I. Affirmative Action
Louis Menard, "Integration by Parts," The New Yorker, January 20, 2020.
" 'Do something' is still one of the meanings of 'affirmative action' today. After 1978,when the Q-word declared racial quotas unconstitutional, affirmation actions avoided any suggestion of the Q-word." "Most colleges accept almost everyone who applies, so when we talk about race-conscious admissions, we are talking about policies that affect relatively small numbers of people."

"Thousands of firms adopted affirmative action programs after 1969,when the Nixon Administration began insisting on diversity benchmarks for government contractors, and in 'little more than a decade,' [Melvin Vorofsky, law professor and author of "The Affirmative Action Puzzle"] says, 'affirmative action became a way of life for many large corporations.' "As late as 1969, less than five per cent of all professors had African or Asian ancestry, and around eighty per cent were male schools like Harvard and Stanford [which] had trouble getting to gender balance."

"To paraphrase George Schultz, Nixon's Secretary of State, 'for hundreds of years,the United States had a racial quota. It was zero. Affirmation action is an attempt to redress an injustice done to black people.' "

"The whole history of affirmation action shows, as Vorofsky somewhat reluctantly admits, that when the programs are shut down, diversity representation drops. Diversity, however we define it, is politically constructed and politically maintained." "Do they [white Americans] really believe that there should be no sacrifice to make or price to pay for the systemic damage done to the lives of millions of American citizens, and the men and women who are their ancestors?"

II. Toxic Tech Companies
Kevin Lozano, "God Mode," The Nation, February 20, 2020.
"While warning about the  collection of data and the way it reaffirms some of the most insidious forms of inequality in our society, she [Anna Wiener, author of "Uncanny Valley"] examines how tech companies were run in a toxic cocktail of misogamy, prejudice, and rampant surveillance." "Quickly,Wiener realized the tools for data collection weren't the only things for sale. For the company's clients, user data, as much as any of the services on offer, was itself a valuable good that could be packaged and sold."

"At  a ride-sharing company, employees would frequently search customers' ride history, tracking the travel patterns of celebrities and politicians. It created a wealth of unchecked power for those companies that ended up with vital information." "If they could predict user preferences and behavior, they could also manipulate the entire economy."

"Wiener was also confronted with the arrogance, classicism,  and misogamy of Silicon Valley's workplaces." "Wiener shows how the casual misogamy and truculence of the  workplace -- and tech businesses in general -- are two of  the reasons that the Internet has become an unwelcome place for women, people of color, and those who are down and out. Having refashioned the Internet in their image, start-up executives have made it a hostile environment for everyone else."  "Breaking up Silicon Valley monopolies, unionizing the workplaces and imposing effective new government regulations, need to happen to begin fixing the Internet (and the world.)"

Various Issues From My Writer's Notebook

#John Nichols, "Mr. President... " The Nation, February 3, 2020.
"81 percent of Democrats favor electing presidents with a popular vote, according to a June 2019 NBC/Wall Street Journal survey." "Democrats should begin by shredding the myths about the Electoral College and recognizing it for the abomination it has been since slaveholding delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 worked overtime to restrict popular democracy." "Of the considerations that factored into the Framers' calculus, 'race and slavery were perhaps  foremost,' according to the Brennan Center for Justice fellow, Wilford Cobington."

#Julian Assange's attorney has said that Dana Rohnabacker, a former member of Congress,       dangled a pardon to Assange if he would say that Trump had no role in unveiling Hillary Clinton's emails. Rohnabacker has largely confirmed the offering of a pardon by saying that Trump did not dangle the pardon in advance, but if Assange seemed to be interested, he [Rohnabacker] would try to convince Trump to offer a pardon.

#Channing Gerard Joseph, "The First Drag Queen," The Nation, February 17, 2020.
In 1879, the 'Evening Star' reported that the abolitionist Frederick Douglas advised that "with a full complement of 'manly qualities' the negro could and would make [him-or-herself] respected in every part of the republic." "In post-Civil War America, there was very little patience for men who  subverted gender norms." "The term 'queen,' though used loosely today, was, until the 1960s, often used for someone in a position of honor and leadership in the community."

#Deliah Friedler, "Ghost Stories," Mother Jones, March/April 2020.
"The popularity of trans porn has been rising for years. Data shared by PornHub, one of the most popular porn sites, reveals that searchers for trans content tripled between 2014 and 2017: it now ranks among the top 10 categories in many parts of the world. Trans porn is especially popular among men,whose searches for the term climbed another 167 percent in 2018."

"In 2019, at least 25 trans or gender-nonconforming people of color were killed in the United States."

#Joan Walsh, "Indivisible," The Nation, September 9/16, 2019.
"Dozens of Virginia Indivisible affiliates were crucial to state Democrats picking up 15 seats in the 2017 House of Delegates elections. Pennsylvania's Indivisible movement got  national attention for its work electing Conor Lamb in the state's 18th Congressional district,which went for Trump by nearly 20 points."

"In an interview, [sociologist Theda Skapol's] estimate that 70 to 90 percent of Indivisible activists around the country are white women with an average age of about 55."

#Mike Konczal, "Think of the Children," The Nation, February 10, 2020.
"The Bennet-Romney proposal would make several changes to the current system: the most important is that most of the child tax credit would be fully refundable." "Effectively, the bill would create a basic income for all families with children linking the interests of poor, working-class, middle-class families."

A Variety of Issues From My Writer's Notebook

#Joshua Hunt, "Eviction Inc.," The Nation, February 17, 2020.
"Cabello's company,Quick Evic, is on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, amid four neighborhoods where housing is increasingly precarious. In Brownsville, where [Cabello] grew up, 40 percent of the population lives in poverty; in east New York where Quick Evic does most of its business, the poverty rate is 25 percent, and one-third of tenants live in severely rent-burdened households, spending more than half their income on housing..."

"In 2018, researchers at New York University found that people from low-income households, once evicted, face an increased risk of homelessness, and are more likely to end up in the emergency room. And the problem is not limited to large cities like New York. Across the US, there are nearly a million evictions every year."

#Kiera Butler, "Of Two Kinds," Mother Jones, March/April 2020.
"The number of same-sex public schools has exploded over the last two decades, up from a handful in the early 2000s to a few hundred today." "Cutting edge neuroscience has cast doubt on the idea of consistent and meaningful  brain differences between girls and boys, and education  researchers have found that sex-differential teaching doesn't guarantee academic progress." "So far, the ACLU has challenged same-sex schooling in 15 states, resulting in the closure of 36 programs."

"A 2017 'Education Week' report found that single-sex public schools are composed of a disproportionate number of students of color -- of about 90 percent..." "In 2014, ;in a meta-analysis published by the American Psychological Association, researchers combed through 184 studies of 1.6 million students around the world; they could find 'little or no advantage of single-sex schools over coed ones, noting that this undercut assumption about biological differences between boys and girls."

#Jill Lepore, "In Every Dark Hour," The New Yorker, February 3, 2020.
Walter Lippman said: "The present century is the century of authority, a century of the Right, a Fascist  century." Jill Lepore has picked up on Lippman: "Starting in about 2005, the number of democracies around the world began to fall, as it had in the nineteen-thirties. All the same, measured not against its past, but against its contemporaries, American democracy in the twenty-first century is withering. True, the United States still doesn't have a Rome or a Berlin to march on. That hasn't saved the nation from misinformation, tribalism, domestic terrorism, human rights abuses, political intolerance, social media excesses, mob violence, white nationalism, a criminal Presidency,the   hobbling of Congress, a corrupt Presidential Administration, assaults on the press, crippling polarization, the undermining of elections, an epistemological chaos that is the only air that totalitarianism can breathe." "New Dealers were trying to save the economy; they ended up saving democracy. T,hey built a new America; they told a new American story."

#The Trump Organization is charging the Secret Service $157,000 more than what was previously known. The Washington "Post" has documents showing that the Trump Organization has charged the Secret Service more than $628,000 since Trump took office in 2017.

#The District of  Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that the Department of Justice must hand over materials from former special counsel Mueller's investigation to Congress. In short, the ruling said that it is the "the district court, not the Executive or the Department that controls access to the grand jury materials." It was Judge Neomi Ray, a Trump nominee, who voted no.

#Vera Bergengruen, "John Bolton tests the GOP's fealty to Trump," TIME, February 10, 2020.
"In the arc of the Trump presidency, Bolton now represents the high-water mark in loyalty tests for Trump's followers in Congress." "These documents which the White House refused to hand over, could prove what more than a dozen officials, Bolton now among them, has said for months: that Trump leveraged the economic and military might of the U.S. to aid his own re-election."

#Justin Worland, "The world of finance..." TIME, February 10, 2020.
" 'For decades, banks have given fossil-fuel companies the financing to mine and drill; meanwhile, governments have provided seemingly bottomless subsidies, some $5 trillion annually,' the IMF said last year." "Microsoft pledged to go carbon-negative in a decade and remove by 2050 a sum of carbon equivalent to all that the company has ever emitted."

ADDENDUMS:
*Trump's SOTU speech drew roughly 37.3% of Americans, the smallest live-TV audience for a presidential address to Congress since Obama's valedictory speech in 2016.  It was a 20% decline since Trump's SOTU speech last year, and well below the audience for his speeches in 2017 and 2018.

*Trump said of Roger Stone's prosecutors: "They hit the road very quickly." "They treated Roger Stone very badly."

*Trump said Democrats are "vicious as Hell" in his impeachment victory speech.

*Trump has said he has "legal rights" to intervene in Justice Department handling of criminal  cases. "This doesn't mean that I do not have as President the legal right to do so, but I have so far chosen not to do so."

Putting the Emphasis on Foreign Policy

I. Joshua Seifer, "A Tense Relationship," The Nation, February 24, 2020.
"In the Six-Day War, as Amos Oz later recalled, unleashed 'a mood of nationalistic intoxication, of infatuation, with the tools of statehood, with the rituals of militarism.' Rather than subsiding, this mood became 'part of the general attitude of a country engaged in perpetual occupation and war.' "

"Cloaking false equivalences and ideology in the language of realism has long been a hallmark of liberal Zionism argument. Liberal Zionists often insist that one cannot condemn Israeli militarism and occupation without an equivalent condemnation of Palestinian separatism and irredentism, and they generally maintain that the two-state solution is the only realistic and desirable outcome for Israel-Palestine." "The emergence of a Jewish state, however, marked the failure of the early Zionist's very proposition; instead of solving the Jewish question once and for all, Israel [enclosed] it in  the realm of geopolitics."

II. Jessica Loudis, "The Act of Recounting," The Nation, March 2/9, 2020.
"The feeling of normality in Argentina didn't last long. Under the pretext of uniting the country around  'Western and American values,' the junta's leaders began targeting what they deemed the 'subversive' elements of society, which included anybody who might disagree  with their rule."

"During their seven years in  power, the junta conducted thousands of extrajudicial killings, ran clandestine detention centers across the country, censored the press, and gave the infant children of the 'disappeared' to junta loyalists."

"At the end of the Dirty War, as many as 30,000 people had been murdered, and Argentina found itself with $45 billion in foreign debt."

III. Laila Lalami, "The America We Want to Be," The Nation, March 2/9, 2020.
President Trump's travel ban has been extended to Nigeria, Eritrea, Kygyzstan, Tanzania, Myariman, and Sudan. Access is restricted to the the U.S. diversity program for people in Tanzania and Sudan. The Trump administration says the latest ban affects nations with "deficiencies in sharing terrorist, criminal or identity information."

The new restrictions will not apply to tourist or business travel. Neither President Trump, Homeland Security, nor the State Department have detailed any threat from these countries.

The initial 2017 ban applied to seven Muslim-majority countries. Nigeria will be especially impacted by the new ban, because nearly 8,000 immigrant visas went to Nigerians in FY 2018. Rights groups have expressed concern about the potential immigrants from Myariman, where the Rohinjaya Muslim minority faces persecution.

"Slowly and surely, Trump has shaped immigration policy to favor 'more people from Norway,' as he infamously put it, and fewer from  everywhere else." "And while Nigeria has a high rate of people overstaying their visas, it is, again, not the only foreign nationals with this issue. In 2018, more Canadians overstayed their visas than any other foreign nationals. Canada is not listed either."

IV. Michael T. Klare, "Twin Threats," TIME, January 27, 2020.
"One particularly worrisome scenario of extreme drought and abnormal monsoon rains devastating agriculture and unleashing social chaos in Pakistan, potentially creating an opening for radical Islamists aligned with elements of the armed forces to seize some of the country's 150 or so nuclear weapons." "A potential US military incursion in nuclear-armed Pakistan is just one example of a crucial but little-discussed aspect of international politics in the early 21st century: how the acceleration of climate change and nuclear war planning may make those threats to human survival harder to defuse."

"Although Obama initiated the nuclearization of the nuclear triad, the Trump administration has sought funds to proceed with their full-scale production,  at an estimated initial installment of $500 billion over 10 years." "Trump's decision to acquire a whole new suite of ICBMs, nuclear-armed submarines, and bombers has added momentum to these efforts."

V. Pavel Lakshin, "What is Russia doing with its nukes?" The Week, August 30, 2019.
With "America's withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, Russia is also free to deploy short-range, tactical nukes all along its European border." "The U.S. is now accelerating the modernization of its nuclear arsenal, and working on new, smaller tactical weapons."

VI. Shawn Tully, "China is  winning the trade war," The Week, August 30, 2019.
"Instead of slapping one-size-fits-all tariffs across vast categories of goods, Chinese President Xi  is targeting only products the country can't buy at comparable cost  elsewhere." "At the same time, China has lowered tariffs on every other country, making it even harder for U.S. manufacturers to compete."

VII. Evan Osnos, "Hong Kong on the March," The New Yorker, September 2, 2019.
Since taking power in 2012, President Xi has set about extinguishing all challenges to his authority. He has abolished term limits on his Presidency, detained hundreds of activists and human-rights lawyers, and oversees an anti-corruption purge that has punished 1.5 million members of his own party." "A crackdown would also undermine Xi's larger mission: to convince the world that China is a credible contender for global leadership in the age of Trump."

ADDENDUMS:
*While defending his since-canceled plan to hold this year's G-7 Summit at his Doral, Florida resort, Trump referred to the "phony emoluments clause" in the Constitution.

*At least a dozen states,including Florida and much of the Southwest states have passed legislation since 2011 to block efforts to require medical leave.

*Lalami: The Trump administration quietly designated Customs and Border Protection a security agency, shielding many of its documents from public scrutiny.

New Light on Battered-Woman Syndrome, and Mental Illness

#Elizabeth Flock, "A Violent Defense," The New Yorker, January 20, 2020.
There is no statewide public defender in Alabama, so courts often appoint private attorneys to provide defense for the indigent. Mary Anne Franks, a professor at the University of Miami School of Law, wrote a study of gender disparity in self-defense law, entitled "Real Men Advance, Real Women Retreat," arguing that women have long been deemed pathological for acting in self-defense. Battered-woman syndrome, a theory developed by a psychologist in the nineteen-seventies, has often been deployed as a defense in cases in which a woman has killed her abuser. Unlike Stand Your Ground laws, which offer justification for a defendant's action, battered-woman syndrome proposes that a woman has "acted wrongly but is so defective in some significant sense that she cannot be held accountable," Franks writes.

#Mandy Oaklander, "When every day is a mental health day," TIME, February 3, 2020.
"Mental illness is rising in every country in the word. Depression is so common and debilitating that it's one of the leading causes of disability in the world, and coupled with anxiety, costs the global economy about $1 trillion a year in lost productivity, according to the World Health Organization. Among millennials, who are ages 24 to 39 in 2020, depression is the fastest-growing health condition, the Blue Cross, Blue Shield recently found." A 2019 poll by the American Psychiatric Association found 62% of people ages 29 to 37 feel comfortable discussing their mental health at work, compared with about half as many people ages 54 to 72."

#Greg Adams, "Shedding new light," TIME, February 3, 2020.
Greg Adams agrees with Mandy Oaklander that depression is a leading cause of illness among young people, and that anxiety is on the rise. His contribution to this illness issue is that suicide ranks third as a cause of death for 15-to-19-year-olds, and is increasingly becoming a health-equity issue: African American girls in grades nine to twelve were 70% more likely to attempt suicide in 2017, compared to non-Hispanic white girls of the same age.

#"Planned Parenthood rejects federal funding over 'gay rules'," The Week, August 30, 2019.
Acting Planned Parenthood president Alexia McGill Johnson said: "Our patients deserve to  make  their own health care decisions." She added that she will "not be forced to have Donald Trump or Mike Pence make their decisions for them."

"But in Utah,where Planned Parenthood is the only Title X provider, and Minnesota,where Planned Parenthood serves 90 percent of Title X recipients, cutbacks could mean that low-income women will face long waits for appointments." "Texas provides a disturbing preview. After the state clamped down on family planning funds in 2011, long-acting contraceptive use fell by 35 percent, and Medicaid-covered births jumped 27 percent."

ADDENDUMS:
*73% of private sector workers have paid sick leave, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

*According to Dan Perry, an economist at the World Bank, a carbon tax of thirty-five dollars per ton would raise the price of gasoline by about 10%, and the cost of electricity by roughly five percent.

*Chris Gelandi, "Deportation as a death sentence," The Week, August 30, 2019.
"ICE considers about 120,000 immigrants who came here as refugees 'deportable' if they  have any crime on their record, including marijuana and drunk driving."

*Polly Toynbee, "Prepare for agricultural Armageddon," The Week, August 30, 2019.
Sean Richard, the former economist of the U.K. National Farmers' Union, says that: "Without a trade deal, the high proportion of U.K. farm produce exported by the bloc's tariffs on imports from nonmembers [will increase by]: 27 percent on chicken, 46 percent on lamb, and 65 percent on beef."

Budget and Financial Matters Get the Spotlight

#Trump's FY 2021 budget cuts in major agencies: Commerce Department: 37%; Environmental Protection Agency: 26%; Department of Health and Human Services: 15%; State Department and foreign aid: 21%; Labor Department: 11%; Agriculture Department: 8%; and Energy Department: 8%. Student loan programs will be slashed, and tax breaks are included for private school tuition. Federal retirement programs will be cut.

Although the Pentagon will receive only a $2 billion increase, that is largely due to the fact that it has received two very large increases since Trump took office. Nuclear weapons programs are, however, budgeted at almost $46 billion.

#Bryce Covert, Trump's Bad Budget," The Nation, March 16/23, 2020.
Covert writes: "The real intent of work requirements is to cut people off from benefits in order to dramatically shrink social programs. Trump's proposed FY 2021 budget is no different. It calls for instituting or beefing up work requirements in federally funded public assistance programs. The budget, therefore, seeks to trim spending by $4.4 trillion over a decade."

#Looking at the Trump FY 2021 budget from a Discretionary Budget Request perspective: 57% is allocated to Defense, 7% to the Veterans Administration, and 4% to Homeland Security, for a combined 68% of the pie. The Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Education, Labor, and Agriculture departments combined share a total of 15% of the pie. Broadly speaking, about two-thirds of spending goes to the category of national security, and about one-seventh goes to the category of the domestic economy.

#According to Chad Boin of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the average tariff on imported goods from China will be 19.3%,up from 3% when Trump took office. The first-phase agreement between the two nations said nothing about government subsidies to Chinese firms, and the operation of state-owned enterprises.

#Nathan Heller, "Big Spenders," The New Yorker, January 27, 2020.
"They [venture capitalists] , too, make predominantly bad bets: about eighty per cent of venture investments don't pay off." "But the bulk of Venture World's offerings are online,where they are hawked on bright,uncluttered sites that scroll down, down and down again with charming animations, offering moving stories about one big idea that will change the industry

"A chastening study by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in 2012 found that the average venture capital fund in the previous two decade,far from delivering its promised returns, had scarcely broken even."

#Amelia Pang, "Field Schemes." Mother Jones, March/April 2020.
"Lax federal controls mean that the USDA can hire organic certifiers that will help them boost profits by looking the other way." "We import 70 percent of our organic soybeans and 40 percent of our organic corn, which are fed to livestock." "The Cornveopia Institute, an industry watchdog group, suspects that the USDA, which is supposed to regulate but also promote US agriculture, is not strictly monitoring these imports -- because if it did, it could undercut the entire organic food chain." "But American officials are taking a less stringent approach. They still do not require rigorous pesticide tests for organic imports from high-risk countries. Although the USDA suspended [a license] to certify products from Turkey, the department still allows the company to accredit organic products from Russia,Ukraine, and Bulgaria."

#Klaus Schwab, "The World We Leave Them," TIME, February 3, 2020.
"Millennials, though not yet 35, accounted for only 3% of U.S wealth by 2018. Until the early 1930s, U.S. national debt exceeded 40% of GDP, and at times stood as low as 30%. Then it exploded. By the end of 2019, U.S. federal debt stood at over 100% of GDP."

"If the U.S. Social Security system is no longer funded beyond the next 15 years, as is currently the projected case, all societal partners should make a pact to ensure the future funding." "It would redirect government resources, for example, from deficit spending on current accounts to investments in green infrastructure that will last for generations."

ADDENDUMS:
*The EU rejects the Trump administration's Israeli-Palestinian peace plan, as it "departs" from internationally agreed parameters, It had been ejected by the Palestinians.

*Scotland may end up back in the EU, as the Scottish National Party (SNP) wants to secede from the U.K., and then rejoin the EU. Currently, it must get permission from the U.K. parliament.

*Angela Doyinsola Aina, TIME, March 2-9, 2020.
"African Americans are three to four times more likely than their white counterparts to suffer pregnancy-related deaths."

*Kimberly Teehee, TIME, March 2-9, 2020.
Over half of American Indian/Native Alaska women have experienced sexual violence."

*The Human Rights Campaign figures that at least 26 trans- or gendered-nonconforming people, over 90% of whom were trans women, were killed by violence in 2019.