Historical farce

Once upon a time, there was a Kennedy who "advised American families to build bomb shelters to protect them from atomic fallout in the event of a nuclear exchange ..." That dangerous farce was 60 years ago.

Now we have a Republican Kennedy who argues again for bomb shelters.

“Well, the [former] vice president says he will transform America. He will. And the American people will pay a fearsome price. [Biden's] foreign policy is hugs and hot cocoa for America’s enemies. If he’s elected, my advice to you is to build a fallout shelter,” the Louisiana senator exclaimed, prompting [Sean] Hannity to do a double take.

“Build a fallout shelter,” Kennedy reiterated. “You’ll need it. ...”

Daily Beast

Pretty stupid argument for his party's President who has abrogated, ended, or broken every agreement restraining nuclear danger that he could get his mitts on: the multilateral agreement with Iran to halt their nuclear bomb development; the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) first signed by Ronald Reagan; and the Open Skies Treaty which allows the U.S. and Russia to fly over each other's territory to verify arms control agreements. And this Kennedy's current president seemingly aims to kill off the New START treaty with Russia which limits how many nuclear missiles each country can deploy.

Fallout shelters never were going to save anyone; the very real Cuban Missile crisis which nearly led to mass annihilation taught that first Kennedy that nukes were nothing to play games with. Of this, as of most everything but gilded gewgaws, this President knows nothing. Arms control treaties bring adversaries together to, at minimum, keep the talk going instead of the shooting. We need more, not less of them. This is something I do trust that Joe Biden knows.

We live in interesting times

Fintan O'Toole is an Irishman. I suspect that heritage provides him an advantageous perch from which to observe the follies of the two English-speaking polities his country has been fated to sit between, the early divorcing colonies on the American continent and the Less-Than-United Kingdom of Britain. He observes our situation on this side of the water perceptively and reaches drastic conclusions.

... the afterlives of slavery, of the deranged presidency, and of the threat of terrorism as permission to set aside legal and democratic rights — [these all] have raised the stakes in the present struggle. This mass of unresolved stuff is being forced toward some kind of resolution.

That resolution can come in only one of two ways. What has come to the surface can be repressed again—but that repression will have to be enforced by methods that will also dismantle democracy. Trump’s boast that he can do whatever he wants will have to be institutionalized, made fully operational, and imposed by state violence.

Or there will be a transformative wave of change. All of this unfinished business has made the United States semidemocratic, a half-and-half world in which ideals of equality, political accountability, and the rule of law exist alongside practices that make a daily mockery of those ideals.

This half-life is ending—either the outward show of democracy is finished and authoritarianism triumphs, or the long-denied substance becomes real. The unconsumed past will either be faced and dealt with, or it will consume the American republic.

NYRB, July 23, 2020

U.S. democracy sits on a cliff edge; we could go either way. We will make choices. O'Toole's essay is elegant, concise, and absolutely worth reading all of....

Since early in the pandemic, I've been sitting on writing something about O'Toole's dissection of the English Brexit process: The Politics of Pain: Postwar England and the Rise of Nationalism. It's a biting, sometimes hilarious, thoroughgoing take-down of the post-imperial stupidity of England's ruling class, mostly Tories. Somehow it didn't seem right to delight in this as Britain was flunking its COVID test apparently as badly as most of the U.S. was flunking our own. I probably won't ever get to it. But it lives as period piece of the time before the pandemic when Brexiteers thought they were riding high while in reality making their island nation smaller and meaner. Worth a quick read if trying to understand other country's delusions of grandeur. Goodness knows, we've enough of those of our own to keep us busy.

The broken-hearted sign lamenting democracy was part of a little demonstration following the Republican acquittal in Trump's impeachment trial. The book cover is from the English edition -- more interesting than the U.S. cover.

Tough choice

I feel as if I'd written this post before -- and I more or less did -- during the primary race which left Los Angeles County with the choice of either reelecting incumbent District Attorney Jackie Lacey or replacing her with George Gascón, a former San Francisco D.A. But it keeps happening: well-known national and Southern Californian progressives like Bernie Sanders and Maxine Waters, Dolores Huerta and Jackie Goldberg, even usually less knee-jerk partisan commentators like Ezra Klein, even San Francisco's new progressive D.A. Chesa Boudin, keep telling me that Gascón is part of the new wave of progressive prosecutors who are bringing less punishment and more justice to criminal law enforcement.

As someone active for years in trying to bring to some measure of justice to bear against trigger-happy cops who killed Alex Nieto, Amicar Perez Lopez, Luis Gongora Pat, and Mario Woods in 2014-15, I find the fulsome endorsements of Gascón disorienting. Gascón was AWOL in the context of these police killings, refusing to charge police officers in any of them.

Not that Gascón's current endorsers are "wrong," because elections are binary events from which you can't always get what you want. When voting, you have try to get what you can. But let's apply some nuance here.

I understand that Jackie Lacey, though the first woman and the first African-American in the D.A. role in Los Angeles, is not a progressive choice. She too has failed to charge cops who kill and is notable as one of the few D.A.s in the state still bringing special enhanced murder charges that carry the death penalty. The California death penalty system is totally dysfunctional and our current governor has made clear that no death sentences will be carried out on his watch. She's just wasting money and legal angst by continuing to bring these charges. In the context of the current racial reckoning, the Black Future Project is picketing her house, demanding she resign!

But George Gascón is not a simple alternative. On formal, high profile, declared policies -- he's been a valuable voice among a law enforcement community hooked on punishment. He has supported bail reform, ending the war on drugs, clearing old marijuana conviction records, and alternatives to incarceration for juveniles.

But on charging decisions, his record looks highly political in the bad sense of trying to avert criticism from powerful detractors. Though he backed a "Blue Ribbon" study of police malpractice (and its indictment of police practices is quite incendiary,) somehow no cops who killed on his watch in San Francisco had to face a jury. He may have rightly judged that under the law as then written it would have been hard to convict, but the community was left feeling hung out to dry. Did the lives of these men matter?

Yet when powerful establishment forces line up to push him, he'll overcharge and posture on a bad case. I'm thinking of the high-profile shooting of Kate Steinle by a dumb and dazed undocumented immigrant. This tragedy was clearly a murderous accident, but Donald Trump and all our national Know-Nothings were screaming for blood. Gascón's charges against the shooter all demanded a finding of malevolent intent to reach a guilty verdict; the jury wouldn't and couldn't convict. Gascón demonstrated he can be pushed around; L.A. progressives, take note.

If I lived in L.A., would I vote for Gascón? I guess so. It would be hard, but I believe in making tactical choices with open eyes. And if this guy manages to win, folks better stay ready to get after him ...

This is beyond beautiful

Five descendants of Frederick Douglass read and respond to excerpts of his famous speech, "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" which asks all of us to consider America's long history of denying equal rights to Black Americans.

FEATURING (alphabetically)
Douglass Washington Morris II, 20 (he/him)
Isidore Dharma Douglass Skinner, 15 (they/their)
Zoë Douglass Skinner, 12 (she/her)
Alexa Anne Watson, 19 (she/her)
Haley Rose Watson, 17 (she/her)

The democratic impulse is resilient

On this day celebrating national freedom, there are material signs that enthusiasm for egalitarian democracy is surging after a season of seeming decline.

Just take a look at a new poll of thousands of young citizens from Tisch College at Tufts University.

Here are some summaries of findings:

Youth ready to seize their power. Young people see 2020 as a time to exercise their potential power. Overall, 83% of those surveyed believe young people have the power to change the country, 60% say they feel they are part of a movement that will vote to express its views, and 79% of young people say the COVID-19 pandemic has helped them realize that politics impact their everyday lives.


Youth take to the streets. Young people report that they are protesting at more than five times the rate of 2016. 27% of youth (ages 18-24) say they have attended a march or demonstration in 2020, a remarkable increase from the 2016 (5%) and 2018 elections (16%).
 

Young people reaching out. Along with political activism, peer-to-peer voter outreach is increasing to even greater rates than in 2018, which saw a surge in youth participation. After the 2018 election, 33% of youth reported trying to convince their peers to vote, and 11% said they had registered new voters. Those numbers have skyrocketed: Today, months before the election, 50% of youth say they’ve already tried to convince others to vote, and 25% say they have helped register voters.

Democracy is possible when people are willing, even eager, to participate in the decisions that determine their life chances. Dire times seem to have produced a generation which has decided its their time to jump into the fray.

This may seem to come out of nowhere, but it didn't. The Black Lives Matter wave of activism has been building since the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2013 (if not since 1619). Willingness to take to the streets among white people has been on the rise since Trump's surprise election.

According to a poll from The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation, one in five Americans said that they had participated in a protest since the start of the Trump administration, and 19 percent said they were new to protesting.

... “It looks, for all the world, like these protests are achieving what very few do: setting in motion a period of significant, sustained, and widespread social, political change,” Professor McAdam said. “We appear to be experiencing a social change tipping point — that is as rare in society as it is potentially consequential.”

New York Times, July 3, 2020

This protesting stuff -- whether against the Muslim ban, locking immigrant children in cages, the sexual entitlement of powerful men, or police violence -- is learned behavior and we have a generation that has learned well.
...Meanwhile, older folks are wising up. Here's a pretty amazing story about some mostly white Florida elders who have come to believe that their lives may depend on a change of administration.
These people aren't about to make a revolution, but they aren't standing in the way either. Once again, the citizens of this nation are called to struggle for "a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Fourth of July is upon us

For the national holiday, give a listen to Erudite Partner being interviewed by Bill Moyers. For all the horror of the omni-crisis -- white supremacy, coronavirus, apparent economic Depression, Trump and the GOPers -- neither of them is disheartened.

This is what my students have said over and over again is, “We don’t want to go back to normal. We don’t want the country to go back to the way it was before. This is a time when we need to rethink everything.” And I think that we are at a time when the combination of the pandemic and what’s looking to be a very, very deep recession and the Black Lives Matter movement. Those three taken together create an opportunity to talk about, what would it look like to do things genuinely differently?

And, of course, it’s not gonna be perfect and it may turn out to be incremental and it may not be what one would hope for. But I feel like this is the first time in a very long time that you see people, you know, serious journalists asking about, you know, “Couldn’t things be genuinely, radically different?”

... BILL MOYERS: How are you gonna advise [your students] to celebrate the Fourth of July?

REBECCA GORDON: I might tell them to read Frederick Douglass’s famous address about the Fourth of July in which he argues that this is nothing for him and his people to celebrate.

What I am trying to do is educate people to believe that it is important to be citizens. Citizens of the country they live in, but also citizens of the world. And that if they want to spend their Fourth of July thinking about, “What does it mean to me to be a citizen? What do I have to think about? How do I have to act?” I think that’s a great way to celebrate the Fourth of July.

Let the celebrations begin -- without crowds or probably fireworks.

Friday cat blogging

Introducing Janeway the Zoomcat who came to live with us this week. Yes, we met her on the ubiquitous online platform. She's a rescue, a one year old whose sole (for sure!) litter of kittens have just been weaned. Despite a life that probably wasn't much fun, she's trusting and affectionate with her new humans -- and very curious about her new house. She's not allowed to go outside which is going to take some quick footwork by the humans until she gets used to staying in.

Why "Janeway"? The reference is to Captain Kathryn Janeway, the captain of the Starfleet starship USS Voyager, involuntary explorer of a distant Quadrant. The cat Janeway picked up the name at the Humane Society and we think it does just fine for this little explorer.

Whoever gave it to her probably didn't know that both Stacey Abrams, former candidate for Governor of Georgia, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, U.S. Representative for New York's 14th congressional district, had drawn inspiration from the character of Janeway, according to Wikipedia. We approve.

Bull-bleep on behalf of cops and other stirrings

Dan Walters is what I think of as a classic curmudgeonly columnist. He's been writing in newspapers about California politics nearly forever -- since 1960 in fact. He's a smart old white guy who knows where a lot of bodies are buried, and he has a sharp eye for how power has worked. At this point he's also deeply cynical and out of tune with the hopeful, multi-racial, loosely left, California that is emerging. So, naturally, he gives voice to police unions' propaganda about why it would be terrible if racial justice reform chipped away at the cops' power.

It's not that Walters doesn't see a problem with policing: he calls out

... the cozy relationship between police unions and politicians and the laws and policies that protect violence-prone officers from consequences for their acts.

The unions get what they want from local and state officials, not only legal protections but generous salaries and pension benefits. The politicians also get what they want, campaign funds and union endorsements testifying to their crime-fighting credentials.

But right on cue, he insists that police unions are just like other public employee unions.

... the political clout that police unions have wielded in California for decades is no different from what other public employee unions have done. Universally, they seek more job security and increases in pay and fringe benefits for their members, and do so by supporting politicians who will deliver the goods, regardless of how it impacts the larger public.

If, therefore, we condemn the unhealthy relationship between police unions and politicians, we should subject other public employee unions to the same critical scrutiny.

Police unions have often blocked accountability for violent acts. Education unions flex their muscle to stifle competition and avoid accountability for how schools treat their neediest pupils. The outcomes of both damage the larger society.

Why, in Walters' view, cops are just like teachers!

Here he's equating organized teachers' fight to prevent private charter schools from sucking up public school funding with cops' demand for a protected right to beat, gas, and shoot persons they consider scary or uppity. Usually Black or Latinx persons. And to get paid well for this.

Walter's sleight of hand makes a false equivalence between a policy difference over how to achieve a socially agreed common good -- educating kids -- with perpetuating a license to harm without effective legal limits.

That is, he's spewing bull shit for the cops.

Many of us have long called out corrupt police unions defending indefensible behavior by some of their members. I certainly have. Too often these unions serve as toxic reservoirs of white (and usually male) resentment in a changing society. The labor movement at large is going to have to decide whether it can advance the interests of a multi-ethnic working class while treating police work as just another type of work for wages.

This is not a new dilemma. Because throughout the 19th century, police in the U.S. north had served as violent strikebreakers for bosses, the 1886 American Federation of Labor wanted nothing to do with organizing cops. (In the Jim Crow South, policing in that era meant local white sheriffs whose job was to maintain the racial hierarchy by force.) Labor journalist Steven Greenhouse explains that police officers only won the right to collective bargaining in the 1960s as part of a general expansion of labor organization among public employees. Once governments agreed to bargain with their police, a poisonous dynamic played out.

Initially, newly established unions focused on winning better wages and benefits. A major recession in the early eighties and the anti-tax fervor of the Reagan era caused budget crunches in many cities. Local leaders told police unions and other public-sector unions that they had little money for raises. In turn, the police demanded increased protections for officers facing disciplinary proceedings.

Since the eighties, police contracts in New York and many other cities have added one protection after another that have made it harder to hold officers accountable for improper use of force or other misconduct. Such protections included keeping an officer’s disciplinary record secret, erasing an officer’s disciplinary record after a few years, or delaying any questioning of officers for twenty-four or forty-eight hours after an incident such as a police shooting.

This is how you get a killer officer like Derek Chauvin still on the Minneapolis police force and training newcomers after 17 previous complaints.

Progressive unions within the laboring movement are edging up to the problem of how to deal with affiliates which act as bullies for white supremacy. SEIU President Mary Kay Haney has been willing to talk about expelling police groups. Though national union leadership, including AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, are flinching from a fight over police, plenty of progressive parts of the labor movement such as United Teachers Los Angeles, the second largest teachers organization in the country, want the police out.

One of the accomplishments of the Black Lives Matter movement has been to force organized labor to re-examine its allegiances -- to decide whose side it is on.

Best bumpersticker I've seen in a while

Busy today -- maybe later for posting.

Falling down -- and getting up again

Trust Erudite Partner to find the material meaning behind a scary label. In her latest opus for Tom Dispatch, she asks "Can making Black Lives Matter rescue a failing state?"

Sure as can be, rescue by all of us together is needed as the many plagues of the omni-crisis -- white supremacy, Trump and his GOPers, the coronavirus, and a crashed economy -- grind on. Against every possible obstacle for 400 years, Black citizens have dreamed and enfleshed visions of justice and freedom. What a time!

George Floyd Intersection of Hope

A friend who lives in Minneapolis passed along that one of her friends had taken on supporting the community living and active around the location where George Floyd was killed. That activist, Marie Claire, explains:

Our primary focus is to help the people lovingly preserving George Floyd’s memorial, and make it a safe and comfortable space to visit. ... The process of helping maintain the Memorial has been organic. There has been no planning, and as of now we are only getting by with volunteer help and limited financial support from the community.

I grew up in the neighborhood where George Floyd was killed. As a college student and someone who is biracial, I experience firsthand the unfortunate obstacles of skin color. I am the proud daughter of an interracial marriage, and I can't imagine what someone with a darker complexion endures, not to mention a black man in America.

If you have visited the memorial of George Floyd, you have probably seen a number of groups distributing food, water, and masks for those who need it. We are collecting donations to ensure the sustainability of the memorial and support those actively working to do so.

We are in this together! #BLM #JusticeforGeorgeFloyd

Please continue to share with your friends and family!

We are not done yet, and we won't stop until there is justice.

If anyone you know has extra masks, we could use them at the entry point sanitation stations.

This is not some established nonprofit organization taking up a popular cause. It's just people doing their best to honor their local martyr for justice. They depend on a small GoFundMe. If you can, you know what to do ...

COVID-19: what don't we know yet about recovering

Health policy wonk Andy Slavitt warned about a coming spike in COVID cases where states "opened" too soon. The virus doesn't care about governors' political need to placate Donald Trump and his combative followers; it simply marches on through new, previously uninfected, hosts wherever it can find them. Unhappily, at the moment, that's Florida, Texas, and Arizona, with the rest of the south and southwest apparently on the same path.

Now Slavitt is warning about future dangers. Most people who catch COVID don't die; they "recover." But because the disease is new to humans, we don't know what "recover" means. Slavitt wants our medical scientists to get ahead of the game, to study outcomes so doctors know what to expect.

It is time we consider setting up COVID-19 long term recovery centers so patients with ongoing mysterious symptoms can be treated and studied.

The symptoms that emerge post-hospitalization or among many younger people with initial light symptoms is a scary and not understood part of the disease.

More people will survive COVID but like past viruses like SARS-Cov-1 and AIDS, surviving doesn’t mean a symptom free life.

We can eventually beat and treat many diseases but our scientists need data and patients require support.

One out of 1000 Americans at this point have been hospitalized with COVID-19. Neurological, respiratory, immune system, and clotting and damage to the kidney, pancreas and lungs have all been experienced.

As the virus spreads more people will become ill and more will survive. We should take advantage of the time to increase our understanding.

Many more people will get COVID and not require hospitalization — by the end of the Summer, it could total 15% of the population.

Some number of these people, even if they didn’t experience symptoms, will find the virus has stayed in their system causing new or nagging sensations. With SARS-Cov-1, chronic fatigue & mental health disorders are still a problem with 40% of people who have recovered.

The answer to this phenomenon begins with more widespread testing still. And in particular in hard hit communities.

Special clinics and ongoing treatment should be set up.

Some COVID recoverees report being stigmatized already as we often do with things we don’t understand. People treat them as if they’re infectious. And suggest the only thing that matters is if people die or not. We can do better than that.

Normally the CDC would be enlightening us here. I hope they step up but since the pandemic has begun, leadership has had to come from elsewhere in the country. And it should again.

That is, we need more and better data collection and smart observation from a scientific community that is both over-burdened and sometimes prone to squabbling over credit for new insights. Only coherent political leadership could avert the worse of this. And we know we're not going to get it in this country.

This was preventable.

Tile mural detail above by Juana Alicia outside the Ambulatory Care Center, UCSF Medical Center.

Time's up for California's affirmative action ban

California's Prop. 209 will be on the ballot again this fall -- this time as Proposition 16. At long last, voters will be asked to repeal a measure approved a generation ago amid an eruption of white people's panic about the state's growing racial and cultural diversity. Under this legal provision, the state is forbidden to take into account race and gender in our civic life.

The lead legislative sponsor of the measure, Assemblywoman Shirley Weber of San Diego, explains how, in a spasm of fear, we hogtied racial and gender justice.

Enacted in 1996, Proposition 209 — which was deceptively marketed to voters as a civil rights initiative — removed essential tools to fight discrimination against women and people of color. Far from leveling the playing field, it set up obstacles to success for millions. In the six years that followed Proposition 209’s passage, contract awards to women business enterprises dropped significantly from 6.7% to 3.8%. In the following two decades, California’s minority and women business enterprises lost the potential equivalent of $1 billion annually in public contracts.

Since Proposition 209’s passage, California has become one of only eight states that do not allow race or gender to be among the many factors considered in hiring, allotting state contracts or accepting students into the state’s public colleges and universities.
Despite our position as a global leader, this law has allowed discriminatory hiring and contracting processes to flourish in California. The result is that the number of women and Latinos employed by the state of California has decreased significantly relative to population growth.

In 1994, Latinos were admitted to the UCs above the average rate, and African-Americans at 6 points below average; in 2019, they were admitted at 6 points and 16 points below average, respectively. Asian American admission rates went down, and have not returned to previous levels, especially at the most selective campus in the UC system. For example, before Proposition 209 in 1996, the Asian American admissions rate at UC Berkeley was 32%. Two years later, it was 30%. Currently, it is 21%.

San Diego Union Tribune, June 9, 2020

We can climb out of this hole we dug for ourselves by passing Weber's constitutional amendment.
...

It's hard for anyone under 45 to imagine, but not so long ago, California was in many ways the most Trumpian place in the country outside the old South. The older white electorate was simply scared stupid of the emerging plurality of people of color -- Black, Latinx, and of various Asian origins. Republican politicians spent the decade of the 1990s offering this frightened electorate tasty meals of bigoted fodder that promised the impossible -- to interrupt and impede demographic reality.

So, the state voted in Prop. 187 that California rejected immigrants and that undocumented people should have no access to state funded education or health care. (Prop. 187's hate agenda was never fully implemented because of court challenges; Trump has come far closer than 1990s California ever did.) Later California outlawed bilingual education (repealed 2017) and multiple measures aiming to jail Black and Latin offenders and throw away the keys (chipped away at via Prop. 36 in 2012 and Prop. 47 in 2014.) Prop. 209's ban on affirmative action is the only pillar of that nasty decade of white backlash initiatives still standing.

Young Californians know that Prop. 209 has got to go. Sally Chen grew up in San Francisco as the daughter of working class Chinese immigrants. She wanted to write a college essay that built on what her life experiences had taught her -- but was advised she couldn't if she was applying to the California university system. Since she was a top student, she ended up at Harvard where courts have agreed that the private university can look at life experiences involving race, ethnicity and gender as part of the admission process. But what about all the other students who are not quite such stars? She remains horrified by the narrow lens California sought to force her into:

My race is an essential part of who I am – both in my pride as a Chinese American and in the very real challenges my family and I have faced because of it. 

Varsha Sarveshwar is the president of the University of California Student Association. She graduated this year from UC Berkeley and she believes voting for ACA 5 in November will be acting for equal opportunity for all:

Simply put, we can no longer pretend that race does not exist or that it doesn’t matter.

Students are far more complex than race alone, but race is undeniably an important part of who we are. This shapes the rich perspectives and experiences we bring to an academic environment.

Today, colleges can consider whether you’re from the suburbs, a city or a rural area. They can consider what high school you went to. They can consider your family’s economic background. They can look at virtually everything about you – but not race. It makes no sense – and is unfair – that schools can’t consider something that is so core to our lived experience.

Assemblywoman Weber took her repeal initiative to the legislature by speaking to the moment we're in:

"I'm so grateful I didn't have to convince you that racism is real, because George Floyd did that," said ACA 5's author...

California can affirm that race matters in November. Let's get on with it.

It is time for reparations

Nikole Hannah-Jones lays out what is owed. What follows is an abbreviated excerpt; do read it all.

Wealth begets wealth, and white Americans have had centuries of government assistance to accumulate wealth, while the government has for the vast history of this country worked against black Americans doing the same.

... Wealth, not income, is the means to security in America. Wealth — assets and investments minus debt — is what enables you to buy homes in safer neighborhoods with better amenities and better-funded schools. It is what enables you to send your children to college without saddling them with tens of thousands of dollars of debt and what provides you money to put a down payment on a house. It is what prevents family emergencies or unexpected job losses from turning into catastrophes that leave you homeless and destitute. It is what ensures what every parent wants — that your children will have fewer struggles than you did. Wealth is security and peace of mind. It’s not incidental that wealthier people are healthier and live longer. Wealth is, as a recent Yale study states, “the most consequential index of economic well-being” for most Americans. But wealth is not something people create solely by themselves; it is accumulated across generations.

... Brown v. Board of Education did not end segregated and unequal schools; it just ended segregation in the law. It took court orders and, at times, federal troops to see any real integration. Nevertheless, more than six decades after the nation’s highest court proclaimed school segregation unconstitutional, black children remain as segregated from white kids as they were in the early 1970s. There has never been a point in American history where even half the black children in this country have attended a majority-white school.

... The Fair Housing Act prohibited discrimination in housing, but it did not reset real estate values so that homes in redlined black neighborhoods whose prices were artificially deflated would be valued the same as identical homes in white neighborhoods, which had been artificially inflated. It did not provide restitution for generations of black homeowners forced into predatory loans because they had been locked out of the prime credit market. It did not repay every black soldier who returned from World War II to find that he could not use his G.I. Bill to buy a home for his family in any of the new whites-only suburbs subsidized by the same government he fought for. It did not break up the still-entrenched housing segregation that took decades of government and private policy to create. Lay those redlining maps over almost any city in America with a significant black population, and you will see that the government-sanctioned segregation patterns remain stubbornly intact and that those same communities bore the brunt of the predatory lending and foreclosure crisis of the late 2000s that stole years of black homeownership and wealth gains.

... Making employment discrimination illegal did not come with a check for black Americans to compensate for all the high-paying jobs they were legally barred from, for the promotions they never got solely because of their race, for the income and opportunities lost to the centuries of discrimination. Nor did these laws end ongoing discrimination any more than speed limits without enforcement stop people from driving too fast. These laws opened up opportunities for limited numbers of black Americans while largely leaving centuries of meticulously orchestrated inequities soundly in place, but now with the sheen of colorblind magnanimity.

With Covid-19, black Americans face a financial catastrophe unlike any in nearly a century. Black Americans had already lost the largest share of their wealth of all racial groups as a result of the last recession and have struggled the most to recover. They are the only racial group whose household median income is less than it was in 2000. Today already more than half of black adults are out of work. Black businesses are withering. Their owners were almost completely shut out of the federal paycheck-protection program — just 12 percent of black and Latino business owners who applied for the small-business loans received the full amounts they requested, according to a Global Strategy Group survey last month. Nearly half the respondents said they would most likely shutter permanently within six months. Black children are expected to lose 10 months’ worth of academic gains because of school closures, more than any other group, and yet they attend the schools with the least resources already, schools that will have even fewer resources as states slash spending to make up for budget shortfalls. One in five black homeowners and one in four renters have missed at least one home payment since the shutdowns began — the highest of all racial groups.

Race-neutral policies simply will not address the depth of disadvantage faced by people this country once believed were chattel. Financial restitution cannot end racism, of course, but it can certainly mitigate racism’s most devastating effects. If we do nothing, black Americans may never recover from this pandemic, and they will certainly never know the equality the nation has promised.

So we are left with a choice. Will this moment only feel different? Or will it actually be different?

... It is time for this country to pay its debt. It is time for reparations.

And when our political leaders dither and plead poverty, it's up to all of us to remind them they are lying. What's the wealth of a nation for but to assure the well-being of its people? There's only one morally acceptable answer -- and that's the meaning of the cry that Black Lives Matter.

Old voters swing toward the future

I sure didn't want the Democratic nominee to be an old white guy. (That went for either of the possibles.) If I had my druthers, we'd have someone who looked more like our future than our past. But here we are. Do let's think about old people in our politics.

E.J. Dionne, a Washington Post pundit who is an old white guy himself, pointed out in one of this pandemic year's remote addresses to graduating students that old people have disproportionate political influence. All of us should get more out of government, but we, the old, have a firm grip on what there is.

Our public policies tilt toward the economic interests of older Americans. This imbalance must be righted lest an entire generation of Americans — your generation — be weighed down for the rest of its working life by the aftereffects of this moment.

Older people do well in the policy wars partly because they vote in large numbers (another incentive for young people to turn out). Our social insurance programs for older people, principally Medicare and Social Security, are not matched by similarly comprehensive protections for the middle-aged and the young. Also: Older people are wealthier, and our political system leans hard toward the haves over the have-nots.

He's telling the younger folks to get in there and push for what ought to theirs.

It's hard to overestimate how much influence older people have on voting outcomes in this country. Timothy Noah's statistics about who does the democracy thing are stark.

America’s upper governmental reaches are remarkably old—older, in fact than the much-mocked Soviet Politburo at the time of Leonid Brezhnev’s death, when its median age was a comparatively sprightly 71. There are a variety of reasons for this, including the aging of the Baby Boom and great health strides in recent decades for the over-70 set.

But the real determining factor, I think, is that the voting population is very, very old. In 2016, voters age 65 and older represented only 15 percent of the electorate but accounted for nearly 30 percent of all ballots cast, thanks to their 71 percent turnout. In 2020, this cohort will represent nearly one-quarter of the electorate—and consequently could account for one-third or more of all ballots.

The extraordinary influence of old people on election outcomes is not going to change unless participation from younger people increases. That's just a fact.

So let's be grateful that the electoral preferences of old white people seem to be changing. Current polling says we're done with Donald Trump. We don't want to be left to die off from a virus which he's fumbling to ignore. As of now, Joe Biden ahead by 6 points among old people of all races. By contrast, Hillary Clinton lost this age group by 13 percentage points in 2016.

And our numbers among the voters mean this can sink Trump; we'll be "at least a quarter of voters in 2020." We were slow to get it, but we're moving.

Disappearing histories

So New York City has decided it's time to hide away this:

About time! This horror was erected in 1940.

Now can San Francisco get rid of this?

The statue at Dolores and Market Streets commemorates the U.S. imperial adventures in Cuba and the Philippines. Under the rearing horse's hooves there lies a blond fallen hero. He's not very representative of that war. Though the U.S. occupiers did suffer casualties, as has routinely been the case in our imperial wars, the local population bore the brunt:

The ensuing Philippine-American War lasted three years and resulted in the death of over 4,200 American and over 20,000 Filipino combatants. As many as 200,000 Filipino civilians died from violence, famine, and disease.

So wrote the U.S. government's Office of the Historian. This website comes with a note:

“Milestones in the History of U.S. Foreign Relations” has been retired and is no longer maintained.

An expanded note, defensive in tone, takes pains to explain that a review of the Office of the Historian was underway in 2016. But apparently the decision to retire this material was part of the Trump administration's cuts to the State Department. I suspect we have here historical revisionism to project a story more in tune with "Making America Great Again."

Let's honor this improbable Senator

Way back in the fall of 2017, when it was easy to believe our fellow citizens were hopelessly benighted dupes of racist Trumpian populism, the victorious Senate campaign of Doug Jones was a reminder that all was not lost. Behind a tidal wave of Black women's energy, the good people of Alabama voted to replace their neo-Confederate Senator Jeff Sessions, not with a crazy child molester, but this unprepossessing former U.S. attorney of moderate Democratic sentiments. To those of us in despair over Trump, it was the first breakthrough.

He's up for re-election this year against either the same Sessions or a Trumpian Auburn University football coach, Tommy Tuberville, depending on who wins the GOP primary. Nobody much expects Jones to have a chance. Trump is up 53-39 over Biden in Alabama -- less of a margin than in 2016, but daunting.

But here's Jones standing up for racial decency in his mild way. Responding to George Floyd's murder, he says "Across Alabama, folks are struggling with this ... The road to racial justice has taken far too long.”

Jones has some credibility: what fame he had before the Senate campaign was as the prosecutor of two Ku Klux Klan members for the 1963 Birmingham church bombing that killed four African-American girls. He also indicted Eric Rudolph, the domestic terrorist who bombed abortion clinics and the Atlanta Olympics.

I suspect the target of this ad is not the good citizens of Alabama, but me and people like me. Jones needs national support if he's to have a campaign at all. But I'll take this from him; he deserves.

Pandemic campaigning and democratic breakthroughs

A few months ago, way back when we didn't know who would emerge from the Democratic presidential primary, the old guard of the Democratic Party consultant class were downright panicked that our side had fallen far behind the GOP campaign online. This alarm only deepened when the winner was an "analog candidate in a digital world." And then came the pandemic, and Joe Biden was confined to his basement, and we all found ourselves living on Zoom.

It was actually an episode of the podcast Campaign HQ from one of those consultant heavyweights, David Plouffe, that gave me an inkling that there was another possible path for the coming election season. Pete Buttigieg’s online engagement director told of successfully turning supporters loose in new media they understood better than the campaign to sell the unheralded newcomer. Pete had limits as a candidate, but the potential was huge.

And now we celebrate TikTok activists and K-pop kids who apparently successfully trolled the Trump campaign ticket system and lured the GOPers into a cardinal political campaign sin: overpredicting crowd size. Successful campaigns underpredict and then crow about overflow. Tulsa made Trump look like a deflated balloon. Good going, kids and friends!

We have now seen online activism, launched from no closer than the sympathetic outskirts of a regular campaign, create both a material and media impact. This is something new and will change the coming campaign season.

Ever since politics evolved for its permanent practitioners into a profession dealing in data and sociological observation as much or more than ideology (I make this the 1970s), the vital center of campaigns has been "message discipline." Polls and focus groups study the voters to determine what they want to hear and what they will listen to and candidates and their campaigns rigidly adhere to "the message." This is not always pernicious; a lot of good people and causes have won political office in this system. It was however often inflexible and unwelcoming to everyday concerned citizens who had to be disciplined to get with the program. And consultants profited because they were the essential sources of messages and the approved ads.

Citizen activist politics was due for a breakout from message machine politics. The strange new technological environment of a pandemic election is likely to give space to many novelties and some new people. Black Lives Matter was never on Democratic messaging train; BLM has its own 2020 policy program. The streets have put this on the national agenda. Digital natives have shown they can intervene in politics and will. Yes, as Charlie Warzel insists, there's a lot of alienation in that quarter -- but what is democratic (small "d") politics for, if not to give voice to real pain as well as promise?

We do need to elect a Democratic President and a Democratic Senate and as many smart, honest pols as we can find at every level this fall. The energy must begin to be translated into actualities. That will involve figuring out how to do the necessary mechanics -- registration, education in new voting systems where needed, encouragement of indifferent and hesitant citizens to actually vote, all the usual -- in a pandemic environment. I have no doubt we'll do what needs to be done. We have to.

From my clutter: virus vexations

Sunday morning, after services on Zoom, the attending members of our church community discussed what the prospects are for gathering in the flesh in the season of the coronavirus. Whatever else may develop, we agreed it would be crazy to pretend the pandemic was over. The virus still lurks among us.

It feels time to unload some of the oddments I've collected from COVID journalism. This thing is a mystery.

Scientists trying to suss the coronavirus out are often reduced to admitting they can't identify patterns, though they can document different impacts.

If you are in Belgium and have COVID-19, your odds are not good: About one in six Belgians who have contracted the disease have died. If you are in Rwanda, a former Belgian colony with a per capita GDP about 1/60th of Belgium’s, your odds are superb. Rwanda has reported 339 cases, and none has even required admission to an ICU. Rwandans are younger than Belgians, but zero is a very small number.

In Switzerland, a country with excellent universal health care, a French-speaking Swiss with COVID-19 is 1.6 times more likely to die than a German-speaking Swiss. An Italian-speaking Swiss is 2.4 times more likely to die than a German speaker. The magnitude of these disparities is comparable to the magnitude of the disparities among white, Latino, and black people in the United States—even though there is no modern history of enslavement and genocide of Switzerland’s Italian-speaking population. (Ticino, the center of Italian-speaking Switzerland, ranks seventh out of 26 cantons in per capita GDP.) You might be tempted to attribute the disparity to the Italian speakers’ connections with the death zone of northern Italy. That could account for the difference in the incidence of the disease—but why the difference in the likelihood that you’ll die, if you already have it?

Graeme Wood, The Atlantic, May 29, 2020

What is documented in San Francisco is that the disease is tearing through Latinx and Black communities and disproportionately killing infected people of various Asian origins, while not being nearly so deadly to white residents.

When our medical system tries to understand the discrepancies, further conundrums arise. The focus of study must look away from individuals to social forces, according to Statnews.

“Policymakers’ natural instinct is to think this correlation is because of income disparities, or having health insurance, or diabetes, obesity rates, smoking rates, or even use of public transit,” [M.I.T. economist Chris] Knittel said. “It’s not. We controlled for all of those. The reason why [Black people] face higher death rates is not because they have higher rates of uninsured, poverty, diabetes, or these other factors.”

The Sutter study, too, adjusted for age, sex, comorbidities, and income; the higher hospitalization rate for Black patients wasn’t explained by any of those.

That leaves other factors. “If I were a policymaker,” Knittel said, “I’d be looking at things like the systemic racism that affects the quality of insurance African Americans have and the quality of the health care they receive.”

The county-by-county analysis of Covid-19 death rates in the U.S. comes as more and more studies shift from the initial focus on individual-level factors that seem to increase people’s risk of dying to population-level ones, too, said experts in public health, demographics, and infectious disease.

In some places, the pandemic has enabled communal violence. Indian novelist, essayist, and activist Arundhati Roy charges that the behavior of her Hindu nationalist government has been genocidal.

... the language being used by the mainstream media against Muslims was designed to dehumanise them. To paint an entire community as “corona jihadis” during this pandemic, when there is a pre-existing atmosphere of violence against Muslims is to create a genocidal climate. 

... It was terrifyingly similar to how, during the rise of the Third Reich, Nazis began accusing Jews of being spreaders of disease, carriers of typhus. And the tone of the media – particularly channels like Zee TV and Republic TV began to sound like Radio Rwanda. These channels are specially rewarded by the [President Nahrendra] Modi coterie, granted exclusive interviews by him and his terrifying home minister. The horror show is ongoing. ...

Meanwhile, in its own casually imperial way, the U.S. government has been contributing to global confusion and likely unnecessary deaths.

US-funded website spreading COVID misinformation in Armenia
Medmedia.am was established with money from the Democracy Commission Small Grants programme, awarded to the NGO by the US embassy in Armenia last year. These grants, intended to “promote democracy”, are worth up to $50,000 a year.

In May, the site’s most-read page called on Armenians to “refuse all potential [COVID-19] vaccination programmes”. It has had 131,000 views and 28,000 social media likes (big numbers in a country with a population of less than 3 million).

The second most popular piece claimed, incorrectly, that a morgue offered 100,000 AMD ($205) to a dead patient’s relatives to sign a document saying the death was caused by COVID-19. Other recent pieces have described COVID-19 as a “fake pandemic”.

Open Democracy, May 28, 2020

After this expose was published, the funding was cancelled. Thank you, alert reporters!

Then there's the mask debate. Scientific American calls out machismo run amuck.

Leaders who are more concerned with preserving a macho public image put our lives at risk as they prove their manhood by showing resistance to experts’ opinions, hypersensitivity to criticism and constant feuding with anyone who seems to disagree with them.

Yes, they call out Trump. After all, they speak science.

Our church is not the only one struggling with how we should go forward in this time. An epidemiologist who has studied airborne transmission of the virus and serves on his church's safety committee urges caution. Scholars of religion are, as is their wont, collecting data on what religious institutions are actually doing in the time of the pandemic. John Turner reports:

As far as I can discern, the vast majority of American congregations have responded in responsible ways and demonstrated a concern for public health. Many congregations, moreover, have continued on with their efforts to feed the hungry and to assist the needy.

He's looking for further contributions for this study which can be uploaded at Pandemic Religion.

Meanwhile, our little church community decided for the moment that we're all in this together, even if we're distancing. We don't want to create risk by "opening" while the danger of infection continues, nor to divide ourselves by various partial expedients. Instead, we want to see if we can equip our people who might need cell phones so they can join us via Zoom. Solidarity trumps the desire to be in the same space, at least for now, and for the foreseeable future.

Father's Day 2020

The label on the snapshot said 1938, nine years before I was born. The beach was probably on Cape Cod, though it could also have been somewhere on the shore of Lake Ontario. The mustache was an uncommon detail; I remember him growing one on brief occasions in my childhood. The sailor hat was his concession to his early developing bald spot. The pipe was his signal of adulthood, constantly fingered, usually unlit.

Like so many young people today, he came into adult life (in the early 1930s) just as his country fell into Depression. In that decade, he never found a coherent career path, bouncing from odd job to job. He didn't really get settled into stable employment for another 15 years. I'm sure that grated on him: he believed his male purpose was to provide.

But here there's a youthful hopefulness in his gaze. He would have been 33. I never knew him looking much like that. By the time I came along, there'd been a terrible war; he was too old to be drafted into World War II, so worked at accounting in a wartime aircraft factory. When I knew him, he seemed to think the world around him a pretty grim place.

But he tried to do what he conceived of as his duty and to be kind. What more can any of us do?