Tag Archives: New York Times

So You Want To Be ‘Exceptional’, Eh?

Posted on by under Economic issues, Environmental Issues, Global Issues, Political commentary, Social commentary

We’ve all heard the term ‘American Exceptionalism’, one which causes me to shake my head and roll my eyes.  It ties in with the ultra-discriminatory ‘America First’ ideology and other supremacy notions and has no place in this world.  But, it turns out there is one area in which we are ‘exceptional’ … we, particularly the wealthy in this nation, contribute more per capita to the destruction of the environment than any other nation.  Not something to take pride in, is it?

Somini Sengupta is the international climate reporter for the New York Times, and what follows is her column/newsletter from February 28th.

The American Exception

When it comes to climate footprints, rich people in the United States are in a class of their own.

By Somini Sengupta

28 February 2023

Climate change may be a global problem. But we are not all the same. Far from it.

The wealthier we are, the more climate pollution we produce, because of how much electricity we consume, what we eat, and how much we drive. But it’s not just wealth. It matters a lot in which country we are wealthy.

Take a look below at this chart that my colleague Mira Rojanasakul prepared based on an International Energy Agency analysis of per capita carbon dioxide emissions by income.

You will see the wealthiest people in the United States have an astonishingly large climate footprint, far larger than rich people in wealthy, industrialized Europe and in fast-rising China.

Not only that: Nearly everyone in the United States, even those in the lowest income brackets, produces a lot of climate pollution relative to everyone else in the world. It’s the way our economy is built. We take for granted long commutes and frequent flights. Our electricity comes from sources that are relatively carbon-intensive. The rest of the world is different.

Americans are exceptional.

I know this intuitively. I’ve reported from more than 50 countries. But seeing the spread of per capita emissions from the world’s four largest economies — the United States, the European Union, China and India — still surprised me.

The richest 10 percent of Americans, or those who make an average of $233,600 a year, produces 56.5 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per person, per year on average, according to the I.E.A. analysis. That’s more than double the emissions of the richest 10 percent in Europe. It’s nearly double that of the richest 10 percent of Chinese.

Everyone else in the United States has a big footprint, too, relative to their counterparts in Europe, China and India. For instance, the poorest 10 percent of Americans, those making $2,500 a year on average, have a carbon footprint that’s almost as big as everyone in India, except India’s richest 10 percent.

Likewise, the poorest 10 percent of Americans have a climate footprint larger than the poorest 30 percent of Chinese.

This is about emissions per capita. Not about total emissions.

India and China are obviously much more populous than the United States and Europe. So their small footprints add up. I get that. I wrote about the population question not long ago. But for those at the bottom, and even middle, of their class ladders, they do not produce a lot of emissions.

Inequality within countries really matters.

In China, for instance, the richest 10 percent have a footprint 33 times the size of the poorest 10 percent.

In the United States, the richest 10 percent pollute 16 times as much as the poorest 10 percent. See where you fall on this graph:

In India, the climate pollution produced by the poorest 10 percent of the population is negligible. Many of them still cook with charcoal or cow dung. They may not have access to electricity around the clock. They most certainly don’t own a car. At best, a bicycle.

This could make climate action simpler (in theory).

A small number of relatively wealthy people can make a very big difference. Most of all, in the United States. “The richest individuals have many ways to reduce their emissions,” the International Energy Agency analysis pointed out. They include individual changes and policy changes.

(Note: replacing a massive petroleum-burning car for a giant electric truck isn’t quite a silver bullet.)

And bear in mind that the so-called yacht class, the richest 0.1 percent of the population, are super polluters of another order. Their emissions are 10 times as much as the whole world’s richest 10 percent combined.

I have learned something else from going over these numbers.

I have frequently used the term “we” in writing about climate change. Are we doomed? Can we limit temperature rise to relatively safe planetary boundaries? How quickly can we wean ourselves from fossil fuels to slow down warming?

But who is we, exactly? I’m going to think harder about when I use the term. Because when it comes to our role in this profound global problem, we are not the same.

We The People v Fox ‘News’ Corporation

Posted on by under Election 2020, Free Press Issues, History, Law and justice, Political commentary, Social commentary, voting rights

During the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, the New York Times published an ad for contributing donations to defend Martin Luther King, Jr., on perjury charges. The ad contained several minor factual inaccuracies.

The city Public Safety Commissioner, L.B. Sullivan, felt that the criticism of his subordinates reflected on him, even though he was not mentioned in the ad. Sullivan sent a written request to the Times to publicly retract the information, as required for a public figure to seek punitive damages in a libel action under Alabama law.

When the Times refused and claimed that they were puzzled by the request, Sullivan filed a libel action against the Times and a group of African American ministers mentioned in the ad. A jury in state court awarded him $500,000 in damages. The state supreme court affirmed, and the Times appealed.

When the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, the Court ruled that when a statement concerns a public figure, the Court held, it is not enough to show that it is false for the press to be liable for libel. Instead, the target of the statement must show that it was made with knowledge of or reckless disregard for its falsity. Brennan used the term “actual malice” to summarize this standard.  This was a landmark case and decision that has probably saved this nation billions of dollars in lawsuits over mistakes made by the press.

Fast forward to 2021 through present and consider the information we recently learned that Fox ‘News’, with full knowledge that the 2020 election was a fair one and that President Biden was the legitimately elected president, perpetuated the Big Lie that the election had been “stolen” from one Donald Trump.  Not only did the reports like Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham know that they were telling lies, but the CEO of Fox Corporation, Rupert Murdoch, also knew that his employees were selling the public a grab-bag of very harmful lies!  And Murdoch allowed this to go on for two years.

Dominion Voting Systems, the company that manufactures the electronic voting machines used throughout the country, is suing Fox ‘News’ for libel, and it seems to me they have a pretty darn good case, based on what we have seen of the private communications among the Fox hosts.  However, I don’t think it should end there.  Certainly Dominion suffered harm from Fox’ lies, but so did the people of this country.

Fox ‘News’ is the most-watched cable ‘news’ channel in the nation.  Though I personally do not understand this, according to New York Times’ David Brooks, rural America sees Fox as their ‘community’, as the people who understand them and their problems.  Some, perhaps millions of people, never see any news outside of Fox’ control and may still not be aware that they were blatantly lied to for two years about the results of the 2020 election.  Those people are voting, based on what Fox tells them, against their own interest as well as against the interests of the nation.  They … and we … have been harmed by the lies that Fox hosts repeatedly told, lies that were believed and acted upon, by their viewers.

It seems to me that Dominion isn’t the only one who should be suing Fox, but that We the People have grounds for an enormous class action suit against the company.  Because of their lies, we had January 6th.  Because of their lies, millions if not billions of dollars of taxpayer money has been spent on recounts and lawsuits.  Thousands of hours of personnel time have been dedicated to debunking Fox’ lies.  And nearly every state in the nation has seized on the false notion that there was significant voter fraud in 2020 to warrant them passing voter suppression laws that will hurt us all.

Oh yes, we can prove ‘actual malice’ in this case.  Fox cared only about one thing … its ratings, not losing viewers and thus advertising money.  Murdoch’s and Hannity’s and Carlson’s and Ingraham’s personal bank accounts and investment portfolios meant more than the trust of the public and thus they betrayed that trust.  What’s to stop the people of this nation from filing a lawsuit?

What’s Up With Dilbert And His Creator?

Posted on by under Free Press Issues, History, Political commentary, Racism & Bigotry, Social commentary

I’m sure that unless you’ve been living in a cave in the dessert for the past week or so, you’ve heard of the Dilbert/Scott Adams issue.  Dilbert is no more, and apparently Mr. Adams’ sources of income are now dried up.  Ah well … he brought it on himself with his racist rhetoric, so I have zero empathy for him.  I was curious about a few things, however, such as the Rasmussen poll cited by Adams.  Charles Blow’s latest column clarifies the issue fairly well, I think.  Take a look …

The ‘Dilbert’ Cartoonist and the Durability of White-Flight Thinking

Charles M. Blow

28 February 2023

When Scott Adams, the Donald Trump-revering creator of the “Dilbert” cartoon strip, last week quoted stats from the right-leaning polling operation Rasmussen Reports to justify a racist rant in which he admonished white people to “just get the hell away” from Black people, whom he labeled “a hate group,” the condemnations were swift.

Hundreds of newspapers dropped the comic strip, Adams’s publisher scrapped plans to release his next book, and he said his book agent “canceled” him.

So what was in the poll? Adams referred to the responses to one question: “Do you agree or disagree with this statement: ‘It’s OK to be white.’” Fifty-three percent of Black people agreed, 26 percent disagreed, and 21 percent responded that they weren’t sure. Most Black people, in other words, innocuously said there’s nothing wrong with being white.

But before we go further, we should establish how odd, problematic and confusing the question is. What does “OK to be white” mean? What does “OK” mean in this context? Also: Why single out Black people? Forty-one percent of respondents who were neither white nor Black also didn’t answer in the affirmative. Furthermore, 20 percent of white people didn’t answer in the affirmative.

Are these people also part of a hate group?

Of course not. Adams was simply being lazy in his analysis and bigoted in his assessment. During his diatribe, he said that for years, he’s been “identifying as Black” because he likes to be on the “winning team” and he likes to “help.”

As he put it, “I always thought, ‘Well, if you help the Black community, that’s sort of the biggest lever, you can find the biggest benefit.’ So I thought, ‘Well, that’s the hardest thing and the biggest benefit, so I’d like to focus a lot of my life resources in helping Black Americans.’”

That’s like Miss Millie in the movie “The Color Purple” screaming “I’ve always been good to you people” while demeaning us people.

Adams was consoling himself for failing in the role of white savior while justifying the embrace of the centuries-old white fatalism about and exhaustion with the so-called Negro problem, a supposedly intractably lost cause that consumes energy and resources to no avail because, in the minds of some white people, Black people are pathologically broken.

As Adams concluded: “There’s no fixing this. This can’t be fixed. You just have to escape. So that’s what I did. I went to a neighborhood where I have a very low Black population.”

He’s not alone in this view or approach.

Since the process of school desegregation began in the 1950s; the gains of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, including the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968; and the civil unrest in major cities before and after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., we saw a tsunami of white flight that transformed cities across the country.

But in the decades that followed, as more Black people trickled out to the suburbs to which white people had fled, there was some ebb to segregation and some hope that it was coming to an end.

A 2012 report titled “The End of the Segregated Century” by the right-leaning Manhattan Institute found that “American cities are now more integrated than they’ve been since 1910.”

Now? America is resegregating. A 2021 analysis by the Othering & Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, found that “out of every metropolitan region in the United States with more than 200,000 residents, 81 percent (169 out of 209) were more segregated as of 2019 than they were in 1990.”

That pattern contributes to more segregation in our schools, which research has shown has negative outcomes, particularly for Black children.

And yet Adams blithely pronounced that Black people are haters who have to “fix” their “own problem” because “everybody else figured it out.” He said, “Focus on education, and you could have a good life, too.”

But the attendant problems of segregation — past and present — affect public elementary and high schools and extend to higher education. A 2021 Brookings Institution paper noted that not only does the overall Black-white wealth gap remain stark but “white college graduates have seven times more wealth than Black college graduates” and Black college graduates “experience more difficulty in accumulating wealth than white college graduates since they accrue more student loan debt.”

What Adams doesn’t acknowledge — or possibly doesn’t understand — is that the problems that make white people like him want to flee can be traced, in large measure, to the decisions that many white people have made.

As the 1968 Kerner Commission report put it: “What white Americans have never fully understood — but what the Negro can never forget — is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”

There have always been people in this country who looked at Black people as a problem, one that needed to be contained, suppressed or escaped. There have always been those who preferred a white-flight ethos, who felt most at home with homogeneity, who felt that the best way to deal with Black people was with a remove.

It was the way some people in the South reacted when enslaved Black people were emancipated or the way some in the North reacted when throngs of Black people began to arrive as part of the Great Migration.

Nicholas Guyatt pointed out in his book “Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation” that for decades before emancipation, even many abolitionists saw the only workable plan for Black liberation being the segregation of Black people in a colony of their own out West and away from the existing states.

But at the same time out West in the 1840s, the provisional government of the Oregon territory began to pass a series of racial exclusion laws meant to prevent or discourage Black people from living there. Walidah Imarisha, an assistant professor in the Black studies department at Portland State University and the director of the school’s Center for Black Studies, said, “Oregon was founded as a racist white utopia,” in which “the idea was that white folks would come here and build the perfect white society” — and that meant doing it without Black people there.

When California was drawing up its Constitution to join the Union, the state debated excluding Black people. The delegate who brought forth an exclusion resolution said that with migrating free Black people, the state could find itself “flooded with a population of free Negroes,” which would be “the greatest calamity that could befall California.”

In that way, what Adams said, while racist, was less outside the bounds of America’s troubled ideological canon and more in step with it on the question of having a functional, egalitarian, pluralistic society.

Tearing It Down, Not Making It Great …

Posted on by under Economic issues, Election 2022, Global Issues, Political commentary, Social commentary

We’ve become so used to hearing the term ‘maga’ that perhaps we’ve forgotten what those four letters were originally intended to stand for (though they never did): “make America great again”.  It was the campaign slogan for the former guy back in 2015-2016 and should have gone into the dung heap thereafter, for he did nothing to make anything great.  However, the media kept applying the term to any and all who supported said former guy, and now it’s become part of American slang … much to my our chagrin.  Paul Krugman, an economist and astute political observer writing for the New York Times, posits that what the ‘maga crowd’ have done and are doing today is actually quite the opposite of making the nation ‘great’, and I fully agree with his take on the subject …

Making America the Opposite of Great

Paul Krugman

05 January 2023

I admit it: Like many liberals, I’m feeling a fair bit of MAGAfreude — taking some pleasure in the self-destruction of the American right.

There has, after all, never been a spectacle like the chaos we’ve seen in the House of Representatives this week. It had been a century since a speaker wasn’t chosen on the first ballot — and the last time that happened, there was an actual substantive dispute: Republican progressives (yes, they existed back then) demanded, and eventually received, procedural reforms that they hoped would favor their agenda.

This time, there has been no significant dispute about policy — Kevin McCarthy and his opponents agree on key policy issues like investigating Hunter Biden’s laptop and depriving the Internal Revenue Service of the resources it needs to go after wealthy tax cheats. Long after he tried to appease his opponents by surrendering his dignity, the voting went on.

But while the spectacle has been amazing and, yes, entertaining, neither I nor, I believe, many other liberals are experiencing the kind of glee Republicans would be feeling if the parties’ roles were reversed. For one thing, liberals want the U.S. government to function, which among other things means that we need a duly constituted House of Representatives, even if it’s run by people we don’t like. For another, I don’t think there are many on the U.S. left (such as it is) who define themselves the way so many on the right do: by their resentments.

And yes, I mean “resentments” rather than “grievances.” Grievances are about things you believe you deserve, and might be diminished if you get some of what you want. Resentment is about feeling that you’re being looked down on, and can only be assuaged by hurting the people you, at some level, envy.

Consider the phrase (and associated sentiment), popular on the right, “owning the libs.” In context, “owning” doesn’t mean defeating progressive policies, say by repealing the Affordable Care Act. It means, instead, humiliating liberals personally — making them look weak and foolish.

I won’t claim that liberals are immune to such sentiments. As I said, MAGAfreude is a real thing, and I’m feeling a bit of it myself. But liberals have never seemed remotely as interested in humiliating conservatives as conservatives are in humiliating liberals. And a substantial part of what has been going on in the House seems to be that some Republicans who expected to own the libs after a red wave election have acted out their disappointment by owning Kevin McCarthy instead.

And does anyone doubt that resentment on the part of those who felt disrespected was central to the rise of Donald Trump? Are there any pundits left who still believe that it was largely about “economic anxiety”?

I’m not saying that the decline of manufacturing jobs in the heartland was a myth: It really did happen, and it hurt millions of Americans. But the failure of Trump’s trade wars to deliver a manufacturing revival doesn’t seem to have turned off his base. Why?

The likely answer is that Trump’s anti-globalism, his promise to Make America Great Again, had less to do with trade balances and job creation than with a sense that snooty foreigners considered us chumps. “The world is laughing at us” was a consistent theme of Trump speeches, and his supporters surely imagined that the same was true of domestic globalist elites.

And I have a theory that Trump’s own underlying ludicrousness, his manifest lack of the intellectual capacity and emotional maturity to be president, was part of what endeared him to his base. You fancy liberals think you’re so smart? Well, we’ll show you, by electing someone you consider a clown!

The irony is that the MAGA movement has succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of sinister globalists (if any exist) in making America the opposite of great. Right now the world really is laughing at us, although it’s terrified, too. America is still the essential nation, on multiple fronts. When the world’s greatest economic and military power seemingly can’t even get a functioning government up and running, the risks are global.

I mean, even with a speaker in place, how likely is it that the people we’ve been watching the past few days will agree to raise the debt ceiling, even if failing to do so creates a huge financial crisis? And there may be many other risks requiring emergency congressional action even before we get to that point.

Of course, the world is laughing even harder at Republicans, both the ultraright refuseniks and the spineless careerists like McCarthy who helped empower the crazies. For what shall it profit a man, if he shall lose his own soul, and still not gain enough votes to become speaker of the House?

I’m not sure what we are in store for, nor is anyone else. One thing is sure, however: America is already less great than it was when Nancy Pelosi ran the House, and it’s shrinking by the day.

Jaw-Dropping!!! 😲

Posted on by under education, Election 2022, History, Political commentary

In last month’s mid-term elections, a relatively unknown man named George Santos was elected to represent New York’s 3rd district in the U.S. House of Representatives.  Republicans will have a very slim majority of 4 seats in the House come January 3rd.  An article in yesterday’s New York Times about Santos caused my jaw to drop.  Apparently, Mr. Santos is a consummate liar and literally nothing on his resume is to be believed!  A few snippets from the NYT article …

    George Santos, whose election to Congress on Long Island last month helped Republicans clinch a narrow majority in the House of Representatives, built his candidacy on the notion that he was the “full embodiment of the American dream” and was running to safeguard it for others.

    His campaign biography amplified his storybook journey: He is the son of Brazilian immigrants, and the first openly gay Republican to win a House seat as a non-incumbent. By his account, he catapulted himself from a New York City public college to become a “seasoned Wall Street financier and investor” with a family-owned real estate portfolio of 13 properties and an animal rescue charity that saved more than 2,500 dogs and cats.

    But a New York Times review of public documents and court filings from the United States and Brazil, as well as various attempts to verify claims that Mr. Santos, 34, made on the campaign trail, calls into question key parts of the résumé that he sold to voters.

    Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, the marquee Wall Street firms on Mr. Santos’s campaign biography, told The Times they had no record of his ever working there. Officials at Baruch College, which Mr. Santos has said he graduated from in 2010, could find no record of anyone matching his name and date of birth graduating that year.

    There was also little evidence that his animal rescue group, Friends of Pets United, was, as Mr. Santos claimed, a tax-exempt organization: The Internal Revenue Service could locate no record of a registered charity with that name.

    His financial disclosure forms suggest a life of some wealth. He lent his campaign more than $700,000 during the midterm election, has donated thousands of dollars to other candidates in the last two years and reported a $750,000 salary and over $1 million in dividends from his company, the Devolder Organization.

    Yet the firm, which has no public website or LinkedIn page, is something of a mystery. On a campaign website, Mr. Santos once described Devolder as his “family’s firm” that managed $80 million in assets. On his congressional financial disclosure, he described it as a capital introduction consulting company, a type of boutique firm that serves as a liaison between investment funds and deep-pocketed investors. But Mr. Santos’s disclosures did not reveal any clients, an omission three election law experts said could be problematic if such clients exist.

    And while Mr. Santos has described a family fortune in real estate, he has not disclosed, nor could The Times could find, records of his properties.

But wait … it gets even worse!

    Records show that Mr. Santos’s mother, who died in 2016, lived for a time in the Brazilian city of Niterói, a Rio suburb where she was employed as a nurse. After Mr. Santos obtained a high school equivalency diploma, he apparently also spent some time there.

    In 2008, when Mr. Santos was 19, he stole the checkbook of a man his mother was caring for, according to Brazilian court records uncovered by The Times. Police and court records show that Mr. Santos used the checkbook to make fraudulent purchases, including a pair of shoes. Two years later, Mr. Santos confessed to the crime and was later charged.

    The court and local prosecutor in Brazil confirmed the case remains unresolved. Mr. Santos did not respond to an official summons, and a court representative could not find him at his given address, records show.

    That period in Brazil overlapped with when Mr. Santos said he was attending Baruch College, where he has said he was awarded a bachelor’s degree in economics and finance. But Baruch College said it was unable to find records of Mr. Santos …

The first question is … why are we only learning of this now???  How did he manage to bamboozle the Republican Party into the nomination, and why didn’t the Democratic Party do their opposition research homework?  The next question is … will he be allowed to take his seat in the U.S. House of Representatives on January 3rd, just two weeks from now?  The chairman of New York’s Democratic Party has called for an ethics investigation, but given the slim Republican majority in the House, best guess is that nothing much will happen … for now, at least. Mr. Santos is yet another example of what the Republican Party has become.  He should fit in really well with Marge Greene, Loren Boebert, Matt Gaetz and some of the others he’ll be serving with, eh?

I urge you to read the entire article … it’s a bit lengthy, but it is an eye-opener, a jaw-dropper!

Truth Doesn’t Require An Apology

Posted on by under Election 2022, Free Press Issues, Law and justice, Political commentary, Racism & Bigotry, Social commentary

I fully support civil discourse, compassion, tolerance, kindness, etc., but there comes a time when it is necessary to call a spade a spade.  President Biden did just that earlier this week … he called the far-right Republican movement a ‘threat to democracy’ and ‘semi-fascist’.  Those who are angered by his words should take a long, hard look at what their hopes for the future of this nation are and how they would like to see those hopes achieved.  Charles Blow’s latest OpEd in the New York Times addresses that outrage better than I could (that’s why he gets paid for his opinions and I don’t).

Biden Shouldn’t Apologize to Republicans

By Charles M. Blow

Opinion Columnist

4 September 2022

Republicans are outraged — or possibly simply pretending to be outraged — that President Biden has, in recent speeches, warned that “MAGA Republicans” are a threat to democracy and, at one point, called the philosophy fueling Trumpism “semi-fascism.”

But there is no scandal here. Biden was simply calling a thing a thing. In fact, I would prefer that he be even more pointed and not try so hard to dodge the charge that he’s casting the net too widely.

Biden first used the term “semi-fascism” two weeks ago, at a Democratic fund-raiser in Maryland, saying: “It’s not just Trump; it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the — I’m going to say, something, it’s like semi-fascism.”

Republicans quickly demanded that he apologize for insulting half the electorate. But those Republicans who voted for Donald Trump deserve to be called out for their actions. Trump has consistently exhibited fascist tendencies and espoused racism, misogyny and white nationalism. Republicans supported him, defended him and voted for him. They’ve been actively courting this condemnation.

And yet, ever since the initial brouhaha over his fascism comments, Biden has insisted on walking back his assertion, seemingly determined to distinguish more genteel Republicans from the rest of their party. At a rally in Maryland, shortly after his fund-raiser, Biden said: “I respect conservative Republicans. I don’t respect these MAGA Republicans.”

Personally, I have a very hard time splitting that hair. In 2020, 92 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning independent voters backed Trump. According to a Quinnipiac University poll released last week, 73 percent of Republicans still have a favorable opinion of him, and 72 percent want him to run for re-election in 2024.

The overwhelming majority of Republicans support Trump. The pool of respectable conservatives is shallow, and that’s assuming that they can be neatly defined as those not voting for Trump.

Still, it is clear that Biden is sensitive to the criticism, even as he charges ahead with this pointed assessment.

In Biden’s speech in Philadelphia on Thursday, he returned to the idea that “MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic.” But he took pains to more clearly separate them from other Republicans, saying that “not every Republican, not even the majority of Republicans, are MAGA Republicans. Not every Republican embraces their extreme ideology.”

Still, he underscored that “there is no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans.”

Biden was twisting himself into a rhetorical knot when there was no reason to do so. When he said that not even a majority of Republicans are MAGA Republicans, it muddied the waters. What, to Joe Biden, is a MAGA Republican?

On Friday, Biden walked his comments back further still, telling reporters, “I don’t consider any Trump supporter to be a threat to the country.”

He went on to say, “I do think anyone who calls for the use of violence, fails to condemn violence when it’s used, refuses to acknowledge an election has been won, insists upon changing the way in which we rule and count votes — that is a threat to democracy.”

Make no mistake: A significant portion of Republican voters have done exactly what Biden has tried to exempt them from having done. A Public Religion Research Institute poll published in November found that nearly a third of Republicans agreed with the statement “Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”

Also, a later poll found that a quarter of Republicans were adherents of the internet conspiracy theory QAnon and believe that “there is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders” and that “a group of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who run a global child sex-trafficking operation” control America’s government, media and financial system.

As PolitiFact noted in June, citing a number of polls, roughly 70 percent of Republicans don’t see Biden as the legitimate winner of the presidency.

Furthermore, a July accounting by FiveThirtyEight found that “halfway through the primary season, we can say definitively that at least 120 election deniers have won their party’s nomination and will be on the ballot in the fall.” Republican voters delivered primary victories to those candidates.

Republicans have a knack for persuading Democrats to pull their punches. It was the same strategy they used against Barack Obama after he said some Americans were “bitter” and “cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

He was absolutely correct, but in politics, telling the truth can be a sin.

It was the same strategy Republicans used against Hillary Clinton after she said: “You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”

She was absolutely right. She may have even understated the number.

Democrats have to stop falling for the line that calling out the dangers that some voters present to the country is somehow a divisive, offensive, unfair attack on the innocent. No person who voted for Trump or supports him now is above being named and shamed.

Biden doesn’t owe Republicans an apology; they owe the country an apology.

Understanding Juneteenth (Reprise)

Posted on by under Holidays, Law and justice, Political commentary, Racism & Bigotry, Social commentary

This is the post I posted on Juneteenth in 2020, but since I couldn’t say it any better today than I did then (actually, Jamelle Bouie did most of the work on this) then I thought it apropos to run it again.

Today is Juneteenth, and I would like to start with a few words from President Barack Obama …

Obama“Juneteenth has never been a celebration of victory, or an acceptance of the way things are. It’s a celebration of progress. It’s an affirmation that despite the most painful parts of our history, change is possible––and there is still so much work to do.”

I planned to write a piece about Juneteenth, but I found that it had already been done, much better and much more authentically than I could possibly have done it, by Jamelle Bouie, an opinion columnist for the New York Times, and former chief political correspondent for Slate magazine.

Why Juneteenth Matters

It was black Americans who delivered on Lincoln’s promise of “a new birth of freedom.”

jamelle-bouieBy Jamelle Bouie

Opinion Columnist

Neither Abraham Lincoln nor the Republican Party freed the slaves. They helped set freedom in motion and eventually codified it into law with the 13th Amendment, but they were not themselves responsible for the end of slavery. They were not the ones who brought about its final destruction.

Who freed the slaves? The slaves freed the slaves.

“Slave resistance,” as the historian Manisha Sinha points out in “The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition,” “lay at the heart of the abolition movement.”

“Prominent slave revolts marked the turn toward immediate abolition,” Sinha writes, and “fugitive slaves united all factions of the movement and led the abolitionists to justify revolutionary resistance to slavery.”

When secession turned to war, it was enslaved people who turned a narrow conflict over union into a revolutionary war for freedom. “From the first guns at Sumter, the strongest advocates of emancipation were the slaves themselves,” the historian Ira Berlin wrote in 1992. “Lacking political standing or public voice, forbidden access to the weapons of war, slaves tossed aside the grand pronouncements of Lincoln and other Union leaders that the sectional conflict was only a war for national unity and moved directly to put their own freedom — and that of their posterity — atop the national agenda.”

All of this is apropos of Juneteenth, which commemorates June 19, 1865, when Gen. Gordon Granger entered Galveston, Texas, to lead the Union occupation force and delivered the news of the Emancipation Proclamation to enslaved people in the region. This holiday, which only became a nationwide celebration (among black Americans) in the 20th century, has grown in stature over the last decade as a result of key anniversaries (2011 to 2015 was the sesquicentennial of the Civil War), trends in public opinion (the growing racial liberalism of left-leaning whites), and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Over the last week, as Americans continued to protest police brutality, institutional racism and structural disadvantage in cities and towns across the country, elected officials in New York and Virginia have announced plans to make Juneteenth a paid holiday, as have a number of prominent businesses like Nike, Twitter and the NFL.

There’s obviously a certain opportunism here, an attempt to respond to the moment and win favorable coverage, with as little sacrifice as possible. (Paid holidays, while nice, are a grossly inadequate response to calls for justice and equality.) But if Americans are going to mark and celebrate Juneteenth, then they should do so with the knowledge and awareness of the agency of enslaved people.

Juneteenth-2

Credit…David J. Phillip/Associated Press

Emancipation wasn’t a gift bestowed on the slaves; it was something they took for themselves, the culmination of their long struggle for freedom, which began as soon as chattel slavery was established in the 17th century, and gained even greater steam with the Revolution and the birth of a country committed, at least rhetorically, to freedom and equality. In fighting that struggle, black Americans would open up new vistas of democratic possibility for the entire country.

To return to Ira Berlin — who tackled this subject in “The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States” — it is useful to look at the end of slavery as “a near-century-long process” rather than “the work of a moment, even if that moment was a great civil war.” Those in bondage were part of this process at every step of the way, from resistance and rebellion to escape, which gave them the chance, as free blacks, to weigh directly on the politics of slavery. “They gave the slaves’ oppositional activities a political form,” Berlin writes, “denying the masters’ claim that malingering and tool breaking were reflections of African idiocy and indolence, that sabotage represented the mindless thrashings of a primitive people, and that outsiders were the ones who always inspired conspiracies and insurrections.”

By pushing the question of emancipation into public view, black Americans raised the issue of their “status in freedom” and therefore “the question of citizenship and its attributes.” And as the historian Martha Jones details in “Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America,” it is black advocacy that ultimately shapes the nation’s understanding of what it means to be an American citizen. “Never just objects of judicial, legislative, or antislavery thought,” black Americans “drove lawmakers to refine their thinking about citizenship. On the necessity of debating birthright citizenship, black Americans forced the issue.”

After the Civil War, black Americans — free and freed — would work to realize the promise of emancipation, and to make the South a true democracy. They abolished property qualifications for voting and officeholding, instituted universal manhood suffrage, opened the region’s first public schools and made them available to all children. They stood against racial distinctions and discrimination in public life and sought assistance for the poor and disadvantaged. Just a few years removed from degradation and social death, these millions, wrote W.E.B. Du Bois in “Black Reconstruction in America, “took decisive and encouraging steps toward the widening and strengthening of human democracy.”

Juneteenth may mark just one moment in the struggle for emancipation, but the holiday gives us an occasion to reflect on the profound contributions of enslaved black Americans to the cause of human freedom. It gives us another way to recognize the central place of slavery and its demise in our national story. And it gives us an opportunity to remember that American democracy has more authors than the shrewd lawyers and erudite farmer-philosophers of the Revolution, that our experiment in liberty owes as much to the men and women who toiled in bondage as it does to anyone else in this nation’s history.

They Are NOT Heroes

Posted on by under Election 2020, History, Law and justice, Political commentary, Social commentary

Suddenly I’m hearing Mike Pence, Bill Barr, Ivanka Trump, and others referred to as ‘heroes’.  I don’t see it that way at all.  At some point, they did step up to the plate and do their job for We the People, but for years before that, decades in the case of Ivanka, they failed.  Instead they licked the boots and played “yes-man”, enabling a lunatic who was intent on turning the United States into his own personal playground.  I am not alone in my view of these and other people, for yesterday Frank Bruni wrote of them in his column in the New York Times …

Don’t Let Bill Barr and Ivanka Trump Visit the Reputation Laundromat

June 16, 2022

By Frank Bruni

The Jan. 6 committee’s televised hearings are many things: the coalescence of scattered revelations into a clearer, cleaner narrative; an unblinking appraisal of the madness of King Donald; an opportunity for Americans to reflect on how close things came, and might yet come, to falling apart.

But for Bill Barr, Bill Stepien, Ivanka Trump and others, they are also something else — something we should not be taken in by.

They are a trip to the reputation laundromat (or perhaps, for this crowd, the reputation dry cleaner). Donald Trump’s onetime acolytes are trying to expunge the stain of their sycophancy. And they’re betting that in a country and era of fickle attention spans and feeble memories, they’ll have more luck with that spot than Lady Macbeth did with hers.

Early this week, the committee showed testimony by Barr, the former attorney general, that he told Trump again and again that Joe Biden had won the 2020 election fairly and definitively. It showed testimony by Stepien, who was Trump’s 2020 campaign manager, that he was among a group of aides — “Team Normal,” he called them — who pushed back against Rudy Giuliani’s hallucinatory insistence that the election was being stolen.

And last week, of course, was Ivanka Trump’s star turn. That’s when we saw her testimony: that she said a big no to the Big Lie.

But her, Barr’s and Stepien’s words don’t amount to moral reckonings. They reflect professional calculations.

Team Normal? If you were still working for Trump by the fourth year of his presidency, there was nothing normal about you. If you served that campaign, during which Trump repeatedly telegraphed his intention to declare any result other than victory an illegitimate one, there was nothing normal about you. If you’d taken the measure of the man before Election Day 2020 and decided, yes, he’s fit to lead America, good for this country and worthy of my efforts and energies on his behalf, there was nothing normal about you.

And if, in the weeks after Election Day, you finally stopped abetting his delusions, midwifing his megalomania and whispering sweet reassurances in his ear, you weren’t returning to normal. You were simply cutting your losses. It was time to hitch your wagon to a sturdier, steadier horse, to find another patron and another payday.

Stepien, as my colleague Michelle Cottle wrote in The Times on Tuesday, “slunk away, coat collar flipped up and hat brim pulled low in the hopes that no one would notice him fleeing the spiraling freak show to which he had sold his services and his soul.”

Susan Glasser, in The New Yorker, also had it right. Reflecting on how Stepien and Barr are now styling themselves (and being showcased) as blunt tellers of Trump-foiling truths, Glasser wrote on Monday evening that they are “not only Trump’s accusers but also first-class enablers of Trump and his lies — until Trump finally found a lie too big for them to enable. Even when it came to their qualms about Trump’s ‘rigged election’ crusade, their outrage came conveniently after the fact, not when it might have made a difference.”

Amen. We can be grateful that Barr and Stepien didn’t travel the final autocratic mile with Trump and not discount their disgraceful road to that point. We can remember how Barr, in advance of Robert Mueller’s report, released a toned-down summary of it that was clearly meant to dull its impact.

We can remember that before Mike Pence patriotically refused Trump’s order not to certify the election results, he pathetically performed the role of Trump’s evangelical beard. And don’t get me started on Ivanka. I’ve spent ample time in her temple of self-celebration, as have others. She and her husband, Jared Kushner, will always do what’s profitable for them, and if that occasionally intersects with the public interest, well, accidents happen. We can think a word of thanks without uttering a syllable of praise.

There were Republicans who took a chance on Trump at the start and got out fast, accepting that either he’d fooled them or they’d kidded themselves. There were Republicans who signaled that much was amiss. Those who didn’t — including Pence, Mike Pompeo and others with presidential aspirations in 2024 — forfeited the moral high ground and can’t credibly reclaim it now.

Nor can they pretend that they were anything other than transaction-minded actors in the most transactional administration I’ve observed. When they benefited from their proximity to Trump, they held their noses, bit their tongues and cuddled close. It’s possible they persuaded themselves that his flaws weren’t so different from any other vain leader’s, that politics is invariably messy and that their compromises were “normal” ones. That’s awfully convenient. And utterly absurd.

Still Hope …

Posted on by under education, Global Issues, History, Political commentary, Racism & Bigotry, Social commentary

I came across an OpEd by Pulitzer Prize-winning Bret Stephens in the New York Times this morning that I thought made some excellent points, gave encouragement to not lose hope, even as our nation seems to be falling apart at the seams some days.

Can We Still Be Optimistic About America?

May 10, 2022

By Bret Stephens, Opinion Columnist

This is a season — an age, really — of American pessimism.

The pessimism comes in many flavors. There is progressive pessimism: The country is tilting toward MAGA-hatted fascism or a new version of “The Handmaid’s Tale.” There is conservative pessimism: The institutions, from primary schools to the Pentagon, are all being captured by wokeness. There is Afropessimism: Black people have always been excluded by systemic, ineradicable racism. There is the pessimism of the white middle and working classes: The country and the values they’ve known for generations are being hijacked by smug, self-dealing elites who view them with contempt.

There is also the pessimism of the middle: We are losing the institutional capacity, cultural norms and moral courage needed to strike pragmatic compromises at almost every level of society. Zero-sum is now our default setting.

These various kinds of pessimism may reach contradictory conclusions, but they are based on undeniable realities. In 2012, there were roughly 41,000 overdose deaths in the United States. Last year, the number topped 100,000. In 2012, there were 4.7 murders for every 100,000 people. Last year, the rate hit an estimated 6.9, a 47 percent increase. A decade ago, you rarely heard of carjackings. Now, they are through the roof. Shoplifting? Ditto. The nation’s mental health was in steep decline before the pandemic, with a 60 percent increase of major depressive episodes among adolescents between 2007 and 2019. Everything we know about the effects of lockdowns and school closures suggests it’s gotten much worse.

Economics tell a similar story. “Twenty-first-century America has somehow managed to produce markedly more wealth for its wealthholders even as it provided markedly less work for its workers,” observed Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute in a landmark 2017 Commentary essay. It’s in part from the loss of meaningful work — and the consequent evaporation of pride, purpose and dignity in labor — that we get the startling increase in death rates among white middle-aged Americans, often to suicide or substance abuse.

The list goes on, but you get the point. Even without the daily reminders of Carter-era inflation, this feels like another era of Carter-style malaise, complete with an unpopular president who tends to inspire more sympathy than he does confidence.

So why am I still an optimist when it comes to America? Because while we are bent, our adversaries are brittle. As we find ways to bend, they can only remain static or shatter.

This week brought two powerful reminders of the point. In Moscow, Vladimir Putin gave his customary May 9 Victory Day speech, in which he enlisted nostalgia for a partly mythical past to promote lies about a wholly mythical present, all for the sake of a war that is going badly for him.

Putin is belatedly discovering that the powers to humiliate, subvert and destroy are weaker forces than the powers to attract, inspire and build — powers free nations possess almost as a birthright. The Kremlin might yet be able to bludgeon its way to something it can call victory. But its reward will mainly be the very rubble it has created. The rest of Ukraine will find ways to flourish, ideally as a member of NATO and the European Union.

Meanwhile, in Shanghai, more than 25 million people remain under strict lockdown, a real-world dystopia in which hovering drones warn residents through loudspeakers to “control your soul’s desire for freedom.” Does anyone still think that China’s handling of the pandemic — its deceits, its mediocre vaccines, a zero-Covid policy that manifestly failed and now this cruel lockdown that has brought hunger and medicine shortages to its richest city — is a model to the rest of the world?

Meanwhile, in Shanghai, more than 25 million people remain under strict lockdown, a real-world dystopia in which hovering drones warn residents through loudspeakers to “control your soul’s desire for freedom.” Does anyone still think that China’s handling of the pandemic — its deceits, its mediocre vaccines, a zero-Covid policy that manifestly failed and now this cruel lockdown that has brought hunger and medicine shortages to its richest city — is a model to the rest of the world?

For all its undeniable progress over 45 years, China remains a Potemkin regime obsessed with fostering aggrandizing illusions: about domestic harmony (aided by a vast system of surveillance and prison camps); about technological innovation (aided by unprecedented theft of intellectual property); about unstoppable economic growth (aided by manufactured statistics). The illusions may win status for Beijing. But they come with a heavy price: the systematic denial of truth, even to the regime itself.

Rulers who come to believe their own propaganda will inevitably miscalculate, often catastrophically. Look again at Putin, who really believed he had a competent military.

Which brings me back to the United States. Just as dictatorships advertise their strengths but hide their weaknesses — both to others and to themselves — democracies do the opposite: We obsess over our weaknesses even as we forget our formidable strengths. It is the source of our pessimism. But it is also, paradoxically, our deepest strength: In refusing to look away from our flaws, we not only acknowledge them but also begin fixing them.

We rethink. We adapt. In bending, we find new ways to grow.

We have a demonstrated record of defanging right-wing demagogues, debunking left-wing ideologues, promoting racial justice, reversing crime waves, revitalizing the political center and reinvigorating the American ideal. Our problems may be hard, but they are neither insoluble nor new.

Those without our freedoms will not be so fortunate.

Black History Month: Seeing America Clearly

Posted on by under Black History Month, education, History, Racism & Bigotry, Social commentary

It is one thing for me, a white person, to write about Black History, but I do so without having the personal experience of growing up Black, not having the true context of what it meant to grow up and live in a world where you were often mistreated and abused, where opportunities afforded to others did not apply to you simply because of the colour of your skin.  So, when I came upon one writer’s personal essay, I was deeply moved, as I believe you will be.  The following essay was published Sunday in the New York Times by Esau McCaulley, an author and a professor at Wheaton College in Illinois.

Black History Month Is About Seeing America Clearly

A woman who was born into enslavement in Alabama.Credit…Jack Delano/Getty Images

Feb. 20, 2022

By Esau McCaulley

Contributing Opinion Writer

Growing up, I didn’t know anyone who did the kinds of jobs featured at career fairs or depicted on television shows. I had never met a Black doctor, lawyer, professor or scientist. Where does a young Black man go when looking for hope? My teachers, overworked as they were, pointed me toward Black luminaries from the past.

The first Black History Month project I recall was about George Washington Carver. I was enthralled with the idea that the early 20th-century agricultural scientist, born into slavery, came up with hundreds of uses for peanuts. By the time Black History Month rolled into full swing, my ode to the master of peanuts sat alongside posters lauding the accomplishments of such stalwarts as Martin Luther King Jr. (he always inspired multiple posters), Rosa Parks, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington and Sojourner Truth.

Black history, in this frame, is the story of exemplars. We learn about the first Black surgeon, Supreme Court justice or astronaut. This version of Black history endeavors to show Black capability and challenge stereotypes. The lesson is clear: If this Black person from history overcame racism, so could we. With enough grit, determination and patience, we too could go to space or invent hundreds of uses for a common crop.

These exemplars were helpful. But the exercise also left me with a feeling that there was a long list of things Black people had never done, and my job was to find one of those things and check it off the list. Then we could stand before the world and say: We have done all the things. Can we have justice now?

This exemplars-based approach to Black history also produced an unintentional consequence. It gave those outside our community license to use Black accomplishment against us. They told us that we needed more exceptional Black people, instead of questioning a society that required such greatness of us. Our very victories were transfigured into condemnations of those still languishing.

I was exposed to a second form of Black History Month when I got older: Black history as corrective. In this version, we learned about Black achievement that had been erased from the historical record. It points us to the African American female mathematicians involved in the space race, as recounted fictionally in the film “Hidden Figures” or the Tuskegee Airmen, whose contributions during World War II were long underappreciated. This is important. One reason that we are still chasing “firsts” is because too many of our accomplishments have been stolen from us. But the problem is that this way of teaching history is about amending a story, instead of telling a more truthful one.

It was not until I got to college that I began to see African American history for what it truly is. It is not a series of heroics or forgotten contributions. It is a different telling of the American story altogether.

What happens when we do not begin with the Mayflower but the slave ship, and tell American history from that perspective? The explicit aim of The Times’s 1619 Project was “to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.” This powerful, challenging idea led to a still-raging debate about racism in America that is playing out in school boards and local elections all over the country, with certain books and ideas being ruled out of bounds.

Americans have not been taught enough about anti-Black racism in our past and present. This, to my mind, is beyond dispute. We are poorer as a nation for these omissions. It is also true that scholars of good will can disagree when making sense of the lives of figures long dead. People are complex, and getting at the complexity is no small thing. Education should be a place where such matters are debated openly.

But endless discussions about the intent of the founding fathers miss a fundamental point. History is not merely the study of intent; it encompasses effect. Whether or not every founding father intended to create a government that sanctioned slavocracy, and later Jim Crow, those were the outcomes. To limit the question to the intent at the expense of the experience of the enslaved and their descendants is to prioritize white American intentions or ideals over Black bodies, a mistake our Republic has made over and over.

What cannot be doubted is that for African peoples brought to this land against our will, slavery and anti-Black racism are defining characteristics of our American experience. This is why Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I have a dream” speech draws upon the Declaration of Independence in its opening movement. He highlighted the fact that this declaration had little purchase in the lives of Black folks:

When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men — yes, Black men as well as white men — would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked insufficient funds.

Black history, then, should be a challenge to our Republic and its core narrative. Instead of quibbling with this detail or that, it must raise a fundamental question about the quality of life Black people have been allowed to experience. If we are indeed a part of this nation, then our lives and experiences have a claim on our national narrative. African American history forces us to view the Black experience of injustice not as the interruption of or caveat to an otherwise grand narrative, but as a compelling story in its own right.

Would this leave us with only a tale of woe? No. There is a dark beauty to the American story. The beauty is not in our innocence. We have been party to too much death and terror for that. African American history requires the recasting of our central figures, where those on the sidelines are brought to the forefront. The enslaved must be allowed to unbend their backs and step into the light and claim the glory due to them. Washington and Lincoln must give way to Truth and Douglass as American marvels.

What makes America a wonder is that this is the land upon which my ancestors, despite the odds, fought for and often made a life for themselves. We are great because this land housed the poetry of Phillis Wheatley and Maya Angelou, the advocacy of Fannie Lou Hamer, the urgency of Nina Simone’s music, and the faith-inspired demand for change in Martin Luther King Jr.’s sermons.

This way of telling the story allows us to speak of American ideals even if the norm is failure rather than accomplishment. It allows our history to chronicle progress without diminishing the suffering necessary to bring it about. This means, too, that to tell the American story well the contributions of us Black folks cannot be limited to February.

Black history offers America a chance to see itself both as what we have failed to become and as we wish ourselves to be. It is not to inspire hate for one race or to foment division. America seeing itself clearly is the first step toward owning and then learning from its mistakes. The second step is the long journey to become that which we hope to be: a more perfect — and just — union.