Month: October 2018

Robert Reich writes:

‘…At the start of the 2016 election cycle, this power structure proclaimed Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush shoo-ins for the nominations of the Democratic and Republican parties. After all, both of these individuals had deep bases of funders, well-established networks of political insiders, experienced political advisers and all the political name recognition any candidate could possibly want.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the White House. The presidency was won by Donald Trump [….]

Median family income is lower now than it was 16 years ago, adjusted for inflation. Workers without college degrees – the old working class – have fallen furthest. Most economic gains, meanwhile, have gone to top. These gains have translated into political power to elicit bank bailouts, corporate subsidies, special tax loopholes, favorable trade deals and increasing market power without interference by anti-monopoly enforcement – all of which have further reduced wages and pulled up profits.

Wealth, power and crony capitalism fit together. Americans know a takeover has occurred, and they blame the establishment for it.

The Democratic party once represented the working class. But over the last three decades the party has been taken over by Washington-based fundraisers, bundlers, analysts, and pollsters who have focused instead on raising campaign money from corporate and Wall Street executives and getting votes from upper middle-class households in “swing” suburbs…’

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/10/democrats-working-class-americans-us-election

Antiwar Movement Spreads among Tech Workers
– Engineering students join Google and Microsoft workers in protesting the tech-industry’s enabling of U.S. militarism

The protesters state:

‘…Many Microsoft employees don’t believe that what we build should be used for waging war. When we decided to work at Microsoft, we were doing so in the hopes of “empowering every person on the planet to achieve more,” not with the intent of ending lives and enhancing lethality. For those who say that another company will simply pick up JEDI where Microsoft leaves it, we would ask workers at that company to do the same. A race to the bottom is not an ethical position…’

Meanwhile more than 100 engineering students at Stanford and other schools released a letter pledging that they will:

‘…First, do no harm.

Refuse to participate in developing technologies of war: our labor, our expertise, and our lives will not be in the service of destruction…

Abstain from working for technology companies that fail to reject the weaponizing of their technology for military purposes. Instead, push our companies to pledge to neither participate in nor support the development, manufacture, trade or use of autonomous weapons; and to instead support efforts to ban autonomous weapons globally…’

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/antiwar-movement-spreads-among-tech-workers

US Wages for the 1% just reached their highest level ever

‘…The 1% has never had it so good.

The average wage for the top 1% of income earners hit $719,000 per year in 2017, up 3.7% on the year, exceeding their peak of $716,000 per year just before the Great Recession, according to a report released Thursday by the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive, nonprofit think tank, citing data from the Social Security Administration. The average wage for the top 0.1% reached $2.7 million in 2017, the second-highest level ever, just 4% below their level in 2007. However, wages for the 0.1% rose 8% on the year in 2017.

Income inequality has soared in the U.S. over the last five decades, despite increases in worker productivity, the report said. “Incomes for most Americans have been stagnant for four decades,” according to a separate report released earlier this year by the staff of Keith Ellison, a Democratic congressman for Minnesota. “Instead, this increase in income inequality was almost entirely driven by soaring compensation levels for the top 1% of income earners.”…’

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/wages-for-the-1-just-reached-their-highest-level-ever-2018-10-18

How Big Data Is ‘Automating Inequality’

‘…We assume technology and the information it yields is making everyone’s life easier, freer and more comfortable.

Virginia Eubanks begs to differ, with the authority to do so. For the poor, she argues, government data and its abuses have imposed a new regime of surveillance, profiling, punishment, containment and exclusion, which she evocatively calls the “digital poorhouse.” While technology is often touted by researchers and policymakers as a way to deliver services to the poor more efficiently, Eubanks shows that more often, it worsens inequality. Data can’t provide what poor people need, which is more resources. Indeed, as with the 19th-century poorhouse, she argues, the shiny new digital one allows us to “manage the individual poor in order to escape our shared responsibility for eradicating poverty.”…’

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/04/books/review/automating-inequality-virginia-eubanks.html

Allergies: the scourge of modern life?

‘…Before the 1990s, peanut allergy was so rare that barely any data on it was collected. In a 2015 article in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, Paul J Turner noted that even though admissions to hospital for anaphylaxis increased between 1992 and 2012 by 615%, the incidence of fatal anaphylaxis did not. Turner and his colleagues believed that “increasing awareness of the diagnosis, shifting patterns of behaviour in patients and healthcare providers” might be contributing factors. Even though peanut allergy is much more common, its associated fatalities have not increased. [….]

The first is the delayed introduction of allergens. For years, throughout the world, allergy specialists had been advising that infants avoid the consumption of potentially allergenic foodstuffs. Not only was this incorrect but it may have played a role in driving the food allergy epidemic that we are seeing today.

Prof Gideon Lack of King’s College London, lead investigator on Learning Early About Peanut Allergy (the LEAP study) found that “of the children who avoided peanuts, 17% developed peanut allergy by the age of five years. Remarkably, only 3% of the children who were randomised to eating the peanut snack developed allergy by age five.” The children involved in the trial already had severe eczema and/or an egg allergy (both strong predictors for nut allergy)…’

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/oct/20/allergies-the-scourge-of-modern-living-hay-fever-ashtma-eczema-food-peanuts-dairy-eggs-penicillin

Post-Cold War U.S. Foreign Policy Has Been A Near Total Failure. Two New Books Look At Why.
by Murtaza Hussain

‘…Emerging as the world’s sole superpower at the end of the Cold War, the U.S. had two possible futures to choose from. It could either cash in a peace dividend at home by gradually scaling back its Cold War-era alliance commitments, or it could embark on a bold project of “liberal hegemony,” intended to spread its own system of government and a rules-based international order across the world. Flush with confidence after the the collapse of communism, American elites chose the latter course.

[….] Rather than define victory in these reasonable terms, the war against the Taliban was instead characterized as a moral crusade on behalf of human rights, feminism, and an array of other causes about which there can be no negotiation. Rejecting any compromise with an enemy it had defined as evil, the U.S. helped its local allies pursue a campaign of total annihilation against the Taliban and its supporters. Years later, Afghanistan is no closer to being a liberal democracy and the war is still raging there, at horrific human cost. The U.S., for its part, has given up on even defeating the Taliban and is instead simply trying to negotiate a face-saving exit. After flirting with a utopian idea of transforming Afghanistan in its own image and killing tens of thousands of Afghans in the process, the U.S. belatedly realized that the entire horrible endeavor has been essentially pointless…’

Too socialist for the suffragettes: the UK left’s forgotten women
– Early female socialists never figure in any roll-call of great suffragettes, because they objected on principle to a campaign that would leave so many disenfranchised.

‘… it was a schism that descended into deep rancour when the two sides also found themselves bitterly divided over support for the First World War, where the pragmatic, patriotic fervour urged by the elder Pankhursts was viewed by the female socialists as another betrayal of the working classes doomed to do the bulk of the dying.

Albeit in a much less offensive way, those passages reminded me of the arguments that persist to this day in the United States, where the original campaign for women’s suffrage is tainted by its promotion in the southern states as a means of reinforcing white supremacy in the Jim Crow era…’

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2018/10/Women-Room-Labours-Forgotten-History-Nan-Sloane-review

What is Dual-Carding?

http://organizing.work/on-dual-carding

‘The Genghis Khan Equestrian Statue in Mongolia. This is the largest equestrian statue in the world’

The Rule of the Uber-Rich Means Either Tyranny or Revolution
by Chris Hedges

‘…It is essential to understand the pathologies of the uber-rich. They have seized total political power. These pathologies inform Donald Trump, his children, the Brett Kavanaughs, and the billionaires who run his administration. The uber-rich cannot see the world from anyone’s perspective but their own. People around them, including the women whom entitled men prey upon, are objects designed to gratify momentary lusts or be manipulated. The uber-rich are almost always amoral. Right. Wrong. Truth. Lies. Justice. Injustice. These concepts are beyond them. Whatever benefits or pleases them is good. What does not must be destroyed.

[….] Political theorists, from Aristotle and Karl Marx to Sheldon Wolin, have warned against the rule of the uber-rich. Once the uber-rich take over, Aristotle writes, the only options are tyranny and revolution…’

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-rule-of-the-uber-rich-means-either-tyranny-or-revolution/

via https://twitter.com/karlremarks/status/920290897505464320

Geneticists Criticize Use of Science by White Nationalists to Justify ‘Racial Purity’

‘…In an unusual statement on the role of science in the resurgence of white supremacy in America, the American Society of Human Genetics on Friday denounced “attempts to link genetics and racial supremacy.”

The statement, which appears in the November issue of the group’s scientific journal, The American Journal of Human Genetics, said the concept of “racial purity” was scientifically meaningless. The group has about 8,000 members and is the largest professional organization of scientists who study human genetics.

As newly visible and often-virulent groups of white nationalists have invoked genetic research to claim racial superiority, some geneticists have suggested that the field was not doing enough to counter the claims.

[….] It also explains a distinction between race and ancestry that geneticists say has been muddled by the rise of commercial ancestry tests.

“Although a person’s genetics influences their phenotypic characteristics, and self-identified race might be influenced by physical appearance,” the statement said, “race itself is a social construct,” meaning it has no biological basis. “Black,” for instance, is a socially defined term that includes many Americans who have a majority of European ancestry…’

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/19/us/white-supremacists-science-genetics.html

the actual text
/jd

‘The American Journal of Human Genetics’ Attempts to Link Genetics and Racial Supremacy

‘…The past decade has seen the emergence of strategies for assessing an individual’s genetic ancestry. Such analyses8 are providing increasingly accurate ways of helping to define individuals’ ancestral origins and enabling new ways to explore and discuss ancestries that move us beyond blunt definitions of self-identified race…’

https://blog.ashg.org/2018/10/19/announcing-ajhg-perspectives-series/

As’Ad Abukhalil is the blogger from The Angry Arab News Service
/jd

AS’AD ABUKHALIL: ‘…he was always a symbol of reactionary advocacy on behalf of the Saudi regime and militant Salafi Islam. That’s what he stood for. The picture that is being painted in mainstream Western media is totally unrecognizable for anybody who bothers to read Arabic. Unfortunately, all the people who are commenting about the issue and commenting even about his record of journalism, so to speak, are people who have never read anything except in the Washington Post…’

via The Real News Network

‘The murder of Jamal Khashoggi should be denounced. Professor As`ad AbuKhalil says western media’s uncritical praise of Khashoggi is unworthy, he was a loyal member of the Saudi propaganda apparatus and chose the wrong side of the House of Saud.’

full transcript: https://therealnews.com/stories/duplicitous-khashoggi-picked-the-wrong-prince

‘…Helen—a smart, cheerful five-year-old girl—is an asylum seeker from Honduras [….]

In July, Helen fled Honduras with her grandmother, Noehmi, and several other relatives; gangs had threatened Noehmi’s teen-age son, Christian, and the family no longer felt safe. Helen’s mother, Jeny, had migrated to Texas four years earlier, and Noehmi planned to seek legal refuge there. With Noehmi’s help, Helen travelled thousands of miles, sometimes on foot, and frequently fell behind the group. While crossing the Rio Grande in the journey’s final stretch, Helen slipped from their raft and risked drowning. Her grandmother grabbed her hand and cried, “Hang on, Helen!” When the family reached the scrubland of southern Texas, U.S. Border Patrol agents apprehended them and moved them through a series of detention centers.

[….] Helen was given a pack of crayons and spent the summer coloring patriotic images: busts of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, the torch on the Statue of Liberty. She was granted an hour of “Large Muscle Activity and Leisure Time” each day, and received lessons on the human respiratory system, the history of music, and “the risk and danger of social media.” “Helen,” a caseworker observed, “has excellent behavior at all times.” She had no major sources of stress, her reports noted, aside from “being separated from her family.” Her teachers encouraged her to develop “smart goals”—ambitions that are “Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.” Helen’s goal was simple: “Minor disclosed wanting to live with her mother and family in the U.S.”

[….] On Helen’s form, which was filled out with assistance from officials, there is a checked box next to a line that says, “I withdraw my previous request for a Flores bond hearing.” Beneath that line, the five-year-old signed her name in wobbly letters…’

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-five-year-old-who-was-detained-at-the-border-and-convinced-to-sign-away-her-rights

Always read the end of NYT articles, that's where the info is. It looks like Trump is for a permanent occupation of parts of Syria...
/jd

‘…[Trump] has spoken positively about the idea of withdrawing the approximately 2,000 American soldiers who are based in eastern Syria in areas once controlled by the Islamic State, although he now appears committed to leaving them there. In August, his administration decided not to spent $230 million that had already been earmarked for stabilization programs in that area.

The Saudi money, in addition to another $50 million given by the United Arab Emirates, will allow American programs there to continue, but on other countries’ tabs.

The funds will be used by USAID and the State Department for a variety of programs, including infrastructure repairs and provision of health, education and sanitation services.’

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/16/world/middleeast/saudi-arabia-money-syria.html

Those Raised Fists Still Resonate, 50 Years Later

‘…And beyond that, the Olympics were taking place amid turmoil around the nation and around the world. Two major assassinations in the United States. A student riot that paralyzed much of Paris. The Czech uprising against Communist rule that became known as Prague Spring. People beaten in the streets during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

And in Mexico City, dozens, perhaps hundreds, of students protesting the country’s authoritarian government were killed by that same government.

The games went on anyway…’

‘…Smith and Carlos were banned from future participation in any Olympics for life. (They were in their early 20s in Mexico City, and this effectively prevented them from competing in other races in Munich and Montreal.) There were no offers of the complimentary stadium tickets usually offered to medaled athletes.

(Peter Norman suffered many of the same indignities when he returned to Australia. He was ostracized, never allowed on an Australian Olympic team again, despite qualifying in several national trials. His offense: wearing an Olympic Project for Human Rights button, like Smith and Carlos, and refusing to disavow his podium mates. When he died, in 2006, Smith and Carlos flew to Australia to be pallbearers.)

But for all the detractors, many thought of Carlos and Smith as heroes, especially in black America. Their upraised fists became a symbol of black refusal to submit to racial injustice — a precursor to today’s take-a-knee protests by NFL players…’

And, I think people assume the white guy was separate from the black guys, not true
/jd

The third man: The forgotten Black Power hero

‘…Yet few know that the man standing in front of both of them, the Australian sprinter Peter Norman who shocked everyone by powering past Carlos and winning the silver medal, played his own, crucial role in sporting history.

‘…On his left breast he wore a small badge that read: “Olympic Project for Human Rights” — an organization set up a year previously opposed to racism in sport. But while Smith and Carlos are now feted as human rights pioneers, the badge was enough to effectively end Norman’s career. He returned home to Australia a pariah, suffering unofficial sanction and ridicule as the Black Power salute’s forgotten man. He never ran in the Olympics again.

[….] Australia too, was in the midst of racial strife. The country’s “White Australia” policy had provoked protests of its own. It put heavy restrictions on non-white immigration — and a raft of prejudicial laws against its indigenous aboriginal population, including a policy of taking Aboriginal children from their birth parents and handing them to white couples for adoption, a practice that continued until the 1970s…’

https://edition.cnn.com/2012/04/24/sport/olympics-norman-black-power/index.html

Even capitalist Forbes magazine is telling us capitalism is the problem, and still no one listens,,,,

quarterly reports are the motive of every corporation. corpos are zombies. only the living can stop them.
/jd

https://www.forbes.com/sites/drewhansen/2016/02/09/unless-it-changes-capitalism-will-starve-humanity-by-2050

Bittersweet Justice in Guatemala
A Guatemalan court found that the army committed genocide against the Maya Ixi, but at the same time acquitted the chief of military intelligence of wrongdoing.

‘…In 2013, Guatemala brought charges against the former dictator, Efraín Ríos Montt, and his chief of military intelligence, Mauricio Rodríguez Sánchez, for the crimes of genocide against the Maya Ixil population. It was an historic trial, marking the first time in Guatemala that a former head of state was put on trial for serious human rights violations.

During Guatemala’s thirty-six-year civil war (1960-1996), 200,000 people, mostly civilians, were killed or disappeared and countless others were subjected to torture, sexual violence, forced labor, and forced displacement. Some 600 villages were destroyed. A UN commission found that ninety-three percent of atrocities were the responsibility of the Guatemalan military…’

https://progressive.org/dispatches/court-delivers-bittersweet-justice-in-guatemala-181016

A new study reveals the real reason Obama voters switched to Trump

‘…One of the most puzzling elements of the 2016 election, at least for a lot of Americans, was the millions of voters who switched from voting for Barack Obama in 2012 to Donald Trump in 2016. Somewhere between 6.7 million and 9.2 million Americans switched this way; given that the 2016 election was decided by 40,000 votes, it’s fair to say that Obama-Trump switchers were one of the key reasons that Hillary Clinton lost.

[….] The study, from three political scientists from around the country, takes a statistical look at a large sample of Obama-Trump switchers. It finds that these voters tended to score highly on measures of racial hostility and xenophobia — and were not especially likely to be suffering economically.

“White voters with racially conservative or anti-immigrant attitudes switched votes to Trump at a higher rate than those with more liberal views on these issues,” the paper’s authors write. “We find little evidence that economic dislocation and marginality were significantly related to vote switching in 2016.”…’

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/10/16/17980820/trump-obama-2016-race-racism-class-economy-2018-midterm

Some Bad News For Earth
by Tom Tomorrow

the rest of this cartoon at: https://thenib.com/some-bad-news-for-earth

Howard Zinn’s “Three Holy Wars”