Workers Consider Unionizing at Several More U.S. Sites by Spencer Soper and Josh Edelson for Bloomberg.  [Added 3/21/2021]

Revisiting Samuel Butler’s ‘Erewhon’

Samuel Butler’s EREWHON (1872) and EREWHON REVISITED (1901) may have been the first dystopian science fiction novel.  It is a literary curiously—broad social satire within a “lost kingdom” adventure story.

I’ve had a copy lying around the house for years, and just recently got around to reading it.  What’s interesting is how what Butler must have thought were the most outrageous parodies of British life of his day are the parts that have the most relevance today.

Butler was what we’d now call a cultural radical and an economic conservative.  He questioned Church of England dogma and Victorian morality, but was all for business enterprise and the British Empire.  His Erewhom novels are what he is most remembered for.

The plot of Erewhon is that an adventurous young Englishman named Higgs, in a British colony much resembling Australia, crosses a mountain range and finds himself in a nation where everything is a kind of mirror-image of how they do things in Britain.

Erewhonians do not feel shame or guilt about moral offenses.  Rather they regard them as Britons do physical ailments, and discuss them just as freely.  If you have “a touch of embezzlement,” you turn to a family “straightener,” who would prescribe a treatment such as a diet of bread and water for a specific number of weekss.

Physical ailments, on the other hand, are regarded as Britons regard moral offenses.  They are known to occur, but they aren’t talked about, and are severely punished when exposed.

Certain Erewhonian reformers suggest leniency for minor illnesses, such as the common cold, while admitting the need for harsh punishment of more severe offenses, such as pneumonia.  But conservatives say this would mean subjecting people to the power of “doctors,” who would be able to interfere in family life.

Erewhonians have called a halt to technological development. Their philosophers have pointed out the parallels to human evolution of the evolution of machinery. 

They point out that machinery has grown more complex, and is being constantly improved through natural selection.  Human beings devote more and more effort to finding fuel and raw materials for machines, and keeping machines in repair.  It would have been only a matter of time, they said, before machines rule.

No doubt Butler was just kidding, but nowadays many people are worried about runaway artificial intelligence and self-replicating machines. 

I read a comment on some Internet thread saying that there are only three real threats to human existence.  They don’t include nuclear war, overpopulation, global warming or a meteor impact because all of these would leave a remnant from which the human race could be reconstituted.

No, these people say, the existential threats are (1) runaway artificial intelligence, (2) extraterrestrial invasion and (3) someone turning off the simulation of reality we’re all living in.  I wonder what Butler would have made of that.

Other Erewhonian philosophers developed a philosophy of animal rights, which Butler no doubt thought a joke, but which foreshadowed the serious animal rights philosophy of today.

Despotism or paralysis? Which is the problem?

Donald Trump never was a potential dictator, as so many Democrats and progressives feared. 

Rather he was part of a continuing a rear-guard action by conservatives and Republicans to thwart the will of the majority.

That’s the view of Corey Robin, a political scientist writing in the New Yorker.

Robin noted that Trump accomplished virtually none of his announced goals, not even when Republicans controlled both houses of Congress.

That’s because Republicans and conservatives are a minority, he said. 

The GOP failed to get a popular vote majority in four of the last five elections.  No conservative or right-wing group had the massive support that the Black Lives Matter protests did last year.  Religious conservatives such as Rod Dreher rightly note that they are losing the culture wars.

The problem, according to Robin, is that the U.S. Constitution gives right-wingers the power to thwart the will of the majority because of the undemocratic nature of the Senate, the Electoral College and the Supreme Court.  The result, he wrote, is paralysis.

There’s something to what he says, although our 18th-century Constitution did not prevent Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson, or, for that matter, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, from enacting ambitious political programs. 

The Constitution is not preventing change now.  What’s holding back change is the reluctance of the Biden administration to keep its promises.  Nothing prevents the Democratic majority in the Senate from abolishing the filibuster, as the Republican majority in the House of Representatives did way back in 1888.

Nor does anything prevent the calling of a convention to rewrite the Constitution and ask for ratification by the voters.  But the ones calling for a new Constitutional convention are the Koch brothers and other conservatives.  Liberals and progressives generally fear what a new convention would come up with, and cling to the Constitution as it is.

Then, too, paralysis only in one direction.  Nothing holds back or limits appropriations for the military.  Nothing hold back war-making by the President.  Nothing holds back upper-bracket tax cuts or bailouts for big financial institutions.

Paralysis does not hold off dictatorship.  Rather people come to accept dictatorship as the only possible solution to paralysis.

Authoritarian governments in the 20th century have arisen in three ways.  Revolutionaries take power from weak ineffective governments.  The military takes power to prevent revolutions.  Pseudo-revolutionary movements take power with the silent consent of the military, the landowners and big business.

Trump antagonized the military, and was regarded by Wall Street as a loose cannon, so he never had a chance of becoming an authoritarian ruler.  He did do a lot of damage to the normal functioning of government, but that is a separate issue.

I think there is a strong possibility of some future crisis, in which some right-wing pseudo-populist could succeed where Trump failed.  But for now, there is no reason for the military or big-money donors to be dissatisfied with the Biden administration.

There is also such a thing as creeping authoritarianism, which I think is what we’ve got now.  I think the proposed “domestic war on terrorism” is a greater threat to what’s left of American freedom and democracy than anything proposed during the Trump administration.

Rulers of empires in decline all had broad powers to wage war and crush dissent, but they were paralyzed when it comes to reforming themselves.

LINKS

Trump and the Trapped Country by Corey Robin for The New Yorker.  “For years we debated whether Donald Trump would topple democracy.  But the threat continues to come from the system itself.”  I say it all depends on what you mean by “the system.”

‘Anti-racism’ as an unfair labor practice

On July 31, 2018, Oumou Kanoute, a black student and teaching assistant at Smith College was eating lunch at a dorm and was approached by a campus police officer and asked what she was doing there.

My account of what happened next is based on an article in the New York Times.

Deeply offended for being harassed for “eating while black,” she posted a denunciation on social media of a janitor and a cafeteria worker that she thought had reported her.

Kathleen McCartney, the president of Smith College, immediately apologized to her and put the janitor on paid leave.  She also hired a law firm to make an impartial investigation of the incident.

She also ordered anti-bias training for all staff, revamped the campus police force and created segregated dormitories for non-white students.

In October, the law firm submitted its report.  The dormitory in question had been reserved for high school students taking part in a summer program.  Smith had asked college staff to report unauthorized persons in the dorm.  The campus police officer had spoken to her politely and left without taking any action.

The janitor she denounced, Mark Patenaude, was not the janitor who notified police.  The cafeteria worker had mentioned to her that the dorm was off limits, but had not notified anybody.

In other words, nobody had done anything wrong.

McCartney made the report public, but commented, “I suspect you will conclude, as did I, it is impossible to rule out the potential of implicit racial bias.”

My interpretation of that comment is: (1) Employees accused of racial bias are guilty until proven innocent.  (2) It is impossible to prove you are innocent of racial bias.

Jodi Blair, the cafeteria worker, earned $40,000 a year at Smith.  Tuition, including room and board, is $78,000 a year.

Blair said she got notes in her mailboxes and taped to her car, and phone calls at home, accusing her of racism.  She heard students whisper as she went by, “There goes the racist.”

The American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who represented the student commented, “It’s troubling that people were more offended by being called racist that by actual racism in our society.  Allegations of being racist, even getting direct mailers in their mailboxes, is not on a par with the consequences of actual racism.”

Blair suffers from lupus, a disease of the immune system, and stress triggers episodes.  She checked into a hospital last year.  Then she, along with other workers, was furloughed because of the coronavirus pandemic.

She applied for a job in a restaurant, and, she said, the first thing she was asked was whether she was the notorious racist.

The janitor who called campus security is still working at Smith and didn’t want to be interviewed.  Mark Patenaude, the other janitor, quit not long after his name was posed on Facebook.

Campus staff, but not faculty, are required to attend anti-bias training.  Blair and Patenaude both disliked being interrogated about their inner feelings and childhood experiences regarding race. 

Another employee, Jodi Shaw, said being subjected to such training should not be a condition of employment.  She resigned and is suing the college.

Am I getting old?

I changed my car horn to gunshot sounds.  People get out of the way much faster now.

Gone are the days when girls used to cook like their mothers.  Now they drink like their fathers.

I didn’t make it to the gym today.  That makes five years in a row.

I decided to stop calling the bathroom the “John” and renamed it the “Jim”.  I feel so much better saying I went to the Jim this morning.

Old age is coming at a really bad time.

When I was a child I thought “Nap Time” was a punishment.  Now, as a grownup, it feels like a small vacation.

The biggest lie I tell myself is ”I don’t need to write that down, I’ll remember it.”

I don’t have gray hair; I have “wisdom highlights”!  I’m just very wise.

If God wanted me to touch my toes, He would’ve put them on my knees.

Last year I joined a support group for procrastinators.  We haven’t met yet.

Why do I have to press one for English when you’re just going to transfer me to someone I can’t understand anyway?

Of course I talk to myself.  Sometimes I need expert advice.

At my age “Getting lucky” means walking into a room and remembering what I came in there for.

Actually I’m not complaining because I am a Senager (Senior teenager).  I have everything that I wanted as a teenager, only 60 years later.  I don’t have to go to school or work.  I get an allowance every month.  I have my own pad.  I don’t have a curfew.  I have a driver’s license and my own car.  And I don’t have acne.  Life is great.

I have more friends I should send this to, but right now I can’t remember their names.

Hat tip to an old college classmate.

Matt Taibbi on the one-party press, etc.

The Sovietization of the American Press by Matt Taibbi on TK News.  “The transformation from phony ‘objectivity’ to open one-party orthodoxy hasn’t been an improvement.”

HBO’s docuseries Allen v. Farrow: A shameful, vicious, McCarthyite attack on filmmaker Woody Allen by Joanne Laurier for the World Socialist Web Site.

Louis DeJoy Is Killing It by Casey Taylor for New York magazine.  “While Biden dithers, Trump’s minion wrecks the postal service.”

“Deaths of Despair” Are Rising – It’s Time to Define Despair by Bruce Bower for Science News.  “Scientists investigate whether despair is distinct from mental disorders.”

The emerging campaign against Substack

In Defense of Substack by Matt Taibbi on TK News.  “UCLA Professor Sarah T. Roberts mourns the good old days of gatekeeping and credential worship.”

Criticizing Public FIgures, Including Influential Journalists, Is Not Harassment or Abuse by Glenn Greenwald.  “As social media empowers uncredentialed people to be heard, society’s most powerful actors seek to cast themselves as victims and delegitimize all critiques.”

Journalists Start Demanding Substack Censor Its Writers: to Bar Critiques of Journalists by Glenn Greenwald.  “This new political battle does not break down along left v. right lines.  This is an information war waged by corporate media to silence any competition or dissent.”

The Global South resists the COVID virus

My e-mail pen pal Bill Harvey sent me this chart and a link to a New York Times article indicating that death toll from the coronavirus has been a lot less in poor nations in Asia and Africa than in rich nations in Europe and North America.

The writer, David Leonhardt, isn’t sure why.  It’s not that the African and Asia nations fail to record the COVID-19 deaths, he wrote.  Record-keeping is pretty good in the cities, where you’d expect the disease to be at its worst.

Some possibilities:

• Young people resist the disease better than older people, and African and Asian populations are on average younger than European and North American popultions.
• People in Africa and Asia on average care for their elderly relatives at home rather than putting them in nursing homes, and a large proportion of COVID-19 deaths have been in nursing homes.
• People in poor African and Asian countries on average are more exposed to infectious disease, and may be developed more of an overall resistance to infection.
• Homes and places of business in tropical countries are better ventilated than in more northerly climes.

Ventilation is an important aspect of controlling an airborne, respiratory disease.  It hasn’t received near the attention it should in the USA.

I’d add another point.

Air travel is an important vector for the spread of the disease.  Infected passengers in the enclosed space of a plane spread the virus to others, and they all become potential speaders in the places where they land.

The spread wouldn’t have been nearly as bad as it was in, for example, New York City if incoming passengers from Europe had been screened for the virus.

Poor countries in Africa and Asia get less air traffic to begin with, and my impression is that countries that have been most successful in fighting the virus have restricted incoming air travel.

Or maybe the explanation is just that many poor countries simply did a better job of combating the virus than rich countries.

∞∞

The overall coronavirus situation is better than I expected it to be this time last year.  Drug companies developed vaccines in less than a year, and vaccinations are proceeding with all deliberate speed, especially here in the USA.

I think President Trump, for all the harm he did in discouraging masking, made the right choice in Operation Warp Speed, which was simply to give large amounts of money to drug researchers in the hope that a few of them would come up with something good.

In the present vaccine rollout, I don’t think the people who need the vaccine the most are not being prioritized as they should.  But maybe that’s less important than simply immunizing as many people as possible as quickly as possible.  If President BIden’s vaccination goal is achieved by May, that will be have been great achievement.

The anti-virus struggle isn’t over.  The new mutant strains are worrisome.  But things are better than they might have been.

LINKS

A cornonavirus whodunnit? by David Leonhardt for the New York Times.

How Europe and the United States Lost COVID-19 by David Wallace-Wells for New York magazine.  [Added 3/15/2021]

Covid conundrum: Pandemic is hitting rich countries harder than poor ones by Yen Makabenta for the Manila Times.

Why Does the Pandemic Seem to Be Hitting Some Countries Harder Than Others? by Siddhartha Mukherjee for The New Yorker

Good Samaritan bunny helps a kitten

I don’t know whether the rabbit and the kitten were friends, or whether the rabbit is an altruist.

Conspiracy theories and official lies

.

G.K. Chesterton remarked that when people stop believing in Christianity, they don’t believe in nothing.  Rather they become willing to believe in anything.

I think the same thing is true of belief in the credibility of the government or the mainstream news organizations. 

When people stop believing in the official version of events, a lot of them don’t adopt a position of skepticism.  They look for something else to uncritically believe in.

Public opinion polls indicate that barely half the American people believe that Joe Biden was legitimately elected President of the United States.

One in five think protesters were justified to storm the Capitol to prevent Biden’s victory from being certified.  Forty-five percent of registered Republicans believe this.

Why would people doubt that Biden was legitimately elected? 

Donald Trump, the previous President of the United States, says he wasn’t, and a certain number of Republicans and conservative writers and broadcasters back him up.

On the other hand, the Democratic Party, a certain number of Republicans and the overwhelming majority of broadcasters and journalists say he was.

Why would anybody automatically believe the second group over the first group?  They don’t have a great track record. 

In the runup to the election, there was a clampdown on reporting about the relationship of Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son, with corrupt a corrupt Ukrainian oligarch.

After the election, I read article after article in my local newspaper stating that Trump had “falsely” claimed that the election was rigged, without any details about what he claimed or why his claim was false.  This information is available, but you have to know how to look for it.

As soon as Biden was sworn in, Trump was banned from Twitter and other social media.  Parler, a new platform for web sites, was shut down; it had attracted a lot of right-wingers and Trump supporters who’d been banned from other sites.

Silencing people is not a good way to convince them they are wrong.  What it does is make them think that you are afraid to let people hear what they have to say.

If I was told by a President of the United States whom I’d voted for and whom I trusted that the election was being stolen, I think I’d believe him.  I wouldn’t trust his discredited enemies.  I might even go to Washington to protest. 

In fact, as I recall, a lot of self-described liberals and progressives went to Washington to protest the election of Donald Trump.  They regarded his election as illegitimate.  Some talked of having members of the Electoral College violate their pledges in order to block Trump.

I wouldn’t have taken part in any storming of the Capitol, but I might be inclined to make excuses for it, just as some people make excuses for the vandalism and looting that has accompanied some of the Black Lives Matter protests.

The forever wars are on track to continue

Click to enlarge

President Biden gives no indication of wanting to end the forever wars.  He does not plan to reopen negotiations with Iran or end the U.S. alliance with Saudi Arabia.  He is going along with a military buildup to confront China and Russia.  All this is bleeding the country dry, and making the United States weaker, not stronger.

LINKS

U.S. military budget: What can global bases do vs. COVID, cyber attacks? by Kim Helmgaard for USA Today.  “The U.S. has enjoyed military dominance for decades.  But in the face of emerging threats, some say a new strategy is in order.”

United States Counterterrorism Operations, 2018-2020 by Stephanie Saveli, etc., for the Costs of War project for Brown University’s Watson Institute.  (Hat tip to Bill Harvey)

Biden’s “Nothing Will Fundamentally Change” Promise Extends to His Foreign Policy by Bernhard for Moon of Alabama.

Rewarding Failure by William Astore for TomDispatch.  “Why Pentagon Weapons Programs Rarely Get Canceled Despite Major Failure.”  (Hat tip to Bill Harvey)

Biden’s Protection of Murderous Saudi Despots Shows the Hidden Reality of U.S. Foreign Policy by Glenn Greenwald.  “That the U.S. opposes tyranny is a glaring myth.  Yet it is not only believed, but often used to justify wars, bombing campaigns, sanctions and protracted conflict.”

New President, Same Old Forever Wars by Jacob Silverman for The New Republic.  “Biden’s air strike in Syria shows how little is going to change about America’s military entanglements in the Middle East.”

A chart of two recessions

Click to enlarge.

The Employment Situation Is Far Worse Than the Employment Rate Indicates by Calculated Risk.

Seeing the USA as others see us

Hat tip to Steve Hsu.

I just got finished watching this video of a panel discussion on the American future hosted by Dr. Mohammad Marandi, a professor of English Literature and Orientalism at the University of Tehran. 

It is an uncomfortable reminder that the rest of the world is watching us Americans, and they don’t see us as we’d like to see ourselves.

It is more than two hours long, which I realize is a long time to watch something on a small screen.  But I want to take note of a couple of the observations by Max Blumenthal, a foreign correspondent and editor-in-chief of The Greyzone.

Blumenthal said most Americans have no idea what “domestic terrorism” really is.  He recalled being in Nicaragua during the runup to an election when rebels were regularly murdering government officials and Sandinista politicians, and attacking police stations.

He said that when reporting from Syria, he sometimes saw poor people scavenging through garbage outside U.S. military installations.  In January, he saw the same kind of scene in Washington, D.C.

We Americans need to recognize that the rest of the world doesn’t necessarily look to us for leadership, or regard our form of liberal democracy as a role model.  And that our nation is being bled dry by our leaders’ efforts to dominate the world through financial and military power.

Christopher Lasch and the case against progress

The American Dream, as I was taught growing up, is that it is possible for members of every generation, provided they make the effort, to be better off than members of the generation before.

Recently I finished reading THE TRUE AND ONLY HEAVEN: Progress and Its Critics by Christopher Lasch (1991), which argues that all this is an illusion.  He wrote that limitless material progress is not only impossible, but incompatible with the idea of justice.

Lasch, who died in 1994 at the age of 61, was a thinker who didn’t fit any of the usual categories.  A radical in politics and economics, he was a conservative in morals and culture. 

Virtue in the contemporary USA is equated with striving for success, according to Lasch.  Success is defined as improving your economic and social status.  This is not enough to inspire a good society or a good life.

He is nearly forgotten now, but I find his ideas more relevant today than I did during his lifetime.  Most Americans are pessimistic about the future, and with good reason.

Lasch didn’t believe in optimism, which is faith that things are bound to get better.  He believed in hope, which is the unwillingness to give up.

The True and Only Heaven is an intellectual history.  Lasch told how various thinkers, generation by generation, decided it was necessary to subordinate tradition, religion, family loyalty, self-government, patriotism and other moral principles to the goal of increasing moral output with less work.

The book begins with Adam Smith and the idea that free enterprise plus self-interest would ensure ever-increasing material abundance.

Smith did have misgivings, as Lasch noted.  He thought enlightened self-interest was an ignoble motive, compared to patriotism and religious faith. 

He noted that the widening of the market would lead to increasing division of labor.  He predicted assembly-line production, which he saw as degrading.  He also worried about replacement of militias with professional armies, which he saw as leading to a decline of discipline and patriotism.

But Smith was no friend of large corporations, which is his day were almost all government-established monopolies.  His vision was a society of prosperous independent farmers, artisans and shopkeepers.

He famously said that the self-interest of the baker, the brewer and the butcher who provided him with his dinner would be kept within the limits of a baseline middle-class Protestant morality.  As for the rest, he hoped popular education would make up the difference.

Smith’s vision seemed to be realized in the northern United States between the Revolution and the Civil War.  It seemed that any hardworking, thrifty Protestant white man could thrive as a farm owner, shopkeeper or self-employed artisan.  Working for wages was something you only did when you were getting started in life.

After the Civil War, as the USA transformed from an agricultural to an industrial nation, it became apparent that the economy would be dominated by large corporations, and that the majority of American workers would be “hirelings” all their working lives.

This was shocking, at the time.  Many an editorial was written about the equivalence of “wage slavery” and “chattel slavery.” 

But in the end, most people accepted the corporate form of capitalism as the price of continued progress. 

Karl Marx was one of them.  In contrast to the “utopian” socialists, who experimented with alternative ways of organizing society, he thought corporate capitalism was a stage through which civilization had to pass on the way to socialism.

He wrote about how capitalism substituted profit-seeking for all other values—tradition, community, kinship, religion, even the marriage bond. 

But Marx thought that was a good thing in the long run because these older values were obstacles to human liberation, which could be achieved once industrial productivity reached the point of being able to provide abundance for all.

John Maynard Keynes thought the salvation of capitalism required the sacrifice of the core values of capitalism itself—hard work and thrift.  Rather the functioning of the capitalist machine required spending and borrowing in order to maintain consumer demand.

He, too, looked forward to a future of effortless abundance, without, in his case, even the need for revolution.

Material output in the USA, UK and other industrial nations has reached the level that Keynes hoped for.  But here is the result, according to Lasch—

To see the modern world from the point of view of a parent is to see it in the worst possible light.

This perspective unmistakably reveals the unwholesomeness … of our way of life: our obsession with sex, violence and the pornography of “making it”; our addictive dependence on drugs, “entertainment” and the evening news; our impatience with anything that limits our sovereign freedom of choice, especially constraints of marital and family ties; our preference for “nonbinding commitments”; our third-rate educational system; our third-rate morality; our refusal to draw a distinction between right and wrong, lest we “impose” our morality on others and thus invite others to “impose” their morality on us; our reluctance to judge or be judged; our indifference to the needs of future generations, as evidenced by our willingness to saddle them with a huge national debt, an overgrown arsenal of destruction and a deteriorating environment; our inhospitable attitude toward the newcomers born into our midst; our unstated assumption, which underlies so much of the propaganda for unlimited abortion, that only those children born for success ought to be allowed to be born at all.

It didn’t have to be that way, Lasch wrote.  Economic and intellectual elites consciously chose material progress over other values, and opposed those who proposed alternatives.

Glenn Miller and the Chattanooga Choo Choo

Time for for some music