Rouge Forum Dispatch: Degenerates in Power!
August 17th, 2019 / Author: rgibsonWe Say Fight Back!
www.facebook.com/PrensaObrera/videos/763005574102602/?t=18
Argentina: 50.000 unemployed workers protest in Plaza de Mayo
The workers have reacted for the first time in their struggle against the economic catastrophe following last Sunday’s primary elections. On Thursday, August 15, piquetero and social organizations demonstrated in different parts of the country as well as in the Capital, with the support of employed workers from the Teachers and Government Workers Unions. In Buenos Aires, they rallied together in the Plaza de Mayo in defense of wages and for the creation and growth in the number of social programs, against austerity measures and in favor of breaking with the International Monetary Fund. The Plaza was packed with three huge columns that made it very clear that we cannot wait until October, as salaries and the minimum wage collapse in front of our eyes.
37,000 Kaiser employees in California vote to strike
Kaiser Permanente’s California employees voted to authorize an unfair labor practices strike against their employer during a vote ending on Friday, its union announced Monday.
More than 37,000 ballots cast by Service Employees International Union – United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW) union members – whose job duties range from nurse practitioners to janitors for the Oakland-headquartered nonprofit hospital network – voted in support of a strike.
That figure penciled out to 98 percent in favor of striking.
A national contract with SEIU-UHW expired last September. In December, the National Labor Relations Board charged Kaiser with failing to negotiate in good faith and attempting to tie collective bargaining to a ban on political activity. sjvsun.com/business/37000-kaiser-employees-in-california-vote-to-strike/
Here’s the Evidence Corporate Media Say Is Missing of WaPo Bias Against Sanders (And any mention of class war/empire)
Bernie Sanders has taken to calling out corporate media for their anti-progressive bias, and their feathers have gotten quite ruffled.
In a campaign event Monday in New Hampshire, Sanders told the crowd:
We have pointed out over and over again that Amazon made $10 billion in profits last year. You know how much they paid in taxes? You got it, zero! Any wonder why the Washington Post is not one of my great supporters, I wonder why? New York Times not much better.
The next day, he returned to the same point:
And then I wonder why the Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, who owns Amazon, doesn’t write particularly good articles about me. I don’t know why.
The Post‘s executive editor, Martin Baron, immediately retorted (CNN, 8/12/19) that Sanders was spouting a “conspiracy theory,” insisting that “Jeff Bezos allows our newsroom to operate with full independence, as our reporters and editors can attest.”
Many others in corporate media were incensed as well. NPR‘s All Things Considered (8/13/19) accused Sanders of “echoing the president’s language,” and CNN (8/13/19) ran a segment that likewise accused him of using Trump’s “playbook”; CNN‘s Poppy Harlow warned ominously, “This seems like a dangerous line, continuous accusations against the media with no basis in fact or evidence provided.” FAIR has been following this issue for quite some time, so we’re happy to offer the evidence CNN and the Post protest is lacking. fair.org/home/heres-the-evidence-corporate-media-say-is-missing-of-wapo-bias-against-sanders/?awt_l=BZB2u&awt_m=iqfFjh5fl0OI_TQ
Expat, Immigrant, Migrant, Refugee: Why ‘This Land Is Our Land’ No Matter the Label
THIS LAND IS OUR LAND
An Immigrant’s Manifesto
By Suketu Mehta
In almost any other country on earth, Central Americans attempting to reach our southern border would be considered refugees, a designation that would guarantee them protection under international law. But in the United States, they are mere migrants who must, as a result of this label, fight desperately for a chance to cross over and to stay.
Such tricks of language abound in the contemporary war against migration — and against migrants themselves. Is it a border wall or a border fence? Are the teenagers who flee gang violence victims or criminals? Did the chain link separating children from their parents constitute a cage or a cell? “Etymology is destiny,” Suketu Mehta writes in “This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto,” his searing new book about migration past and present. The category a person is assigned at a border — asylee, refugee, forced migrant, economic migrant, expat, citizen — is determined by where she comes from, and will in turn decide her fate, and even, at times, whether she lives or dies.
In an age of brutal anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy, “This Land is Our Land” offers a meticulously researched and deeply felt corrective to the public narrative of who today’s migrants are, why they are coming, and what economic and historical forces have propelled them from their homes into faraway lands. We are, and always have been, a planet on the move, Mehta observes. Yet migration tripled between 1960 and 2017, and, with war, climate change and income inequality, mass migration will only get worse. www.nytimes.com/2019/06/04/books/review/suketu-mehta-this-land-is-our-land.html
Susan Ohanian: Getting the last laugh on impeachment
From the time he gave his second grade music teacher a black eye to “make his opinion known,” to lying about his academic standing at the University of Pennsylvania, to overall campaign outrage and Oval Office vileness, Donald Trump, has shown himself to be someone without a functioning moral anchor. These days, the man dubbed “the short-fingered vulgarian” in the 1988 inaugural issue of Spy magazine makes us worry over much more than length of his body parts.
Trump exhibits mythomania — in the day-to-day operation of his presidency, in his business empire, and even in his family background. The lies about his grandfather’s homeland gain new ugliness in light of his telling members of Congress to go back to their homeland. Some years after 16-year-old Friedrich Trump left Bavaria for the U.S., he returned and married; then he brought his wife and child to the U.S. When his wife became homesick, Friedrich decided to resettle back in his homeland, but Bavarian authorities noted that he had left the country to avoid military service. There was no mention of bone spurs. Despite a desperate letter to the prince regent, begging to be allowed to stay, Bavaria deported Friedrich.
Forty-one years later, Donald Trump was born, and today he berates members of Congress, born in this country, saying they should “go back” to some “totally broken and crime infested places” that he invented as their homelands. Like his father, Donald fabricates people’s origins, including his own, to suit a particular purpose. In “The Art of the Deal,” Donald claimed his grandfather “came here from Sweden as a child,” repeating the myth started by his father in an effort to sell apartments to Jewish tenants. vtdigger.org/2019/08/16/susan-ohanian-getting-the-last-laugh-on-impeachment/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=SocialWarfare
British Marxist’s Reading Picks for Dog Days of Summer
Top of my list for holiday reading are novels. The one I’m most looking forward to is the huge newly translated Stalingrad by Vasily Grossman, the earlier companion to his major work Life and Fate. These are not exactly a light read in any sense, covering as they do the Battle of Stalingrad and the Holocaust, but they are some of the finest writing I have come across. Grossman was Jewish and a war correspondent in the besieged city, and the books echo the great Tolstoy classic War and Peace,which is set during Napoleon’s invasion of Russia.
Alexander Baron was also a Jewish writer, this time in Hackney, who covered the same period but in a very different way. Try his novels From the City, From the Plough or There’s No Home, set among soldiers in wartime Sicily. There have been several novels which take as their theme myths and history from the ancient world, and particularly from the point of view of women. I’ve had very mixed reports of Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, which retells Homer’s Iliad through the eyes of Briseis, the concubine of Achilles. portside.org/2019-08-08/british-marxists-reading-picks-dog-days-summer
CCP on laser pointers
Hong Kong Fights on:
Getty images, Anthony Kwan
- The Little Red Schoolhouse
Identity politics run amok! Push for Ethnic Studies in Schools Faces a Dilemma: Whose Stories to Tell (let’s start with Class War)
Discuss a recent instance of police brutality in your community. Read op-eds arguing for and against legal status for unauthorized immigrants. Compare and contrast border conditions in the Palestinian territories and Mexico.
Those are some of the lesson plans suggested in a draft of California’s newly proposed ethnic studies curriculum for K-12 public schools. The documents have led to bitter debate in recent weeks over whether they veer into left-wing propaganda, and whether they are inclusive enough of Jews and other ethnic groups. Now, amid a growing outcry, even progressive policymakers in the state are promising significant revisions.
The materials are unapologetically activist — and jargony. They ask students to “critique empire and its relationship to white supremacy, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism and other forms of power and oppression.” A goal, the draft states, is to “connect ourselves to past and contemporary resistance movements that struggle for social justice.”
Many educators and policymakers across the country have been pushing for instructional materials that confront race in America, citing instances of racist violence and the divisive and inflammatory language ricocheting in politics, on social media and beyond. California is one of the first three states, alongside Oregon and Vermont, to forge ahead this year with creating K-12 materials in ethnic studies. www.nytimes.com/2019/08/15/us/california-ethnic-studies.html
White professor investigated for quoting James Baldwin’s use of N-word
Laurie Sheck, who teaches at the New School, says inquiry followed a complaint that she had discussed Baldwin’s use of the slur
The Pulitzer-nominated poet Laurie Sheck, a professor at the New School in New York City, is being investigated by the university for using the N-word during a discussion about James Baldwin’s use of the racial slur.
The investigation has been condemned by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (Fire), which is calling on the New School to drop the “misguided” case because it “warns faculty and students that good-faith engagement with difficult political, social, and academic questions will result in investigation and possible discipline”.
Sheck, who is white, was teaching a graduate course this spring on “radical questioning” in writing. She assigned students Baldwin’s 1962 essay The Creative Process, in which the black American writer and civil rights activist argued that Americans have “modified or suppressed and lied about all the darker forces in our history” and must commit to “a long look backward whence we came and an unflinching assessment of the record”. During the class, Sheck pointed to the 2016 documentary about Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro, and asked her students to discuss why the title altered Baldwin’s original statement, in which he used the N-word instead of negro during an appearance on a talk show.
Sheck told Inside Higher Education that a white student had objected to her language. According to Sheck, she questioned the student about her objection, who said she had been told by a previous professor that white people should never use the term. At the end of term, the student gave a presentation about racism at the New School. www.theguardian.com/books/2019/aug/15/white-professor-investigated-quoting-james-baldwin-use-of-n-word-laurie-sheck
In a compromise that did not appear to end the fight, the San Francisco Board of Education voted Tuesday night to conceal, but not destroy, a series of Depression-era school murals that some considered offensive to Native Americans and African-Americans.
The 4-to-3 vote, which came after a tense and emotional meeting, nullified the board’s earlier vote to paint over the murals, a decision that had brought widespread complaints of censorship.
Even though the murals would now be preserved, defenders of the artwork objected to the new decision to hide them from view. Jon Golinger, executive director of the Coalition to Protect Public Art, a group formed to preserve the murals, said that his group “would not yet rule out any legal or political options, including a possible initiative on the S.F. ballot.”
“While it is a step in the right direction to take permanent destruction off the table, we will continue to strongly oppose spending $815,000 to permanently wall off the murals so nobody has the choice to see them or learn from them,” he said. www.nytimes.com/2019/08/14/arts/san-francisco-murals-george-washington.html?action=click&module=News&pgtype=Homepage
River Rouge Not A Large School District, But Superintendent Paid $258k
There’s a discrepancy between the amount reported by the district and by pension officials
Derrick Coleman, the superintendent of the River Rouge School District, is one of Michigan’s highest paid superintendents, even though his district is not considered to be a large one. River Rouge has 2,257 enrolled students.
According to the district’s website, Coleman’s salary went from $238,040 in 2017 to $258,521 in 2018, an 8.6% increase.
This made him the fifth-highest paid public school superintendent in the state in 2018. www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/river-rouge-not-a-large-school-district-but-superintendent-paid-258k?fbclid=IwAR0dVs0yEzIRQwlGhijqF5nf0Q54CtVkZQ7kSE3s2x73g_AiaFcYYNTz6HI
Bungled multimillion-dollar roofing project at SDSU a ‘case study’ on what not to do
Faced with a deadline to finish $2.5 million in renovations to a San Diego State University building or risk losing most of the funds, campus officials made a series of decisions that threatened the health of students, faculty and staff, records obtained by inewsource show.
A roofing material used in the construction sickened dozens of people and eventually led officials to close the Professional Studies and Fine Arts building in mid-March after weeks of complaints about noxious odors that enveloped classrooms, offices and hallways. Hundreds of classes were held in the building before it was vacated.
Now, campus officials plan to spend up to $12 million to make more renovations to the PSFA building, including $2.5 million to replace the roof where the problems started.
The difference with the new renovations: The work will be done when the building is mostly unoccupied. It reopened in May but remains largely vacant and might not be fully operational until May 2021.
More than 800 pages of documents inewsource obtained through public records requests detail how this construction project got so badly off track. Fear of losing funds for the work was a factor. inewsource.org/2019/08/13/psfa-sdsu-roof-project-health/
‘Someone will get hurt’: Whistleblower alleges major problems in UCSD’s human research protections program
An anonymous whistleblower is claiming that UC San Diego, one of the top research universities in the world, is putting at risk thousands of people each year because it’s not following basic rules meant to protect human research subjects and values grant funding over safety.
In a letter delivered to top University of California officials Monday, the whistleblower warns, “What is going to happen is someone will get hurt.”
The letter criticizes UCSD’s Human Research Protections Program, which ensures university researchers follow ethical and legal guidelines when conducting studies with human participants. Similar programs exist at universities that participate in human research across the country.
The whistleblower calls UCSD’s program “the most serial noncompliant” throughout the University of California system, “if not in the country.” inewsource.org/2019/08/14/ucsd-human-research-protections-program-whistleblower/?utm_source=Master+List&utm_campaign=4397b73384-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_08_17_weekender&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c99e73181c-4397b73384-221519197
The International Hot War of the Rich on the Poor
The U.S. and the Taliban Are Near a Deal (on the war the US lost). Here’s What It Could Look Like.
After months of negotiations between the United States and the Taliban, both sides have signaled that they are nearing an initial peace deal for Afghanistan, perhaps in the coming weeks or even sooner, even though the recent talks have seemed bogged down in the final details.
Even a provisional agreement would be momentous, marking the beginning of the end to the United States’ longest war. The conflict has stretched for nearly 18 years, taking the lives of tens of thousands of Afghans and more than 3,500 American and coalition forces, and costing hundreds of billions of dollars.
President Trump’s desire to end what he has described as an endless war has been abundantly clear, and it is likely that if there is a breakthrough to announce, in an election season, he will be the person to do it.
Whether the withdrawal of foreign troops will actually bring peace and stability to a devastated Afghanistan depends largely on whether it is contingent on the Taliban and Afghan officials making progress toward a separate political agreement. Otherwise, critics fear, the United States and the Taliban will merely be signing an agreement on withdrawal, not peace….
One crucial and divisive facet of the negotiations is how a withdrawal would play out. The Taliban have demanded that all foreign troops leave within months. American negotiators have brought military experts to the table to explain how ending a military presence of 18 years — closing bases, shipping equipment home — is logistically impossible in that short a window.
As a compromise, the most likely timeline for the withdrawal of troops would be about two years or a little less, and would take place in phases. Noncombat support staff, including trainers and advisers to Afghan forces, could leave in earlier batches, with the more lethal Special Operations forces and the technical teams necessary for coordinating air power leaving later. www.nytimes.com/2019/08/13/world/asia/us-taliban-peace-deal-details.html
Pakistan and India trade barbs after rare UN Kashmir talks
Pakistan accuses New Delhi of human rights abuses after Security Council meeting, India says Kashmir ‘internal matter’.
United Nations – Envoys from nuclear-armed neighbours India and Pakistan have traded barbs outside the United Nations Security Council chamber, after members met behind closed doors for rare talks on the disputed region of Kashmir.
The meeting on Friday came as Indian-administered Kashmir remained under a military lockdown for a 12th straight day following the highly controversial decision by the Hindu nationalist government in New Delhi to revoke the special status accorded to the Muslim-majority state in India’s constitution.
Council members met for 90 minutes amid heightened tensions in the contested Himalayan region, which has long been a flashpoint between India and Pakistan – the two countries, which both claim Kashmir in full but rule it in part, have fought two of their three wars over the disputed territory. India is also fighting a three-decade rebellion in Jammu and Kashmir that has claimed tens of thousands of lives. www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/08/190816174341755.html
The Silence Is the Loudest Sound
The Indian government has confined about seven million Kashmiris to their homes and imposed a complete communications blackout.
By
Ms. Roy is a writer and lives in Delhi.
NEW DELHI — As India celebrates her 73rd year of independence from British rule, ragged children thread their way through traffic in Delhi, selling outsized national flags and souvenirs that say, “Mera Bharat Mahan.” My India is Great. Quite honestly, it’s hard to feel that way right now, because it looks very much as though our government has gone rogue.
Last week it unilaterally breached the fundamental conditions of the Instrument of Accession, by which the former Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir acceded to India in 1947. In preparation for this, at midnight on Aug. 4, it turned all of Kashmir into a giant prison camp. Seven million Kashmiris were barricaded in their homes, internet connections were cut and their phones went dead.
On Aug. 5, India’s home minister proposed in Parliament that Article 370 of the Indian Constitution (the article that outlines the legal obligations that arise from the Instrument of Accession) be overturned. The opposition parties rolled over. By the next evening the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganization Act, 2019 had been passed by the upper as well as the lower house.
The act strips the State of Jammu and Kashmir of its special status — which includes its right to have its own constitution and its own flag. It also strips it of statehood and partitions it into two Union territories. The first, Jammu and Kashmir, will be administered directly by the central government in New Delhi, although it will continue to have a locally elected legislative assembly but one with drastically reduced powers. The second, Ladakh, will be administered directly from New Delhi and will not have a legislative assembly. www.nytimes.com/2019/08/15/opinion/sunday/kashmir-siege-modi.html
CreditBettmann Archive/Getty Images
Rebecca Gordon, How the U.S. Created the Central American Immigration Crisis
What Happens in El Norte
Doesn’t Stay in El Norte
It’s hard to believe that more than four years have passed since the police shot Amílcar Pérez-López a few blocks from my house in San Francisco’s Mission District. He was an immigrant, 20 years old, and his remittances were the sole support for his mother and siblings in Guatemala. On February 26, 2015, two undercover police officers shot him six times in the back, although they would claim he’d been running toward them with an upraised butcher knife.
For two years, members of my little Episcopal church joined other neighbors in a weekly evening vigil outside the Mission police station, demanding that the district attorney bring charges against the men who killed Amílcar. When the medical examiner’s office continued to drag its feet on releasing its report, we helped arrange for a private autopsy, which revealed what witnesses had already reported — that he had indeed been running away from those officers when they shot him. In the end, the San Francisco district attorney declined to prosecute the police for the killing, although the city did reach a financial settlement with his family back in Guatemala.
Still, this isn’t really an article about Amílcar, but about why he — like so many hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans, Hondurans, and El Salvadorans in similar situations — was in the United States in the first place. It’s about what drove 225,570 of them to be apprehended by the U.S. Border Patrol in 2018 and 132,887 of them to be picked up at or near the border in a single month — May — of this year. As Dara Lind observed at Vox, “This isn’t a manufactured crisis, or a politically engineered one, as some Democrats and progressives have argued.” www.tomdispatch.com/post/176598/tomgram%3A_rebecca_gordon%2C_how_the_u.s._created_the_central_american_immigration_crisis/
Rattling the Nuclear Cage: India, Pakistan, Israel, Iran and the US
We like our anniversaries in blocks of 50 or 100 – at a push we’ll tolerate a 25. The 100th anniversary of the Somme (2016), the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Britain (2015). Next year, we’ll remember the end of the Second World War, the first – and so far the only – nuclear war in history.
This week marks only the 74th anniversary of the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It doesn’t fit in to our journalistic scorecards and “timelines”. Over the past few days, I’ve had to look hard to find a headline about the two Japanese cities.
But, especially in the Middle East and what we like to call southeast Asia, we should be remembering these gruesome anniversaries every month. Hiroshima was atomic-bombed 74 years ago on Tuesday, Nagasaki 74 years ago on Friday. Given the extent of the casualty figures, you’d think they’d be unforgettable. But we don’t quite know (nor ever will) what they were.
The bombing of the two cities, we are told, left between 129,000 and 226,000 dead. The first US statistics suggested only 66,000 dead in Hiroshima, 39,000 in Nagasaki. But in later years, the Hiroshima authorities estimated their dead alone at 202,118 – taking account of those who later died of radiation sickness, rather than just the incinerated corpses and human shadows left in the immediate aftermath of the explosion.
In the Middle East, where Aleppo and Mosul and Raqqa count the dead from conventional bombs – American, Russian, Syrian – in the tens of thousands, you might think the 1945 statistics would leave the folk who live there pretty cold. But the book of crises unfolding in the region – by the chapter, almost every month – is of critical importance to every soul who lives between the Mediterranean and India. www.counterpunch.org/2019/08/12/rattling-the-nuclear-cage-india-pakistan-israel-iran-and-the-us/
Massacres at Home and Abroad
On August 5, former President Obama released a powerful statement in response to the latest gun massacres in Gilroy, El Paso, and Dayton that left scores dead and wounded—including children who were shopping for school supplies at Walmart with their mothers, and with their families at the wonderful Gilroy Garlic Festival. He decried the madness of violence that has been fueled by Trump’s vile pronouncements and policies that help spread anti-immigrant and racist poison across the nation.
Obama asserted that “We should soundly reject language coming out of the mouths of any of our leaders that feeds a climate of fear and hatred or normalizes racist sentiments; leaders who demonize those who don’t look like us, or suggest that other people, including immigrants, threaten our way of life, or refer to other people as sub-human, or imply that America belongs to just one certain type of people….” He concluded, “It’s time for the overwhelming majority of Americans of goodwill, of every race and faith and political party, to say as much—clearly and unequivocally.” His statement, clearly aimed at the vile Trump whose name was not mentioned, linked racism and white nationalism as key contributing factors creating the climate and context for recent gun massacres.
Obama’s statement brought a flood of support from his liberal and celebrity admirers who are nostalgic for the “good old days” under his presidency; people who are outraged at the Gilroy, El Paso, and Dayton murderers—as they should be—but were virtually silent when their hero killed untold thousands across the Greater Middle East.
There are other factors contributing to gun massacres that Obama and the corporate media erase from consideration; foremost among these is the violence that is fostered by America’s commitment to a permanent warfare state that he deepened during his years in the White House. www.counterpunch.org/2019/08/13/massacres-at-home-and-abroad/?fbclid=IwAR1eAAGxHhMmZGM1-4IYkMSvRLAOyedmBT_FVUzUawZFDIy9kvFZ5srRaHo
The International Economic War of the Rich on the Poor
City of Detroit fails to board up ‘every’ vacant house by July deadline
Mayor Mike Duggan pledged to board up every vacant house on Detroit’s east side by the end of July after police warned about a suspected serial killer luring his victims into abandoned homes.
But the plan fell far short of its goal. By early August, many vacant houses on the east side were still wide open. And of the homes that were boarded up, some were open to trespass because the plywood had been ripped off.
The ambitious effort began on June 7 at an abandoned house on Mack and Mt. Elliott, where the decomposed body of one of the victims, Tammy Jones, was found two days earlier. The suspect, Deangelo Martin, was also accused of beating and raping another woman at the same house, which he used as his home base, police said.
On Thursday, Metro Times discovered the house was open to trespass. The plywood that was sealing the front and side doors was peeled back on the house, which is located just blocks from the Heidelberg Project, a popular tourist destination. After Metro Times posted the story, city workers returned to the house to board it up again.
The house is on the city’s demolition list, but no date has been set to raze it.
In Detroit, plywood does little to keep people out of vacant homes, which are havens for drug dealers, metal scrappers, and predators. That’s why Detroit Public Schools sealed its abandoned buildings with metal panels. www.metrotimes.com/detroit/city-of-detroit-fails-to-board-up-every-vacant-house-by-july-deadline/Content?oid=22388060&utm_source=featurefollow&utm_medium=home&utm_campaign=hpfeatures&utm_content=HomeTopFeature&fbclid=IwAR1FrufTM8Pw7Estq6CCP_UqpbNZz_7ZPbhy9aCbR_eJ0JoSSbcLrwW1B6M
The Fight to Redefine Racism (New Yorker’s Juvenile Grasp of Racism)
In “How to Be an Antiracist,” Ibram X. Kendi argues that we should think of “racist” not as a pejorative but as a simple, widely encompassing term of description.
Sixteen years ago, in 2003, the student newspaper at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, a historically black institution in Tallahassee, published a lively column about white people. “I don’t hate whites,” the author, a senior named Ibram Rogers, wrote. “How can you hate a group of people for being who they are?” He explained that “Europeans” had been “socialized to be aggressive people,” and “raised to be racist.” His theory was that white people were fending off racial extinction, using “psychological brainwashing” and “the AIDS virus.” Perhaps the most incendiary line appeared at the end, after the author’s byline and e-mail address: “Ibram Rogers’ column will appear every Wednesday.”
As it turned out, that final claim, like a few of the claims that preceded it, was not quite accurate. The column caused a stir, and Rogers was summoned to see the editor of the local newspaper, the Tallahassee Democrat, where he was an intern. The editor demanded that Rogers discontinue his column, and Rogers agreed under protest, though he resolved to continue his examination of race in America, which became his life’s work. He eventually earned a Ph.D. in African-American studies from Temple, and gained a reputation in the field, along with some new names. He changed his middle name from Henry to Xolani, which is Zulu for “be peaceful,” after learning the history of Prince Henry the Navigator, a fifteenth-century Portuguese explorer who helped pioneer the African slave trade. And at his wedding, in 2013, he and his wife, Sadiqa, told their guests that they had chosen a new last name: Kendi, which means “the loved one” in the Kenyan language of Meru. In 2016, as Ibram X. Kendi, he published “Stamped from the Beginning,” a voluminous, sober-minded book that aimed to present “the definitive history of racist ideas in America.”
In the thirteen years since his abortive college-newspaper column, Kendi had become ever more convinced that racism, not race, was the central force in American history, and so he reached back to 1635 to show how malleable racism could be. The preachers who justified slavery used racist arguments, he wrote, but so did many of the abolitionists—the ubiquity of racism meant that no one was immune to its seductive power, including black people. In his view, the pioneering black sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois was propping up racist ideas in 1897, when he condemned “the immorality, crime, and laziness among the Negroes.” So, too, was Barack Obama, when, as a Presidential candidate in 2008, he decried “the erosion of black families.” Although Obama noted that this erosion was partly due to “a lack of economic opportunity,” he also made an appeal to black self-reliance, saying that members of the African-American community needed to face “our own complicity in our condition.” Kendi saw statements like these as reflections of a persistent but delusional idea that something is wrong with black people. The only thing wrong, he maintained, was racism, and the country’s failure to confront and defeat it. www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/19/the-fight-to-redefine-racism
Wells Fargo Closed Their Accounts, but the Fees Continued to Mount
For weeks after the date the bank said the accounts would be closed, it kept some of them active. Payments to his insurer, to Google for online advertising and to a provider of project management software were paid out of the empty accounts in July. Each time, the bank charged Mr. Einaudi a $35 overdraft fee.
Mr. Einaudi called the bank’s customer service line. He went to his local branch. Nobody could help him. “They told me, ‘The accounts are closed out — we cannot do anything,’” he said.
By the middle of July, he owed the bank nearly $1,500.
“I don’t even know what happened,” he said.
Current and former bank employees said Mr. Einaudi got charged because of the way Wells Fargo’s computer system handles closed accounts: An account the customer believes to be closed can stay open if it has a balance, even one below zero. And each time a transaction is processed for an overdrawn account, Wells Fargo tacks on a fee.
The problem has gone unaddressed by the bank despite complaints from customers and employees, including one in the bank’s debt-collection department who grew concerned after taking in an estimated $100,000 in overdraft fees over eight months. www.nytimes.com/2019/08/16/business/wells-fargo-overdraft-fees.html
Does An Inverted Yield Curve Always Predict A Recession?
Headlines blared when a rare anomaly occurred in the bond market. While the yield curve has been inverted in a general sense for some time, for a brief moment the yield of the 10-year Treasury dipped below the yield of the 2-year Treasury. This hasn’t happened since the depths of the 2008/2009 recession. The news was enough to cause our roller-coaster markets to suffer its worst drop this year.
Does this inversion signal an impending recession, or are we merely witnessing the lemming-like behavior so typical of headline inspired trading?
Certainly, history suggests a correlation between inverted yield curves and recessions, albeit with a sometimes significant lag time.
“The timetable varies but it is generally within a 24-month period, so while it can be a very early indicator it is one that should be heeded,” says Greg McBride, chief financial analyst at Bankrate.com in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. “The most dangerous words in finance are ‘it’s different this time.’ We’ve heard that in the past couple recessions and it hasn’t turned out to be different.”
What triggered the market fall-off, however, was the rare 10-year/2-year inversion. This specific data point has been cited as a reliable harbinger of recession. www.forbes.com/sites/chriscarosa/2019/08/16/does-an-inverted-yield-curve-always-predict-a-recession/#345845c27e7b
Lead Crisis in Newark Grows, as Bottled Water Distribution Is Bungled
Worries about the safety of the drinking water in New Jersey’s largest city have raised comparisons to Flint, Mich.
A growing crisis over lead contamination in drinking water gripped Newark on Wednesday as tens of thousands of residents were told to drink only bottled water, the culmination of years of neglect that has pushed New Jersey’s largest city to the forefront of an environmental problem afflicting urban areas across the nation.
Urgent new warnings from federal environmental officials about contamination in drinking water from aging lead pipes spread anxiety and fear across much of Newark, but the municipal government’s makeshift efforts to set up distribution centers to hand out bottled water were hampered by confusion and frustration.
State and local officials said they were making free water available to 15,000 of the city’s 95,000 households, and hundreds of people waited in long lines in the summer heat to pick up cases of water. But officials had to halt the distribution temporarily after discovering that some of the water exceeded its best-by date.
The intensifying worry about the safety of Newark’s drinking water has raised comparisons to Flint, Mich, where dangerous levels of lead led to criminal indictments against state and local officials and forced residents to rely on bottled water. www.nytimes.com/2019/08/14/nyregion/newark-water-lead.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage
The Great Land Robbery
The shameful story of how 1 million black families have been ripped from their farms
Wiped Out
“You ever chop before?” Willena Scott-White was testing me. I sat with her in the cab of a Chevy Silverado pickup truck, swatting at the squadrons of giant, fluttering mosquitoes that had invaded the interior the last time she opened a window. I was spending the day with her family as they worked their fields just outside Ruleville, in Mississippi’s Leflore County. With her weathered brown hands, Scott-White gave me a pork sandwich wrapped in a grease-stained paper towel. I slapped my leg. Mosquitoes can bite through denim, it turns out.
Cotton sowed with planters must be chopped—thinned and weeded manually with hoes—to produce orderly rows of fluffy bolls. The work is backbreaking, and the people who do it maintain that no other job on Earth is quite as demanding. I had labored long hours over other crops, but had to admit to Scott-White, a 60-something grandmother who’d grown up chopping, that I’d never done it.
“Then you ain’t never worked,” she replied.
The fields alongside us as we drove were monotonous. With row crops, monotony is good. But as we toured 1,000 acres of land in Leflore and Bolivar Counties, straddling Route 61, Scott-White pointed out the demarcations between plots. A trio of steel silos here. A post there. A patch of scruffy wilderness in the distance. Each landmark was a reminder of the Scott legacy that she had fought to keep—or to regain—and she noted this with pride. Each one was also a reminder of an inheritance that had once been stolen. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/09/this-land-was-our-land/594742/
The Emergence of Fascism as a Popular Mass Movement and The War on Reason
India Plans Big Detention Camps for Migrants. Muslims Are Afraid.
More than four million people in India, mostly Muslims, are at risk of being declared foreign migrants as the government pushes a hard-line Hindu nationalist agenda that has challenged the country’s pluralist traditions and aims to redefine what it means to be Indian.
The hunt for migrants is unfolding in Assam, a poor, hilly state near the borders with Myanmar and Bangladesh. Many of the people whose citizenship is now being questioned were born in India and have enjoyed all the rights of citizens, such as voting in elections.
State authorities are rapidly expanding foreigner tribunals and planning to build huge new detention camps. Hundreds of people have been arrested on suspicion of being a foreign migrant — including a Muslim veteran of the Indian Army. Local activists and lawyers say the pain of being left off a preliminary list of citizens and the prospect of being thrown into jail have driven dozens to suicide.
But the governing party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is not backing down.
Instead, it is vowing to bring this campaign to force people to prove they are citizens to other parts of India, part of a far-reaching Hindu nationalist program fueled by Mr. Modi’s sweeping re-election victory in May and his stratospheric popularity.
Members of India’s Muslim minority are growing more fearful by the day. Assam’s anxiously watched documentation of citizenship — a drive that began years ago and is scheduled to wrap up on Aug. 31 — coincides with another setback for Muslims, this one transpiring more than a thousand miles away.
Less than two weeks ago, Mr. Modi unilaterally wiped out the statehood of India’s only Muslim-majority state, Jammu and Kashmir, removing its special autonomy and turning it into a federal territory without any consultation with local leaders — many of whom have since been arrested. www.nytimes.com/2019/08/17/world/asia/india-muslims-narendra-modi.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage
White House seeks to extend law that allows spying on Americans’ phone records
In response to the Russia investigation that ended up examining and prosecuting the conduct of many of President Donald Trump’s top aides and advisers, right-wing media — with the White House in tow — has launched a years-long campaign to denounce the government’s “spying” capabilities.
But this public relations effort bears little resemblance to the actual ideology or policy priorities as represented in the Trump administration’s actions. There’s no better evidence for that fact than a New York Times report that revealed Thursday that the White House is pushing for Congress to reauthorize the USA Freedom Act, a law that authorizes surveillance of Americans’ domestic communications.
The Times reported that outgoing Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats acknowledged in a new letter to Congress that the program was suspended when officials determined it was inadvertently collecting far more information about civilians’ communications than was intended. This finding has been previously reported but not acknowledged by top officials. www.alternet.org/2019/08/white-house-seeks-to-extend-law-that-allows-spying-on-americans-phone-records-report/
N.Y.P.D. Detectives Gave a Boy, 12, a Soda. He Landed in a DNA Database.
The city has 82,473 people in its database. Many of them have no idea their genetic information is there.
New York City detectives questioning a boy facing a felony charge last year offered him a McDonald’s soda. When the boy left, they took the straw and tested it for his DNA.
Although it did not match evidence found at a crime scene, his DNA was entered into the city’s genetic database. To have it removed, the child’s family had to petition a court and file an appeal, a process that took more than a year. The boy was 12.
The city’s DNA database has grown by nearly 29 percent over the last two years, and now has 82,473 genetic profiles, becoming a potentially potent tool for law enforcement but one that operates with little if any oversight.
The New York Police Department has taken DNA samples from people convicted of crimes, as well as from people who are only arrested or sometimes simply questioned. The practice has exposed the Police Department to scrutiny over how the genetic material is collected and whether privacy rights are being violated, civil liberties lawyers said. www.nytimes.com/2019/08/15/nyregion/nypd-dna-database.html
Portland prepares for city’s largest far-right rally of the Trump era
Police are fearful of an outbreak of violence at the ‘End Domestic Terrorism’ rally, which is targeted at Portland’s antifascist groups
Portland is preparing for a large far-right rally on Saturday that may be the largest in a series of demonstrations that have descended on the city in the Trump era.
Police in the Oregon city are fearful of an outbreak of violence at the “End Domestic Terrorism” rally, which is targeted at Portland’s antifascist groups, who in recent years have clashed with rightwing activists in running street battles.
The protest has been promoted primarily by Floridian Joe Biggs, a member of the rightwing Proud Boys organization. Biggs is a combat veteran and a former employee of the conspiracy broadcaster Alex Jones’s Infowars network. He claims that up to 1,000 people from around the country will attend Saturday’s unpermitted event on the city’s waterfront.
In promoting the rally on social media, Biggs has brandished a Trump-themed baseball bat, appeared in videos wearing a T-shirt bearing the slogan “Training to Throw Communists Out of Helicopters” – a reference to the Chilean Pinochet regime’s methods for executing dissidents – and has taunted antifascists, saying “You’re not gonna feel safe when you go out in public” and “I’m gonna stomp your ass into the ground, Antifa”.
In more recent days, Biggs has urged supporters to tone down their rhetoric after notifying them on Facebook that he had received a visit from the FBI. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/15/portland-oregon-far-right-rally?fbclid=IwAR2q_v3_rc8iGUShA_ht6BwUWHqHCb3UKRTP2RqILXXZVV66J3fv5odIubo
Far-right rally in Portland met by anti-fascist protesters
A rally of far-right groups was met by a large counterdemonstration in Portland, Oregon, on Saturday.
Fears that the showdown would turn violent prompted some downtown businesses to close and led to a massive police presence. At least 13 people were arrested, according to Lt. Tina Jones of the Portland Police Bureau.
Six people, including one who was hospitalized, reported minor injuries during the day, police Chief Danielle Outlaw said at news conference.
There were also six “use-of-force” events by officers, she said, mostly involving “take-downs” of suspects, and no one was injured.
The dueling demonstrations garnered national attention, including from President Donald Trump, who tweeted earlier Saturday in reference to self-described anti-fascists, some of whom are known collectively as antifa, “Major consideration is being given to naming ANTIFA an “ORGANIZATION OF TERROR.” Portland is being watched very closely. Hopefully the Mayor will be able to properly do his job!” www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/far-right-rally-portland-met-anti-fascist-protesters-n1043646?cid=sm_npd_nn_fb_ma&fbclid=IwAR3Pc5CLEP_ca0Yyn4zFTbjHBNmbx1C8gfLn_jOW8LaTbyOfCn0pquaTlrU
‘It’s techno-racism’: Detroit is quietly using facial recognition to make arrests
For the last two years, Detroit police have been quietly utilizing controversial and unreliable facial recognition technology to make arrests in the city.
The news, revealed in May in a Georgetown University report , has shocked many Detroiters and sparked a public debate in the city that is still raging and mirrors similar battles playing out elsewhere in America and across the world. Among other issues, critics in the majority-black city point out that flawed facial recognition software misidentifies people of color and women at much higher rates.
Detroit also now has the capability to use the technology to monitor residents in real time, though Detroit’s police chief claims it won’t.
Willie Burton, a black member of the civilian Detroit Police Commission that oversees the department, noted Detroit’s population is 83% black and that made using the technology especially worrying.
“This should be the last place police use the technology because it can’t identify one black man or woman to another,” he said. “Every black man with a beard looks alike to it. Every black man with a hoodie looks alike. This is techno-racism.” www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/16/its-techno-racism-detroit-is-quietly-using-facial-recognition-to-make-arrests
How a Trump Ally Tested the Boundaries of Washington’s Influence Game (and bought some Generals along the way)
…on a fall day in 2017, Mr. Broidy was ushered into the West Wing. For about two hours, he met with a handful of the most powerful people on earth, including President Trump, his chief of staff, his national security adviser and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, discussing everything from personnel recommendations to the Republican Party’s finances.
Mostly, though, according to a detailed account he later sent to an associate, Mr. Broidy talked about the Middle East, a subject that had long been important to him personally and was becoming increasingly important to him financially.
As he sat with Mr. Trump, Mr. Broidy promoted a plan for a counterterrorism force backed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which he said would be supported by his private security and intelligence company, Circinus, under the leadership of Stanley A. McChrystal, the retired Army general and former commander in Afghanistan. NYTimes 8/16/19
Corrections Officer Who Struck Rhode Island Protesters with Pickup Truck Resigns
A senior corrections officer at the Wyatt Detention Facility in Rhode Island has resigned after being placed on administrative leave for driving his pickup truck into a crowd of peaceful protestors on Wednesday night. The attack left one man, 64-year-old Jerry Belair, with a broken leg and internal bleeding, and four others were hospitalized after the officer’s colleagues used pepper spray to disburse the crowd.
In an interview with the ACLU, Matt Harvey, a spokesperson for the Jewish-led civic group that coordinated the protest, called the officer’s actions a “shocking and ugly example of the violence that is an integral part of American immigration policy right now.”
The protest was coordinated by the Rhode Island chapter of Never Again, a loose federation of activists formed in response to the Trump Administration’s hardline immigration policies. www.aclu.org/blog/immigrants-rights/immigrants-rights-and-detention/corrections-officer-who-struck-rhode-island?fbclid=IwAR3xZzGtxSWc0Tqp3WXw9tDSe3rmNon1jw78NtbyodZoThosMFo_aXE3itE
Solidarity for Never
above, UAW boss whose greed kept him “Fat, dumb, and happy,” according to Chrysler bosses.
Feds charge ex-UAW leader in growing corruption scandal
A former senior United Auto Workers official has been charged with wire fraud conspiracy and money laundering, marking an expansion of a federal corruption investigation that has spread beyond Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV.
Michael Grimes — who until last year served as administrative assistant to UAW Vice President Cindy Estrada — received $1.99 million in kickbacks from union vendors, according to the government.
He and other unnamed union officials assigned to General Motors Co. were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes and kickbacks from vendors who received contracts to produce promotional merchandise for the UAW, according to a criminal case unsealed Wednesday.
The criminal charges, which could send Grimes to federal prison for up to 20 years, help federal investigators pierce the inner circle of Estrada, a sitting UAW vice president and head of the union’s FCA department who has been under scrutiny for almost two years. The case also expands the scope of a criminal investigation that, until now, focused on Fiat Chrysler executives trying to influence contract negotiations by giving UAW officials money, lavish trips and more.
The criminal filing Wednesday described old-school corruption and greed that deprived UAW members of honest leadership and involved officials in charge of the UAW-GM Center for Human Resources, a training center for blue-collar workers. The alleged scheme also defrauded the training center, prosecutors said.
“This is the first shoe to drop involving General Motors and the UAW,” said Peter Henning, a Wayne State University law professor and former federal prosecutor. “It raises the question of what kind of monitoring the UAW was doing, or was there any? www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/general-motors/2019/08/14/feds-charge-ex-uaw-leader-widening-corruption-scandal/2012066001/
NEA boss Lily Garcia rigged NEA’s internal process to “win” an early endorsement for Clinton, then wasted millions of member dollars on the failed, corrupt, campaign.
Reminder: Counterfeit Unionism in the Empire
With respect to nearly anyone who is trying to fight back in our current context, I differ from what most people think about the current state of US unionism.
Of course, none of that can be split away from an analysis of our current circumstances which I believe is an international hot war, and economic war, of the rich on the poor and the rapid emergence of fascism as a popular movement.
It does not have to be that way.
Let us hope that another scenario is possible if we take on the hard tasks of the immediate future and connect them to a vision of what can be. One of those tasks is to determine the role of the unions and the relationship of radicals to them.
Labor bosses at all levels are the nearest and most vulnerable of workers’ enemies. Rather than “move unions to the left,” better, “demolish the labor quislings, take their treasuries, seize their buildings, as we build a mass class conscious movement to transcend the system of capital.”
Why does that make better sense?
Since the Industrial Workers of the World (a grand vision but fatally flawed practice) were nearly demolished in the Palmer Raids of 1919, American unionism has been a false flag operation: not what most people think of as unionism. www.counterpunch.org/2013/10/23/counterfeit-unionism-in-the-empire/
Below, Lily Garcia, NEA boss, loved Arne Duncan and the RATT.
Janus Isn’t NEA’s Only Problem — State Affiliates Have Been Losing Membership Since Long Before the Supreme Court Ruling
We have seen an unprecedented level of media interest in union membership numbers since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Janus ruling in 2018, which banned the practice of public-sector unions charging representation fees to nonmembers. The common conclusion, which I share, is that the court decision has not had the devastating effect on teacher union membership that Janus supporters hoped or that unions feared.
Its full effect may not be known for several years, but predictions about future membership, particularly in the National Education Association, have to account for trends that were present prior to Janus.
Between the 2008-09 and 2016-17 school years, NEA’s active membership — that is, members working in public schools and universities, excluding retirees and students — declined by 9 percent.
That’s bad, but it is measured from NEA’s high-water mark, before the lingering effects of the 2008-09 recession that led to teacher layoffs across the country. Even so, the average effect on membership nationally tends to disguise the very wide variation in trends among NEA’s 50 state affiliates.
I have put together a table comparing the union’s membership numbers for each state from 2008-09 and 2016-17 to show what was going on prior to Janus. It shows that 14 NEA state affiliates increased active membership during those years and 36 lost members. Of those affiliates that lost members, 14 lost more than 30 percent. www.the74million.org/article/union-report-janus-isnt-neas-only-problem-state-affiliates-have-been-losing-membership-since-long-before-the-supreme-court-ruling/
Analysis: California Teachers Association’s claims of new membership don’t add up
Last week, we reported the news that the California Faculty Association, representing 19,000 employees of the California State University system, suddenly decided to drop its affiliation with both the California Teachers Association and the National Education Association.
Everyone involved is being very close-mouthed about the secession, but EdSource did report this little detail:
“The CTA anticipates that some 22,000 new members it says it has recruited over the past year will offset the approximately 19,000 CSU staff the CTA says belonged to both the faculty association and the CTA. The CTA says its overall membership will remain around 325,000.”
That’s some fancy math.
Eventually, I will be able to verify or debunk those numbers, but it often takes a long time, perhaps even many months. So I can’t say for certain that the union is full of crap — but this doesn’t pass the smell test.
First, the California Department of Education reports that the state’s teacher workforce grew by a cumulative total of only 18,000 between 2014 and 2018. If we increased the number of teachers by 7.2 percent in 2019, I must have missed the news. laschoolreport.com/analysis-california-teachers-associations-claims-of-new-membership-dont-add-up/
From NEA Today: How to Revitalize your local–Get the bosses to join!
...NEA: You helped turn things around by initially attending transportation advisory committee (TAC) meetings, then becoming Chair of the Committee.
BJ: TAC committees were unorganized, un-structured, and ill attended. I remember Superintendent DJ once commented, “This will be my last meeting due to a lack of organization, unless changes are made.” I had experience with this sort of thing and soon became the Committee Chair. Superintendent DI joined FEA…. Eventually, DG, executive director of administration and planning, joined us.”
The DSA’s dishonest and self-serving account of the US teachers’ strikes
By Nancy Hanover
8 August 2019
Red State Revolt, written by New York University doctoral student and member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) Eric Blanc, was published by Verso and Jacobin in late April. It purports to be a “behind-the-scenes” explanation of the causes and outcomes of the 2018 teacher strikes in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona.
The topic is a critical one, as teacher strikes have become a growing feature of an increasingly militant working class the world over. During the last year, teachers have walked out in virtually every country opposing governments’ decades-long policies of eviscerating public education while enriching “edu-businesses” and school privatizers. Broad sections of society rightly see the ongoing destruction of public schooling as part of a social counterrevolution by the financial elite and political establishment, which includes the gutting of healthcare services, proliferation of low-paid part-time labor and the devastating growth of social inequality.
Teachers have been in the forefront of the rising resistance of the working class. In the last six months, teachers have walked out in Morocco, Algeria, Zimbabwe, Germany, Portugal, France, Brazil, the Netherlands, Poland, Chile, Mexico, New Zealand and Australia. In 2019, US strikes also expanded to Los Angeles, Oakland, West Virginia, Chicago and Denver, with mass protests occurring in Virginia, Indianapolis, Louisville, Annapolis and more.
Remarkably, Red State Revolt ignores all this. Despite the author’s stated aims, Blanc is unable to point to, let alone explain, the fundamental origins of this movement. This is because the struggle of teachers did not emerge as a limited rebellion against Republican-controlled (“Red State”) governments. Instead, the strikes were part of an international resurgence of the class struggle against relentless austerity and the historic transfer of wealth to the rich, which governments around the world escalated after the 2008 global financial crash. www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/08/08/reds-a08.html
Mandela’s Legacy: South African Army to Patrol Cape Town Neighborhoods Plagued by Gang Violence; More than 1600 People Killed This Year
- The South African National Defense Force has confirmed that the army will go into the Cape Town neighborhoods that are the most plagued by gang violence, which has left about 1,600 dead so far this year.
- The total number of troops deployed hasn’t been confirmed, but an army spokesperson said they will be in neighborhoods “to support police.”
- Though it was previously announced that the deployment would begin on Friday, authorities instead said troops will go into neighborhoods as soon as it is “feasible.”
- Troops will be deployed for three months to curb the violence because according to South Africa’s Police Minister Bheki Cele: “It can’t continue — people are dying. We’ll have to do something extra.”
- According to Cele, “President Cyril Ramaphosa gave the green light to the request to send army personnel into 10 precincts in the Western Cape known for its high attempted murder rates.” apbnewswire.com/world-news/south-african-army-to-patrol-cape-town-neighborhoods-plagued-by-gang-violence-more-than-1600-people-killed-this-year/
Spy versus Spy
Overstock C.E.O. Takes Aim at ‘Deep State’ After Romance With Russian Agent
He was the philosophizing founder and chief executive of Overstock.com, a publicly traded e-commerce retailer that sells discount furniture and bedding. She was an ambitious graduate student from Russia.
It was the start of a three-year relationship between the e-commerce executive, Patrick Byrne, and the young woman, Maria Butina, that became romantic at times. She is now serving 18 months in prison after being accused by federal prosecutors of trying to infiltrate powerful political circles in the United States at the direction of the Russian government. She ultimately pleaded guilty to a lesser charge.
Mr. Byrne’s relationship became widely known on Monday, when his company took the unusual step of issuing a news release that called attention to it. In the release, which was put out in response to a report that Mr. Byrne had been involved in the federal inquiry into the 2016 presidential election, Mr. Byrne said that he had been helping law enforcement agents, whom he referred to as “Men in Black,” with their “Clinton Investigation” and “Russia Investigation.” www.nytimes.com/2019/08/15/business/overstock-paul-byrne-maria-butina-affair.html
The Magical Mystery Tour
Four more allegations against former Cheyenne bishop made in past year, Kansas City diocese official says
Four more allegations of sexual abuse have been made against former Bishop Joseph Hart in the past year, including accusations that span his time in Wyoming, an official with the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph said Thursday.
“The (Kansas City) diocese has turned over all information we have about allegations pertaining to Bishop Hart to the Diocese of Cheyenne, which I understand they have shared with local law enforcement in Cheyenne,” said Jack Smith, a spokesman for the Missouri diocese.
The allegations are the latest against Hart, who has been dogged by claims that he serially sexually abused boys for decades. At least three Wyoming men have accused Hart, while the Kansas City diocese has settled lawsuits with 10 other alleged victims over the years, Smith told the Star-Tribune.
The Best and Worst Things in the History of the World
Ruling Class Degeneracy Files:
What can a tiny bone tell us about Jeffrey Epstein’s death?
The investigation into disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein’s death could hinge on a minute bone in his neck that in the past has shed light on whether a cause of death is a suicide or a murder.
Epstein’s autopsy reportedly showed multiple broken neck bones, the Washington Post wrote Thursday, citing anonymous sources. But the curiosity surrounds one of the broken bones: The hyoid.
Though the bone is small, it’s been critical in several high-profile cases. The reason: The hyoid can break when a person dies by hanging, particularly when a person is older. But it can also provide tell-tale clues that a person was strangled.
Barbara Sampson, New York City’s chief medical examiner who is handling Epstein’s autopsy, said that the discovery of the broken hyoid doesn’t determine anything. The cause of the financier’s death is still pending.
“In all forensic investigations, all information must be synthesized to determine the cause and manner of death,” Sampson said in a statement to USA TODAY. “Everything must be consistent; no single finding can be evaluated in a vacuum.” www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2019/08/15/mystery-surrounds-hyoid-break-epstein-death-suicide-murder/2017579001/
Here’s the Story Behind That Bizarre Painting of Bill Clinton in a Blue Dress Seen at Jeffrey Epstein’s Home
The painting has launched 1,000 conspiracy theories. But the artist says she had no idea Epstein owned it.
Given the hurricane-force storm of media attention swirling around the case of Jeffrey Epstein, the news that he owned a particularly strange work of art perhaps doesn’t seem like the biggest of deals. After all, the aggressively unsettling decor of Epstein’s homes, which includes displays of prosthetic eyeballs, a female mannequin hanging from a chandelier, and a chessboard whose pieces featured the likenesses of his staff clad only in underwear, was already well established.
This particular work of art, however, features an image of former president Bill Clinton clad in a blue dress and high heels, gesturing to the viewer. Given that Bill Clinton’s name has been prominently connected to Epstein, word of the painting sent the internet conspiracy machine wild.
The original source of the gossip is the not-exactly-reliable Daily Mail, which quotes an unnamed source who snapped a photo of the unsettling Clinton painting through a doorway at Epstein’s $56 million home in 2012. (The Mail claimed it had seen metadata verifying the location and date of the photo.) The New York Post, picking up the story, quoted another anonymous source saying of the painting, “It was hanging up there prominently—as soon as you walked in—in a room to the right. Everybody who saw it laughed and smirked.”
The painting has been identified as Parsing Bill by New York-based Australian artist Petrina Ryan-Kleid. (A print version is available on Saatchi Art starting at $40.) The more feverish corners of the internet immediately began to decode the imagery for clues—but the truth is that it was part of a body of student work produced quite independently of Epstein.
The Clinton painting comes from a pair of works by Ryan-Kleid that lightly satirized political figures. Its companion, a painting of George W. Bush called War Games, features the former president sitting on the floor of the White House playing with paper airplanes and two fallen Jenga towers, referencing his manipulation of the attacks of 9/11 to justify war in Iraq, the defining scandal of Bush’s White House tenure. As for Parsing Bill, the blue dress seems a likely reference to the blue dress that served as evidence in the former president’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, the scandal that marked Clinton’s time in office. news.artnet.com/art-world/bill-clinton-blue-dress-painting-jeffrey-epstein-1628437
Filthy Rich: A Powerful Billionaire, the Sex Scandal that Undid Him, and All the Justice that Money Can Buy: The Shocking True Story of Jeffrey Epstein
Jeffrey Epstein’s Private Island Raided by the Feds
Even after he became a registered sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein brought scores of young women to his private island in the Virgin Islands, to the horror of local air traffic controllers. “On multiple occasions I saw Epstein exit his helicopter, stand on the tarmac in full view of my tower, and board his private jet with children—female children,” a former air traffic controller recently told my colleague Holly Aguirre. “One incident in particular really stands out in my mind, because the girls were just so young. They couldn’t have been over 16.”
Though Epstein was later arrested and charged with running a massive underage sex ring—charges he escaped after he was found dead from an apparent suicide over the weekend—the investigation into his possible crimes remains active. On Monday, the Daily Mail reported that the FBI was spotted conducting a raid on Epstein’s private island, a sign that the investigation had possibly ramped up. Photos taken by an eyewitness on a nearby charter boat show several men in FBI jackets getting off speedboats and driving around the island in golf carts.
Despite Epstein’s death, law enforcement and lawyers representing the victims have vowed to keep investigating the shady financier and his ring of associates, starting with the people who may have assisted in his abuse. Chief among them: Attorney General William Barr, who has been criticized for not doing enough to ensure that Epstein could not commit suicide. www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/08/jeffrey-epstein-private-island-fbi-raid?mbid=social_facebook&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_brand=vf&utm_social-type=owned&fbclid=IwAR2yijyASsUXZLUDmjUNqzl6n7YjTFzxJyW8tDx-mL9OLPV9quEbNH-qytw
Donald Barr: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know
The father of US Attorney General William Barr hired a young college dropout named Jeffrey E. Epstein to teach math at the Dalton School in the 1970s. The convicted sexual predator was 21 when the college prep school headmaster Donald Barr engaged him in the early 1970s as a physics and calculus instructor. A report said he was hired in 1973, but it appears Barr hired him in 1974, the same year that Barr would leave the school after a decade as headmaster.
Epstein, in jail awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges, died Saturday while in custody of the federal Bureau of Prisons, which is overseen by the Department of Justice. Epstein is reported to have hanged himself, but the New York City Medical Examiner has not yet ruled on the former billionaire’s cause and manner of death, per an email to Heavy.
It’s been widely reported that the accused pedophile had been on suicide watch but was recently taken off that close surveillance. His death is under investigation, including a report that Epstein was not checked for hours and one guard was not an corrections officer, AG Barr said Monday.
Donald Barr died in 2004 at age 82. He ran the tony Upper East Side Ivy League college prep school for 10 years before stepping down. In 1976, Epstein too would leave the school for reasons unknown. But in a recent exposé, it’s revealed that Epstein was seen as both flashy and unconventional and perhaps too interested in the teenage girls that were his pupils.
Here’s what you need to know:
1. Epstein Had Taken Classes But Ultimately Dropped Out of Two Prestigious New York Universities. Donald Barr Hired Him to Teach at the Famous Prep School
Now, relax
Eagle Rock, San Diego
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So Long
Edward Lewis, ‘Spartacus’ producer who helped break Hollywood’s blacklist, dies at 99
In the late 1940s and ’50s, a group of prominent Hollywood creatives became the target of a witch hunt fueled by post-World War II anti-communist sentiment.
Known as the Hollywood Ten, they were charged with contempt of Congress, fired from their jobs and served time in prison. The entertainment industry — under mounting political pressure to prove its good faith — caved in and self-imposed a blacklist barring dozens of entertainment professionals believed to be communist sympathizers from working.
The blacklist was enforced for more than a decade — until producer Edward Lewis helped break it by bringing the screenwriter Dalton Trumbo on board for “Spartacus” and giving him full credit for his work.
Lewis died on July 27 in Los Angeles, his daughter Joan confirmed. He was 99. Mildred, his wife of 73 years and a frequent collaborator, died April 7. She was 98. No cause of death was given for either.
Together they shared an Oscar nomination for producing the 1982 film “Missing,” about an American journalist who died in Chile. That movie also shared the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival that year.
Lewis’ film career started in the 1940s and eventually took him to the heights of Hollywood, working with greats like John Frankenheimer, John Huston and Louis Malle. “Spartacus,” his 1960s blockbuster directed by Stanley Kubrick and executive produced by and starring Kirk Douglas, was among the films that brought him 21 Oscar nominations over his career.
Lewis also dabbled in script writing and produced television, including the comedy series “Schlitz Playhouse of Stars.”
It was the costly “Spartacus,” adapted from a Howard Fast novel brought to Lewis by his wife, that helped give voice back to Hollywood’s shunned. www.latimes.com/obituaries/story/2019-08-15/edward-lewis-producer-spartacus-dead