#"No American today can claim to be unaffected by undocumented immigration. The meatpacking industry relies on such workers, as does the service industry. Nearly half of the field workers on US farms are undocumented -- and that's a low estimate. Fifteen percent of construction workers are unauthorized. (Source: Laila Lalami, "Trump's Dirty Laundry," The Nation, January 7, 2019.)
#"For decades, the DOD's leaders and accountants have been perpetuating a gigantic unconstitutional accounting fraud, deliberately cooking the books to mislead Congress and drive the department's budgets even higher, regardless of military necessity." "As a result of the Pentagon's accounting shenanigans, some $21 trillion -- yes, trillion -- worth of financial transactions cannot be accounted for."
"Among the laundering tactics that the Pentagon uses is moving 'one-year money' -- funds that Congress intends to be sent in a single year into a pool of 'five-year money', because unspent money in this pool doesn't have to be returned during the five-year allocation period." "Indeed, Congress appropriated a record amount -- $716 billion-- for the Department of Defense in fiscal year 2019. That was up $24 billion from FY 2018's $692 billion, which itself was up $6 billion from FY 2017's $686 billion." "Appendix C, page 27, reported that Congress had appropriated $122 billion for the US Army that year. But the appendix also appears to report that the Army had received a cash deposit from the US Treasury of $794.8 billion." (Source: Dave Lindorff, "Exposing the Pentagon's Massive Accounting Fraud," The Nation, January 7, 2019.)
#Acting attorney general Matt Whitaker wrote in "The Hill" that "hollow calls for independent prosecutors are just craven attempts to score cheap political points and serve the public in no measurable way." He has accused Mueller of crossing "red lines" in terms of the scope of the investigation, and recently penned an op-ed for CNN, entitled "Mueller investigation of Trump is going too far." Whitaker has suggested slashing Mueller's operating budget and undermining his investigative authority.
#Acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney says he has no idea of which former presidents Trump is claiming told him they wished they had built a border wall while in office. Either personally, or through their representatives, all four living ex-presidents have denied they discussed the issue with Trump. Trump had said: "Some of them have told me that we should have done it."
#President Trump has claimed at least 90 times that the Wall is already being built. He has promised at least 200 times that Mexico will pay for the Wall. As for the the USMCA, the slightly revised but not officially confirmed version of NAFTA, despite Trump's claim that the new agreement will pay for the Wall, there is no payment provision in it.
#[Amazon worker] "Geissler's co-workers are constantly working while sick, pushed by economic necessity, the desire to become a 'permanent' year-around Amazonian." "Sexual harassment is rampant: Male managers stand too close to Geissler, tell her to smile, and make suggestive comments." "All of this combines to create people without a sense of power or agency, so deeply affected by their work environment that they lose hope."
"The faceless immunity of Amazon leaves her [Geissler] with no one who might listen to her complaints; and after all, she thinks, she and her co-workers would be quickly replaced should they go off script, their action reduced to a 'single sentence on the company's website.' " (Source: Alex Press, "No Space to be Human," The Nation, January 14/21, 2019.)
#Shortly before the 2016 elections, President Trump set the tone by tweeting: "Law enforcement has been strongly notified to watch closely for any ILLEGAL VOTING which took place in Tuesday's Election (or early Voting). Anyone caught will be subject to the Maximum Criminal Penalties allowed by law!"
"In nearly every state where the G.O.P. has controlled the governorship and the legislature, it has tried to limit access to voting, most onerously by establishing such unnecessary requirements as having to produce a photo ID in order to register."
#"According to an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice, Democrats won the overall popular vote in the four hundred and thirty-five races for the House of Representatives by about nine per cent..." This is a very significant margin, and would undoubtedly have produced more than a 40-seat gain for the Democrats where it not for GOP gerrymandering.
Jeffrey Toobin is worried that "since Trump has effectively outsourced his judicial appointments to the Federalist Society, the incubater of far-right thinking on the law, recourse to the federal courts on voting rights may be a fading notion." (Source: Jeffrey Toobin, "Winning Votes," The New Yorker, November 26, 2018.)
Tuesday, January 15, 2019
Sunday, January 13, 2019
American Slogans, Arctic Ice, Computerized Hospitals and More
I. Examining "American Dream" and "America First" Tropes
"These two phrases -- 'the American dream" and 'America First' -- have served as touchstones for larger aims. The 'American dream,' as Trump and his audiences understand it, means nothing less than a chance at financial success for all Americans -- at least all those who count as 'American' in his narrow understanding of the term. 'America First,' meanwhile, signals a similar kind of selfishness, but this time on a national scale: abandoning long-standing military alliances and economic partnerships; stemming immigration with literal walls and free trade with figurative ones; and sounding a general retreat from the global stage." [1]
[The author Sarah] "Churchwell explains that originally, there was no such thing as the 'American dream,' but rather an array of dreams: of westward expansion, of navel supremacy, of 'beautiful womanhood.' " "Never in its earliest years was the 'American dream' cited to celebrate the freedom of markets. Indeed, populist and progressive voices denounced the concentration of wealth as a violation of the nation's democracy values and claimed that those who aspired to such avarice were guilty of an 'un-American dream.' "
As Churchwell explains it, "the America First Committee used the exceptionalism of the American dream to argue for isolation from the rest of the world. 'Americans! Wake up!' one of the group's ads implored."
II. The Arctic Ice Cap
"By the end of the summer of 2007, the ice cap was about half the size it had been at the start of the satellite era, and the Arctic sea ice had entered what an American scientist, Mark Sorreze, has dubbed its 'death spiral.' " "Arctic soils contain hundreds of billions of carbon, in the form of frozen and only partially decomposed plants. As the region heats up, much of this carbon, is likely to be released into the atmosphere, where it will trap more heat -- another feedback loop." [2]
In the same chapter in which Peter Wadhams [The author of "A Farewell to Ice: A Report From the Arctic"] argues for better energy policies, he observes that such policies probably can't -- and almost certainly won't -- be put in place fast enough to save the Arctic. Therefore, he says, technologies to block sunlight or change the reflectability of clouds will have to be deployed. These so-called geoengineering technologies have yet to be tested.
III. Hospitals Computerized
"More than ninety per cent of American hospitals have been computerized during the past decade, and more than half of Americans have their health information in the Epic system." "A 2016 study found that physicians spent about two hours doing computer work for every hour spent face-to-face with a patient." "The University of Wisconsin found that the average workday for its family physicians had grown to eleven and a half hours." [3]
"Ordering a mammogram used to be one click," said Susan Badoughi. "Now I spend three extra clicks to put in a diagnosis. When I do a pap smear, I have eleven clicks. It's 'Oh, who did it' "
"People initially embraced new programs and new capabilities with joy, then came to depend on them, then found themselves subject to a system that controlled their lives." "The Tar Pit has trapped a great many of us: clinicians, scientists, police, salespeople -- all of us hunched over our screens, spending more time dealing with constraints on how we do our jobs and less time simply doing them." [4]
"In recent years, it has become apparent that doctors have developed extraordinarily high burnout rates. In 2014, fifty-four per cent of physicians reported at least one of the three symptoms of burnout, compared with forty-six per cent in 2011." A Mayo Clinic analysis found that physicians were switching to part-time work, and the analysis also discovered that one of the strongest indicators of burnout was how much time an individual spent tied up doing computer documentation.
"During the past year, Massachusetts General Hospital has been trying out a 'virtual scribe' service, in which India-based doctors do the documentation based on digitally recorded patient visits." "Just ordering medications and lab tests trigger dozens of alerts each day, most of them irrelevant, and all in need of human reviewing and sorting."
IV. Conservatism's Cynical Strain
"Reagan's famous half-hour commercial for Goldwater described the welfare state as the path to totalitarianism. Apocalyptic thinking, conspiracy theories, and bigotry haunted the movement from the start. The right came to political power under Richard Nixon and Reagan in part by using coded language to appeal to white prejudices." "The movement's hostility to government encouraged a destructive approach to governing. Its attack on institutions nourished violent resentments. Its electoral strategy relied on increasingly open bigotry. The agenda of power at any price gave conservatism a cynical, even nihilistic strain --" [5]
V. Our Brutal Saudi Ally
"Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in crafting a Saudi-Israeli-Us axis against Iran, had persuaded the president to put most of his eggs in the Saudi basket." "The Saudi arms-buying commitments, however, turned out mainly to consist of relatively meaningless letters of intent, signed with major arms corporations rather than firm contracts." "Some 10 percent of annual arms exports have gone to the [Saudi] kingdom in recent years." "If, as seems likely, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman ordered Khashoggi's death, he has raised the specter of a new Moammer El=Gadhafi in the Middle East -- brutal, without conscience, nonpredictable, and reckless." [6]
Footnotes:
[1] Kevin M. Kruse, "Loaded Phrases," The Nation, December 17/24, 2018.
[2] Elizabeth Kolbert, "Now You See It," The New Yorker, October 15, 2018.
[3] Atul Gwande, "The Upgrade," The New Yorker, November 12, 2018.
[4] Ibid.
[5] George Packer, "A Hole in the Center," The New Yorker, November 12, 2018.
[6] Juan Cole, "Our Brutal Saudi Ally," The Nation, November 12, 2018.
"These two phrases -- 'the American dream" and 'America First' -- have served as touchstones for larger aims. The 'American dream,' as Trump and his audiences understand it, means nothing less than a chance at financial success for all Americans -- at least all those who count as 'American' in his narrow understanding of the term. 'America First,' meanwhile, signals a similar kind of selfishness, but this time on a national scale: abandoning long-standing military alliances and economic partnerships; stemming immigration with literal walls and free trade with figurative ones; and sounding a general retreat from the global stage." [1]
[The author Sarah] "Churchwell explains that originally, there was no such thing as the 'American dream,' but rather an array of dreams: of westward expansion, of navel supremacy, of 'beautiful womanhood.' " "Never in its earliest years was the 'American dream' cited to celebrate the freedom of markets. Indeed, populist and progressive voices denounced the concentration of wealth as a violation of the nation's democracy values and claimed that those who aspired to such avarice were guilty of an 'un-American dream.' "
As Churchwell explains it, "the America First Committee used the exceptionalism of the American dream to argue for isolation from the rest of the world. 'Americans! Wake up!' one of the group's ads implored."
II. The Arctic Ice Cap
"By the end of the summer of 2007, the ice cap was about half the size it had been at the start of the satellite era, and the Arctic sea ice had entered what an American scientist, Mark Sorreze, has dubbed its 'death spiral.' " "Arctic soils contain hundreds of billions of carbon, in the form of frozen and only partially decomposed plants. As the region heats up, much of this carbon, is likely to be released into the atmosphere, where it will trap more heat -- another feedback loop." [2]
In the same chapter in which Peter Wadhams [The author of "A Farewell to Ice: A Report From the Arctic"] argues for better energy policies, he observes that such policies probably can't -- and almost certainly won't -- be put in place fast enough to save the Arctic. Therefore, he says, technologies to block sunlight or change the reflectability of clouds will have to be deployed. These so-called geoengineering technologies have yet to be tested.
III. Hospitals Computerized
"More than ninety per cent of American hospitals have been computerized during the past decade, and more than half of Americans have their health information in the Epic system." "A 2016 study found that physicians spent about two hours doing computer work for every hour spent face-to-face with a patient." "The University of Wisconsin found that the average workday for its family physicians had grown to eleven and a half hours." [3]
"Ordering a mammogram used to be one click," said Susan Badoughi. "Now I spend three extra clicks to put in a diagnosis. When I do a pap smear, I have eleven clicks. It's 'Oh, who did it' "
"People initially embraced new programs and new capabilities with joy, then came to depend on them, then found themselves subject to a system that controlled their lives." "The Tar Pit has trapped a great many of us: clinicians, scientists, police, salespeople -- all of us hunched over our screens, spending more time dealing with constraints on how we do our jobs and less time simply doing them." [4]
"In recent years, it has become apparent that doctors have developed extraordinarily high burnout rates. In 2014, fifty-four per cent of physicians reported at least one of the three symptoms of burnout, compared with forty-six per cent in 2011." A Mayo Clinic analysis found that physicians were switching to part-time work, and the analysis also discovered that one of the strongest indicators of burnout was how much time an individual spent tied up doing computer documentation.
"During the past year, Massachusetts General Hospital has been trying out a 'virtual scribe' service, in which India-based doctors do the documentation based on digitally recorded patient visits." "Just ordering medications and lab tests trigger dozens of alerts each day, most of them irrelevant, and all in need of human reviewing and sorting."
IV. Conservatism's Cynical Strain
"Reagan's famous half-hour commercial for Goldwater described the welfare state as the path to totalitarianism. Apocalyptic thinking, conspiracy theories, and bigotry haunted the movement from the start. The right came to political power under Richard Nixon and Reagan in part by using coded language to appeal to white prejudices." "The movement's hostility to government encouraged a destructive approach to governing. Its attack on institutions nourished violent resentments. Its electoral strategy relied on increasingly open bigotry. The agenda of power at any price gave conservatism a cynical, even nihilistic strain --" [5]
V. Our Brutal Saudi Ally
"Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in crafting a Saudi-Israeli-Us axis against Iran, had persuaded the president to put most of his eggs in the Saudi basket." "The Saudi arms-buying commitments, however, turned out mainly to consist of relatively meaningless letters of intent, signed with major arms corporations rather than firm contracts." "Some 10 percent of annual arms exports have gone to the [Saudi] kingdom in recent years." "If, as seems likely, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman ordered Khashoggi's death, he has raised the specter of a new Moammer El=Gadhafi in the Middle East -- brutal, without conscience, nonpredictable, and reckless." [6]
Footnotes:
[1] Kevin M. Kruse, "Loaded Phrases," The Nation, December 17/24, 2018.
[2] Elizabeth Kolbert, "Now You See It," The New Yorker, October 15, 2018.
[3] Atul Gwande, "The Upgrade," The New Yorker, November 12, 2018.
[4] Ibid.
[5] George Packer, "A Hole in the Center," The New Yorker, November 12, 2018.
[6] Juan Cole, "Our Brutal Saudi Ally," The Nation, November 12, 2018.
Thursday, January 10, 2019
Election Results, Culinary Workers, and Cannabis Outcomes
I. Democratic 2018 Election Triumphs
"The potency of the new politics was most evident in the so-called swing states, especially in the Great Lakes region, where Democrats roared back after years of losing statehouses." Democratic Governors Association chair Jay Inslee noted on the day after the election: "After last night's results, 38 million more Americans will have a Democratic governor. That means that Democratic governors now represent a majority of Americans -- more than 175 million people. The governors will have an easier time managing because Democrats overcame big gerrymandering and big money to finish the 2018 election cycle with an overall gain of some 380 state legislative seats." [1]
Columnist Joan Walsh noted that as the votes were still being counted: "Democrats have won a total of 2,908 seats, or more than half of those they contested; 1,173 of the winners are women, 842 are candidates of color, and 84 are LGBTQ. Democrats have now picked up 380 Republican seats -- more than a third lost in three national elections under Obama -- in just one year. Add that to the 44 they'd already flipped from red to blue, in Virginia and in special elections, and they're up 424 seats in the age of Donald Trump." [2]
II. Too Much Democracy
"In 2016, the Republican Party did not decide; it was captured in a cruel blitzkrieg, then rapidly remade in the image of its captor." "Why not conclude that parties would display greater responsibility if their leaders had less power to bully ordinary legislators into submission?" Yascha Mounk then continued to say that "Only around a quarter of eligible voters participated in the heated 2016 presidential primaries, with only about an eighth supporting either Donald Trump [or] Hillary Clinton." "In many democracies that political scientists once considered stable and secure, elected strongmen are putting immense pressure on the judiciary, restricting the freedom of the press, and curtailing the rights of the opposition." "It is that deep popular discontent that has its roots in such large social forces that institutional reforms can, at best, delay a fateful reckoning." [3]
III. Nevada's Culinary Workers
Culinary's membership is filled with what are known as low-propensity voters, working-class people of color, many with recent immigrant backgrounds, who do not historically vote with the same frequency of, say, affluent white retirees." "Culinary contracts mandate that workers can take time off to sort out their immigrant paperwork." [4]
Mobile voting centers traverse Nevada to collect ballots. There are no discriminatory voter ID laws, and an initiative on the November ballot would automatically register to vote those who get a driver's license.
IV. Cannabis Not a Miracle Cure
"A recent study published by 'The Mercury News,' found that one-third of California's cities allow recreational cannabis businesses." "Across the state, the cannabis industry is struggling to meet market projections. Sales tax on marijuana, imposed after legalization in 2016 has driven up prices, encouraging the persistence of an illicit market. Tax income from cannabis sales and cultivation in the first six months of 2018 was $40 million less than the state had projected." "Far from being a miracle economic cure, the cannabis industry was proving to be like every other industry in America: in search of cheap labor and low taxes."
ADDENDUMS:
*Democrats have gained control of seven chambers under Trump: the state senates in Colorado, Connecticut, Maine, New York, and New Hampshire (after winning control of Washington state's upper chamber in a special election last year, and the House of Representatives in Minnesota, where they picked up an astonishing 18 seats.) (Source: Walsh.)
*Wisconsin has lost 40 percent of its union members since it ended collective bargaining for most public employees in 2011. One recent study showed that passage of right-to-work legislation correlated with a 3.5 point boost for Republican candidates. (Source: Drum.)
*Thirteen states don't have any early voting. (Source: Drum.)
Footnotes:
[1] John Nichols, "The Down-Ballot Democratic Triumphs of 2018," The Nation, December 17/24, 2018.
[2] Joan Walsh, 'Taking Back the States," The Nation, December 17/24, 2018.
[3] Yascha Mounk, "Too Much Democracy," The New Yorker, November 12, 2018.
[4] Kevin Drum, "So Long, Haters," Mother Jones, November/December, 2018.
"The potency of the new politics was most evident in the so-called swing states, especially in the Great Lakes region, where Democrats roared back after years of losing statehouses." Democratic Governors Association chair Jay Inslee noted on the day after the election: "After last night's results, 38 million more Americans will have a Democratic governor. That means that Democratic governors now represent a majority of Americans -- more than 175 million people. The governors will have an easier time managing because Democrats overcame big gerrymandering and big money to finish the 2018 election cycle with an overall gain of some 380 state legislative seats." [1]
Columnist Joan Walsh noted that as the votes were still being counted: "Democrats have won a total of 2,908 seats, or more than half of those they contested; 1,173 of the winners are women, 842 are candidates of color, and 84 are LGBTQ. Democrats have now picked up 380 Republican seats -- more than a third lost in three national elections under Obama -- in just one year. Add that to the 44 they'd already flipped from red to blue, in Virginia and in special elections, and they're up 424 seats in the age of Donald Trump." [2]
II. Too Much Democracy
"In 2016, the Republican Party did not decide; it was captured in a cruel blitzkrieg, then rapidly remade in the image of its captor." "Why not conclude that parties would display greater responsibility if their leaders had less power to bully ordinary legislators into submission?" Yascha Mounk then continued to say that "Only around a quarter of eligible voters participated in the heated 2016 presidential primaries, with only about an eighth supporting either Donald Trump [or] Hillary Clinton." "In many democracies that political scientists once considered stable and secure, elected strongmen are putting immense pressure on the judiciary, restricting the freedom of the press, and curtailing the rights of the opposition." "It is that deep popular discontent that has its roots in such large social forces that institutional reforms can, at best, delay a fateful reckoning." [3]
III. Nevada's Culinary Workers
Culinary's membership is filled with what are known as low-propensity voters, working-class people of color, many with recent immigrant backgrounds, who do not historically vote with the same frequency of, say, affluent white retirees." "Culinary contracts mandate that workers can take time off to sort out their immigrant paperwork." [4]
Mobile voting centers traverse Nevada to collect ballots. There are no discriminatory voter ID laws, and an initiative on the November ballot would automatically register to vote those who get a driver's license.
IV. Cannabis Not a Miracle Cure
"A recent study published by 'The Mercury News,' found that one-third of California's cities allow recreational cannabis businesses." "Across the state, the cannabis industry is struggling to meet market projections. Sales tax on marijuana, imposed after legalization in 2016 has driven up prices, encouraging the persistence of an illicit market. Tax income from cannabis sales and cultivation in the first six months of 2018 was $40 million less than the state had projected." "Far from being a miracle economic cure, the cannabis industry was proving to be like every other industry in America: in search of cheap labor and low taxes."
ADDENDUMS:
*Democrats have gained control of seven chambers under Trump: the state senates in Colorado, Connecticut, Maine, New York, and New Hampshire (after winning control of Washington state's upper chamber in a special election last year, and the House of Representatives in Minnesota, where they picked up an astonishing 18 seats.) (Source: Walsh.)
*Wisconsin has lost 40 percent of its union members since it ended collective bargaining for most public employees in 2011. One recent study showed that passage of right-to-work legislation correlated with a 3.5 point boost for Republican candidates. (Source: Drum.)
*Thirteen states don't have any early voting. (Source: Drum.)
Footnotes:
[1] John Nichols, "The Down-Ballot Democratic Triumphs of 2018," The Nation, December 17/24, 2018.
[2] Joan Walsh, 'Taking Back the States," The Nation, December 17/24, 2018.
[3] Yascha Mounk, "Too Much Democracy," The New Yorker, November 12, 2018.
[4] Kevin Drum, "So Long, Haters," Mother Jones, November/December, 2018.
Wednesday, January 9, 2019
A New Yorker-Themed Look at Recent Topics of Interest
I. The Costs of War
"The increase in military spending in the past two years alone is greater than the entire military budget of Russia. And that's before the massive increases proposed by the strategy committee. " As its solution, the National Defense Strategy Committee calls for increases in Pentagon spending of 3 to 5 percent for at least for the next five years. According to calculations by Taxpayers for Common Sense, the high end of this range would mean a Pentagon budget of an astonishing $972 billion by 2024 --" [1]
The "Costs of War Project at Brown University estimates the full price of the United States's post-9/11 wars at $5.9 trillion -- a stunning figure when you consider that the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond have caused more harm than good.
II. The Fateful AMI Meeting
The owner of the American Media Inc., the parent company of the "National Inquirer," has admitted that the company paid off former "Playboy" model, Karen McDougal, to squelch her account of an alleged affair with Donald Trump. The owner, David Pecker, has admitted that the $150,000 payment "was to suppress the model's story so as to prevent it from influencing the election." AMI also admitted that McDougal was not allowed to publicize damaging allegations about the candidate before the 2016 presidential election. Donald Trump, Michael Cohen and David Pecker were at the meeting where Pecker agreed to help with negative stories about Trump's relationships with women by, among other things, to assist the campaign in identifying such stories so they could be purchased and their publication avoided. The Southern District of New York has had a non-prosecution agreement with AMI.
III. The GOP Reverse on Prosecution of the President
During the Monica Lewinski affair, the GOP argued that even the President had to be subject to a civil lawsuit while serving in the White House. The GOP also contended that President Clinton had to answer a lawful subpoena and testify before a grand jury. He had to be held accountable because the rule of law didn't make exceptions, not even for the President. Even a single call from the White House to the Treasury Department was interpreted as obstruction of the Watergate investigation and brought before the grand jury. Now the GOP never talks about the rule of law, except in regard to Hillary Clinton.
IV. Investigating the 2017 Inaugural Committee
The Manhattan U.S. Attorney's office is investigating Trump's 2017 inaugural committee for possible misuse of funds; also, it is examining whether some of the committee's donors gave money in exchange for political favors that could run afoul of federal corruption laws. The inaugural committee has publicly identified vendors accounting for $61 million of the $103 million it spent, and it hasn't provided details on those expenses. Trump spent much more on his inaugural that Obama spent on his.
V. Technologies of Surveillance
"Technologies of surveillance that seem relatively innocuous at first can take 20, or 40, or 100 years to reveal their more insidious potential -- by which point they have long since insinuated themselves into our daily lives, so that there is often very little we can do about them." "Corporate surveillance has consistently troubled working Americans, but state surveillance was viewed more ambiguously by many, at least in the early 20th century." ]2]
"Progressives hope to use state power to create a more just and equitable society, but they also fear the erosions of privacy that something as simple as a Social Security number [being publicly revealed] can cause." Katie Fitzpatrick says that "we need to couple our calls for increased state programs with a forceful opposition to the institutions and practices that threaten our privacy."
VI. A Leadership Mandate
[Rep.] "Ocasio-Cortez's staff began circulating a proposal that calls for a select House committee to 'develop a detailed national, industrial, economic mobilization for the transition of the United States's economy.' " "The fallout from the Great Recession and the looming threat of climate change have exposed bipartisan free-market dogmas as woefully ill-equipped to deal with the crises we face today." [3]
VII. Asymmetric Warfare
"Today, right-wing sites account for an increasingly large portion of political-news sources, and they abide by no known rules of journalism." "The right-wing of the media ecosystem behaves precisely as the echo chamber models predict -- exhibiting high insularity, susceptibility to information cascades, rumor and conspiracy theory, and a drift toward more extreme versions of itself." [4]
In their 2016 book, "Asymmetric Politics," scholars Matt Grosenrran and David Hopkins, write that the conservative movement simultaneously undermined popular faith in both academe and journalism among its supporters, while building and reinforcing Republican reliance on alternative ideological information sources."
ADDENDUMS:
*A study released this past summer found that nearly half of current federal judges have attended a two-week Koch brothers-funded boot camp on economics, and that attendance has had a measurable effect on their rulings.
*Vice President Mike Pence was unable to identify a single living U.S. president who told President Trump that they, individually, supported a border wall.
*President Trump told Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan to stop publicly releasing watchdog reports on the military.
Footnotes:
[1] William D. Hartung, "The Costs of War," The Nation, December 17/24, 2018.
[2] Katie Fitzpatrick, "Always Watching," The New Yorker, December 3, 2018.
[3] Kate Aronoff, "A Mandate for Left Leadership," The New Yorker, December 3, 2018.
[4] Eric Alterman, "Asymmetric Warfare," The New Yorker, December 3, 2018.
"The increase in military spending in the past two years alone is greater than the entire military budget of Russia. And that's before the massive increases proposed by the strategy committee. " As its solution, the National Defense Strategy Committee calls for increases in Pentagon spending of 3 to 5 percent for at least for the next five years. According to calculations by Taxpayers for Common Sense, the high end of this range would mean a Pentagon budget of an astonishing $972 billion by 2024 --" [1]
The "Costs of War Project at Brown University estimates the full price of the United States's post-9/11 wars at $5.9 trillion -- a stunning figure when you consider that the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond have caused more harm than good.
II. The Fateful AMI Meeting
The owner of the American Media Inc., the parent company of the "National Inquirer," has admitted that the company paid off former "Playboy" model, Karen McDougal, to squelch her account of an alleged affair with Donald Trump. The owner, David Pecker, has admitted that the $150,000 payment "was to suppress the model's story so as to prevent it from influencing the election." AMI also admitted that McDougal was not allowed to publicize damaging allegations about the candidate before the 2016 presidential election. Donald Trump, Michael Cohen and David Pecker were at the meeting where Pecker agreed to help with negative stories about Trump's relationships with women by, among other things, to assist the campaign in identifying such stories so they could be purchased and their publication avoided. The Southern District of New York has had a non-prosecution agreement with AMI.
III. The GOP Reverse on Prosecution of the President
During the Monica Lewinski affair, the GOP argued that even the President had to be subject to a civil lawsuit while serving in the White House. The GOP also contended that President Clinton had to answer a lawful subpoena and testify before a grand jury. He had to be held accountable because the rule of law didn't make exceptions, not even for the President. Even a single call from the White House to the Treasury Department was interpreted as obstruction of the Watergate investigation and brought before the grand jury. Now the GOP never talks about the rule of law, except in regard to Hillary Clinton.
IV. Investigating the 2017 Inaugural Committee
The Manhattan U.S. Attorney's office is investigating Trump's 2017 inaugural committee for possible misuse of funds; also, it is examining whether some of the committee's donors gave money in exchange for political favors that could run afoul of federal corruption laws. The inaugural committee has publicly identified vendors accounting for $61 million of the $103 million it spent, and it hasn't provided details on those expenses. Trump spent much more on his inaugural that Obama spent on his.
V. Technologies of Surveillance
"Technologies of surveillance that seem relatively innocuous at first can take 20, or 40, or 100 years to reveal their more insidious potential -- by which point they have long since insinuated themselves into our daily lives, so that there is often very little we can do about them." "Corporate surveillance has consistently troubled working Americans, but state surveillance was viewed more ambiguously by many, at least in the early 20th century." ]2]
"Progressives hope to use state power to create a more just and equitable society, but they also fear the erosions of privacy that something as simple as a Social Security number [being publicly revealed] can cause." Katie Fitzpatrick says that "we need to couple our calls for increased state programs with a forceful opposition to the institutions and practices that threaten our privacy."
VI. A Leadership Mandate
[Rep.] "Ocasio-Cortez's staff began circulating a proposal that calls for a select House committee to 'develop a detailed national, industrial, economic mobilization for the transition of the United States's economy.' " "The fallout from the Great Recession and the looming threat of climate change have exposed bipartisan free-market dogmas as woefully ill-equipped to deal with the crises we face today." [3]
VII. Asymmetric Warfare
"Today, right-wing sites account for an increasingly large portion of political-news sources, and they abide by no known rules of journalism." "The right-wing of the media ecosystem behaves precisely as the echo chamber models predict -- exhibiting high insularity, susceptibility to information cascades, rumor and conspiracy theory, and a drift toward more extreme versions of itself." [4]
In their 2016 book, "Asymmetric Politics," scholars Matt Grosenrran and David Hopkins, write that the conservative movement simultaneously undermined popular faith in both academe and journalism among its supporters, while building and reinforcing Republican reliance on alternative ideological information sources."
ADDENDUMS:
*A study released this past summer found that nearly half of current federal judges have attended a two-week Koch brothers-funded boot camp on economics, and that attendance has had a measurable effect on their rulings.
*Vice President Mike Pence was unable to identify a single living U.S. president who told President Trump that they, individually, supported a border wall.
*President Trump told Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan to stop publicly releasing watchdog reports on the military.
Footnotes:
[1] William D. Hartung, "The Costs of War," The Nation, December 17/24, 2018.
[2] Katie Fitzpatrick, "Always Watching," The New Yorker, December 3, 2018.
[3] Kate Aronoff, "A Mandate for Left Leadership," The New Yorker, December 3, 2018.
[4] Eric Alterman, "Asymmetric Warfare," The New Yorker, December 3, 2018.
Saturday, January 5, 2019
Admissions Policy, Suspect Atheists, and Judicial Uniqueness
I. Admissions Policy
" 'The Princeton Review' has, in the past, encouraged students of Asian descent to try to conceal their cultural identity." Financial adviser, Edward Blum, hopes for a college admissions process in which there would be no race nor ethnicity boxes to check, and students would be evaluated more or less anonymously. [1]
The first time the government used the term, "affirmative action,"in relation to race, was in March 1961, when President John F. Kennedy signed Executive Order 10925, which required government contractors to "take affirmative action" to help realize the nation's goal of "nondiscrimination." In 2003, the Supreme Court ruled, in Grutterv v. Bollinger, regarding the University of Michigan's undergraduate admissions policy, that educational institutions had a compelling interest in promoting diversity.
Harvard University maintains that its admissions process is a "whole person review," in which applicants aren't reduced to a single factor, whether it's academic excellence or their racial and ethnic identity. "What's at stake," Rachael Dane, Harvard's spokesperson, told Hua Hsu, "isn't just the school's admissions policy; it's the ability of Harvard to pursue its stated mission to 'provide a diverse living environment to the citizens and citizen-leaders for our society.' " Blum explained that he intended to prove that Harvard's admissions process sacrificed high-achieving Asian Americans in the name of racial balancing.
"As of 2016, there were an estimated 21.4 million Asians in the U.S., approximately 4.9 million of whom were of Chinese descent." A survey from 2012 showed that Asian Americans supported affirmative action by a three-to-one margin. They saw it as a key component in the struggle for multiracial justice. [2]
II. Atheists Still Suspects
"Americans, in large numbers, still do not want atheists teaching their children, or performing marriages. They would, according to surveys, prefer a female, gay, Mormon, or Muslim President to having an atheist in the White House." "Lack of belief in God is still too often taken to mean the absence of any other meaningful moral beliefs, and that has made atheists an easy minority to revile." [3]
"True religious liberty was rare in the colonies: dissenters were fined, flogged, jailed, and sometimes hanged." "Such is the slippery label of 'atheist' in the American context: slapped on those who explicitly respect it, eschewed by unbelievers who wish to avoid its stigma."
Indeed, the charge of atheism became a convenient means of discrediting nontheological beliefs, including anarchism, radicalism, socialism, and feminism." "The reason that atheists were not allowed to testify in court was the certainty that witnesses who were unwilling to swear an oath to God had no reason to be truthful, since they did not fear divine judgment." [4]
III. Philadelphia's Judicial Uniqueness
In 2015, Philadelphia had the highest incarceration rate of America's ten largest cities. Larry Krasner, Philadelphia District Attorney, contends that there are more parolees in Pennsylvania than anywhere else in the country; also, his findings are that one-third of the people in Pennsylvania's prisons are there because they violated the rules of their probation or parole. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, of the approximately two hundred death sentences handed down in Philadelphia since 1974, nearly a hundred and fifty have been overturned, often because of inadequate representation or prosecutors' misconduct. [5]
Krasner has called the police union "frankly racist and white-dominated," and reminds people that it endorsed Donald Trump for president, in a city where he got fifteen percent of the vote.
IV. West Fire Danger Grows
"Sixteen of the largest fires in California history have occurred over the past 19 years, three of them since last December [2018]." One 2016 study found that since 1984, anthropogenic climate change has doubled the area over which forest fires burn in the West. Another study, published early in 2018, found that "human influence" had quintupled the risk of extreme aridity in the West, increasing the probability of catastrophic wildfires. [6]
Footnotes"
[1] Hua Hsu, "School Colors," The New Yorker, October 15, 2018.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Casey Cep, "Without a Prayer," The New Yorker, October 29, 2018.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Jennifer Gonnerman, "Acts of Conviction," The New Yorker, October 29, 2018.
[6] Ben Ehrenreich, "The Fire This Time," The Nation, December 17/24, 2018.
" 'The Princeton Review' has, in the past, encouraged students of Asian descent to try to conceal their cultural identity." Financial adviser, Edward Blum, hopes for a college admissions process in which there would be no race nor ethnicity boxes to check, and students would be evaluated more or less anonymously. [1]
The first time the government used the term, "affirmative action,"in relation to race, was in March 1961, when President John F. Kennedy signed Executive Order 10925, which required government contractors to "take affirmative action" to help realize the nation's goal of "nondiscrimination." In 2003, the Supreme Court ruled, in Grutterv v. Bollinger, regarding the University of Michigan's undergraduate admissions policy, that educational institutions had a compelling interest in promoting diversity.
Harvard University maintains that its admissions process is a "whole person review," in which applicants aren't reduced to a single factor, whether it's academic excellence or their racial and ethnic identity. "What's at stake," Rachael Dane, Harvard's spokesperson, told Hua Hsu, "isn't just the school's admissions policy; it's the ability of Harvard to pursue its stated mission to 'provide a diverse living environment to the citizens and citizen-leaders for our society.' " Blum explained that he intended to prove that Harvard's admissions process sacrificed high-achieving Asian Americans in the name of racial balancing.
"As of 2016, there were an estimated 21.4 million Asians in the U.S., approximately 4.9 million of whom were of Chinese descent." A survey from 2012 showed that Asian Americans supported affirmative action by a three-to-one margin. They saw it as a key component in the struggle for multiracial justice. [2]
II. Atheists Still Suspects
"Americans, in large numbers, still do not want atheists teaching their children, or performing marriages. They would, according to surveys, prefer a female, gay, Mormon, or Muslim President to having an atheist in the White House." "Lack of belief in God is still too often taken to mean the absence of any other meaningful moral beliefs, and that has made atheists an easy minority to revile." [3]
"True religious liberty was rare in the colonies: dissenters were fined, flogged, jailed, and sometimes hanged." "Such is the slippery label of 'atheist' in the American context: slapped on those who explicitly respect it, eschewed by unbelievers who wish to avoid its stigma."
Indeed, the charge of atheism became a convenient means of discrediting nontheological beliefs, including anarchism, radicalism, socialism, and feminism." "The reason that atheists were not allowed to testify in court was the certainty that witnesses who were unwilling to swear an oath to God had no reason to be truthful, since they did not fear divine judgment." [4]
III. Philadelphia's Judicial Uniqueness
In 2015, Philadelphia had the highest incarceration rate of America's ten largest cities. Larry Krasner, Philadelphia District Attorney, contends that there are more parolees in Pennsylvania than anywhere else in the country; also, his findings are that one-third of the people in Pennsylvania's prisons are there because they violated the rules of their probation or parole. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, of the approximately two hundred death sentences handed down in Philadelphia since 1974, nearly a hundred and fifty have been overturned, often because of inadequate representation or prosecutors' misconduct. [5]
Krasner has called the police union "frankly racist and white-dominated," and reminds people that it endorsed Donald Trump for president, in a city where he got fifteen percent of the vote.
IV. West Fire Danger Grows
"Sixteen of the largest fires in California history have occurred over the past 19 years, three of them since last December [2018]." One 2016 study found that since 1984, anthropogenic climate change has doubled the area over which forest fires burn in the West. Another study, published early in 2018, found that "human influence" had quintupled the risk of extreme aridity in the West, increasing the probability of catastrophic wildfires. [6]
Footnotes"
[1] Hua Hsu, "School Colors," The New Yorker, October 15, 2018.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Casey Cep, "Without a Prayer," The New Yorker, October 29, 2018.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Jennifer Gonnerman, "Acts of Conviction," The New Yorker, October 29, 2018.
[6] Ben Ehrenreich, "The Fire This Time," The Nation, December 17/24, 2018.
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