Fuck Noam Chomsky and the horse he rode in on.

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/10/20/chomsky-opcw-cover-up-of-probe-undermining-us-led-bombing-of-syria-is-shocking/

On 10/20/20 4:18 PM, Vladimiro Giacche' wrote:

What’s happening in Xinjiang can be defined in many ways: in no way this definition can involve the term “genocide

I wouldn't call it genocide but I would call it forced assimilation. It's what Britain did all through its colonies. It's also what Canada did to its native peoples. In the USA, it was plain-vanilla genocide.

More than a year after its appearance in The New York Times Magazine, the 1619 Project continues to drive its critics to distraction. Last month, President Trump convened a “White House Conference on American History” to defend the “magnificent truth about our country” from the “toxic propaganda” of the project.

Earlier this month, 21 scholars published an open letter to the Pulitzer Prize Board demanding that the Prize for Commentary awarded to Nikole Hannah-Jones’s lead essay be rescinded. And on Oct. 9, the Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote that the project’s “categorical and totalizing assertions” had squandered a precious opportunity to reorient the national debate on race in American history. Mr. Stephens’s conclusion was sober: “The 1619 Project has failed.”

The five distinguished historians who wrote to The Times last December to ask for “corrections” were more specific: They rejected the claims that Abraham Lincoln had failed to accept Black equality, that Black people had largely fought for their rights without the help of white allies, and that “one of the primary reasons” the colonists had waged the American Revolution was to protect slavery.

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This final assertion, which appeared fleetingly in Ms. Hannah-Jones’s lead essay, became the weakest spot against which the project’s critics were determined to press. In the spring of this year, The Times reworded one line in her essay to note that “some of the colonists” saw the Revolution as a way to preserve slavery. Some critics of the project declared victory, and wondered if the entire endeavor might now be undone.

Related

The 1619 Project

Opinion | Bret Stephens

The 1619 Chronicles

Oct. 9, 2020

Opinion | Jamelle Bouie

Slavery Was Not a Secondary Part of Our History

Aug. 23, 2019

Instead, 1619 continued to resonate, not least in the extraordinary uprisings that followed the killing of George Floyd in May. With the project now seeming prophetic rather than heretical — or perhaps prophetic and heretical — a new line of argument emerged. Just after Mr. Trump’s impromptu conference on American history last month, the Princeton historian Sean Wilentz criticized both the conference and the project, writing that historians may one day conclude that they were “closely matched symptoms of the same era, feeding off each other.”

Although Professor Wilentz had previously expressed support for 1619’s ambitions, he now presented Mr. Trump’s version of American history and the Times project as equidistant from evidence and historical truth. Americans should set aside “ideological distortion” on both sides and choose “legitimate historical writing” instead. Mr. Stephens does something similar in his recent column. Despite the noble goals of the project, its “overreach” has allowed Mr. Trump and his supporters to argue that what the president calls “fake news” is now promoting fake history: “As unbidden gifts to Donald Trump go, it could hardly have been sweeter than that.”

Writing as a professional historian with no involvement in the 1619 Project, I believe that criticism of the project is not only legitimate but necessary. Argument isn’t an obstacle to the work of historians; it is the work of historians. In recent years historians have written a great deal about how slavery and racism influenced the American Revolution (and vice versa) without reaching a consensus view; they’ve also conducted a lively debate over slavery’s role in the shaping of American capitalism.

Historians of good faith and excellent method can and should explore these questions without fear or rancor, or at least without any more rancor than academics usually generate when they quarrel with one another. But in the loudest criticism of 1619 has been a level of vitriol that is neither productive nor scholarly. Professor Wilentz told The Washington Post that, when he first read Ms. Hannah-Jones’s lead essay, “I threw the thing across the room.” His Princeton colleague Allen C. Guelzo has dismissed the project as a “conspiracy theory.” Prominent critics have looked to shut down the project’s assertions rather than engage with them, and have even suggested that the project’s authors bear some responsibility for the president’s endless culture wars.

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What’s going on here? In part, I think, the answer is gate-keeping. The project’s critics were clearly upset by its arguments, but does anyone think that the same essays published in another venue would have created anything like this reaction?

There is also something generational about this sense of horror at the storming of the citadel: among liberals of a certain age, The Times has a sacred status in American life. Some of the project’s liberal critics are also accustomed to shaping the national conversation on the American past. That The Times would have published the project without the benefit of their expertise clearly came as a shock. “I had no warning about this,” the distinguished historian Gordon S. Wood told the World Socialist website about 1619. “No one ever approached me.”

But the visceral reaction is also an acknowledgment that the 1619 Project radically challenges a core narrative of American history. Liberals and conservatives alike have imagined the story of the United States as a gradual unfolding of freedom. The Declaration of Independence is the seed of equality which eventually flowers for every American; white people — from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Abraham Lincoln to Lyndon B. Johnson — are indispensable allies in the work of racial progress.

The 1619 Project finds this narrative wanting. Its authors describe a nation in which racism is persistent and protean. White supremacy shapeshifts through the nation’s history, finding new forms to continue the work of subjugation and exclusion.

This is bracing to Americans who’ve been taught that the extension of freedom is the nation’s perpetual purpose. Nonetheless, the criticism directed at the project — and especially at Ms. Hannah-Jones’s essay — has been wildly disproportionate. The project’s authors can’t have imagined that their work would tear the Fourth of July from the national calendar, and yet so many of their critics have insisted that the counternarrative of 1619 might unravel even the most cherished assumptions about the nation’s values and purpose.

On the face of it, this fragility seems misplaced. The traditional narratives of American history die very hard indeed. But the 1619 Project has complicated long-held certainties about that history, forcing Americans (especially white Americans) to look at both the past and the present with fresh eyes.

While the old arguments about the moral unity of the American past will continue to generate fierce headwinds for future scholars who follow in the project’s footsteps, the extraordinary public interest in 1619 has suggested something truly profound: that Americans have the capacity to think differently about their history. In this sense, the 1619 Project has succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of its creators.

Nicholas Guyatt is reader in North American history at Cambridge University and the author of “Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation.”

AP finds most arrested in protests aren’t leftist radicals

By ALANNA DURKIN RICHER, COLLEEN LONG and MICHAEL BALSAMO, 2020-10-20 https://apnews.com/article/virus-outbreak-race-and-ethnicity-suburbs-health-racial-injustice-7edf9027af1878283f3818d96c54f748

 

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump portrays the hundreds of people arrested nationwide in protests against racial injustice as violent urban left-wing radicals. But an Associated Press review of thousands of pages of court documents tell a different story.

Very few of those charged appear to be affiliated with highly organized extremist groups, and many are young suburban adults from the very neighborhoods Trump vows to protect from the violence in his reelection push to win support from the suburbs.

Attorney General William Barr has urged his prosecutors to bring federal charges on protesters who cause violence and has suggested that rarely used sedition charges could apply. And the Department of Justice has pushed for detention even as prisons across the U.S. were releasing high-risk inmates because of COVID-19 and prosecutors had been told to consider the risks of incarceration during a pandemic when seeking detention.

Defense attorneys and civil rights activists are questioning why the Department of Justice has taken on cases to begin with. They say most belong in state court, where defendants typically get much lighter sentences. And they argue federal authorities appear to be cracking down on protesters in an effort to stymie demonstrations.

“It is highly unusual, and without precedent in recent American history,” said Ron Kuby, a longtime attorney who isn’t involved in the cases but has represented scores of clients over the years in protest-related incidents. “Almost all of the conduct that’s being charged is conduct that, when it occurs, is prosecuted at the state and local level.”

In one case in Utah, where a police car was burned, federal prosecutors had to defend why they were bringing arson charges in federal court. They said it was appropriate because the patrol car was used in interstate commerce.

Not to say there hasn’t been violence. Other police cars have been set on fire. Officers have been injured and blinded. Windows have been smashed, stores looted, businesses destroyed.

Some of those facing charges undoubtedly share far-left and anti-government views. Far-right protesters also have been arrested and charged. Some defendants have driven to protests from out of state. Some have criminal records and were illegally carrying weapons. Others are accused of using the protests as an opportunity to steal or create havoc.

But many have had no previous run-ins with the law and no apparent ties to antifa, the umbrella term for leftist militant groups that Trump has said he wants to declare a terrorist organization.

Even though most of the demonstrations have been peaceful, Trump has made “law and order” a major part of his reelection campaign, casting the protests as lawless and violent in mostly Democratic cities he says have done nothing to stymie the mayhem. If the cities refuse to properly clamp down, he says, the federal government has to step in.

“I know about antifa, and I know about the radical left, and I know how violent they are and how vicious they are, and I know how they are burning down cities run by Democrats,” Trump said at an NBC town hall.

In dozens of cases, the government has pushed to keep the protesters behind bars while they await their trials amid the COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed more than 220,000 people across the U.S. There have been more than 16,000 positive cases in the federal prison system, according to a tracker compiled by the AP and The Marshall Project.

In some cases, prosecutors have gone so far as appealing judge’s orders to release defendants. Pre-trial detention generally is reserved only for people who are clearly dangers to the community or a risk of fleeing.

In Texas, Magistrate Judge Andrew Austin repeatedly challenged the prosecutor to explain why Cyril Lartigue, who authorities say was caught on camera making a Molotov cocktail, should be behind bars while he awaits his trial. Lartigue, of Cedar Park, described his actions that night as a “flash of stupidity,” prosecutors said.

The 25-year-old lives with his parents in the Austin suburb and had never been in trouble with the law before and wasn’t a member of a violent group.

The judge said there are lot of people “who do something stupid that’s dangerous that we don’t even consider detaining.”

“I’m frustrated because I don’t think this is a hard case,” the judge said. “I have defendants in here with significant criminal histories that the government agrees to release.”

“We have no evidence of him — at least that’s been given to me — being a radical or a member of a group that advocates violence toward the police or others. We’ve got no criminal history. … What evidence is there that he’s a danger to society?” the judge asked.

The judge allowed Lartigue to stay out of jail.

While some of the defendants clearly hold radical or anti-government beliefs, prosecutors have provided little evidence of any affiliations they have with organized extremist groups.

In one arrest in Erie, Pennsylvania, community members raised more than $2,500 to help with bail for a 29-year-old Black man who was arrested after they said white people had come from out of town and spray painted a parking lot.

In thousands of pages of court documents, the only apparent mention of antifa is in a Boston case in which authorities said a FBI Gang Task Force member was investigating “suspected ANTIFA activity associated with the protests” when a man fired at him and other officers. Authorities have not claimed that the man accused of firing the shots is a member of antifa.

Others have social media leftist ties; a Seattle man who expressed anarchist beliefs on social media is accused of sending a message through a Portland citizen communication portal threatening to blow up a police precinct.

Several of the defendants are not from the Democratic-led cities that Trump has likened to “war zones” but from the suburbs the Republican president has claimed to have “saved.” Of the 93 people arrested on federal criminal charges in Portland, 18 defendants are from out of state, the Justice Department said.

This has contributed to a blame game that has been a subplot throughout the protests. Leaders in Minneapolis and Detroit have decried people from out of state and suburbanites for coming into their cities and causing havoc. Trump in turn has blamed the cities for not doing their part.

“Don’t come down to Detroit and tear the city up and then go back home. That’s putting another knee on the neck of Black folk because we got to live here,” the Rev. Wendell Anthony of the NAACP said in May.

More than 40% of those facing federal charges are white. At least 1/3 are Black, and about 6% Hispanic. More than two-thirds are under the age of 30 and most are men. More than a quarter have been charged with arson, which if convicted means a five-year minimum prison sentence. More than a dozen are accused of civil disorder, and others are charged with burglary and failing to comply with a federal order. They were arrested in cities across the U.S., from Portland, Oregon, to Minneapolis, Boston and New York.

Attorneys for those facing federal charges either declined to comment or didn’t respond to messages from the AP.

Brian Bartels, a 20-year-old suburban Pittsburgh man who is described by prosecutors as a “self-identified left-wing anarchist,” was flanked by his parents when he turned himself in to authorities. Bartels, who lives at his parents’ house, spray painted an “A” on a police cruiser before jumping on top of it and smashing its windshield during a protest in the city, prosecutors said. He pleaded guilty in September.

One defendant who was arrested during a protest in the central Massachusetts city of Worcester told authorities he was “with the anarchist group.” Vincent Eovacious, 18, who is accused of possessing several Molotov cocktails, told authorities that he had been “waiting for an opportunity,” according to court documents.

But tucked into the protest-related cases are accusations of far-right extremism and racism as well.

John Malcolm Bareswill, angry that a local Black church held a prayer vigil for George Floyd, called the church and threatened to burn it to the ground, using racial slurs in a phone call overheard by children, prosecutors said. Bareswill, 63, of Virginia Beach, faces 10 years in prison after pleading guilty to making a telephonic threat.

Two Missouri militia members who authorities say traveled to Kenosha, Wisconsin, to see Trump’s visit in the wake of the police shooting of Jacob Blake were arrested at a hotel in September with a cache of guns, according to court documents. An attorney for one of the men, Michael Karmo, said he is “charged criminally for conduct that many Americans would consider patriotic,” as authorities have alleged his motive was to assist overwhelmed law enforcement.

Three of the men arrested are far-right extremists, members of the “Boogaloo” movement plotting to overthrow the government and had been stockpiling military-grade weapons and hunting around for the right public event to unleash violence for weeks before Floyd’s death, according to court documents.

After aborting a mission related to reopening businesses in Nevada as the coronavirus pandemic raged, they settled on a Floyd-related protest led by Black Lives Matter. Angry it had not turned violent, they brought carloads of explosives, military-grade weapons, to a meet-up about 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) from the protest site and pumped gasoline into tanks. FBI agents arrested them before they could act, according to a criminal complaint.

FBI Director Christopher Wray recently told a congressional panel that extremists driven by white supremacist or anti-government ideologies have been responsible for most deadly attacks in the U.S. over the past few years. He said that antifa is more of an ideology or a movement than an organization, though the FBI has terrorism investigations of “violent anarchist extremists, any number of whom self identify with the antifa movement.”

But the handling of the federal protest cases is vastly different from other recent times of unrest.

“Look at Travyon (Martin) verdicts, Eric Garner verdicts,” Kuby said, talking about high-profile cases in which Black people were killed but no charges were filed.

“There was a tremendous amount of anger and unrest and activity that was objectively unlawful,” he said. “There were objections about law enforcement being militarized, but you didn’t see following the quelling of those demonstrations any significant federal law enforcement involvement.”

 

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What Fans of ‘Herd Immunity’ Don’t Tell You
A proposal to let people with low risk of infection live without constraint could lead to a million or more preventable deaths.
By John M. Barry, Mr. Barry is the author of “The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History.”
NYT Op-Ed, Oct. 19, 2020

Hence, it is no surprise that the White House and several governors are now paying close attention to the “Great Barrington Declaration,” a proposal written by a group of well-credentialed scientists who want to shift Covid-19 policy toward achieving herd immunity — the point at which enough people have become immune to the virus that its spread becomes unlikely.

They would do this by allowing “those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally.” This, they say, will allow people “to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection.”

These academics are clearly a distinct minority. Most of their public health colleagues have condemned their proposal as unworkable and unethical — even as amounting to “mass murder,” as William Haseltine, a former Harvard Medical School professor who now heads a global health foundation, put it to CNN last week.

But who is right?

The signers of the declaration do have a point. Restrictions designed to limit deaths cause real harm, including, but by no means limited to, stress on the economy, increases in domestic violence and drug abuse, declines in tests that screen for cancer and on and on. Those living alone suffer real pain from isolation, and the young have every reason to feel bitter over the loss of substantive education and what should have been memories of a high school prom or the bonding friendships that form in a college dorm at 2 a.m. or on an athletic team or in some other endeavor.

So the idea of returning to something akin to normal — releasing everyone from a kind of jail — is attractive, even seductive. It becomes less seductive when one examines three enormously important omissions in the declaration.

First, it makes no mention of harm to infected people in low-risk groups, yet many people recover very slowly. More serious, a significant number, including those with no symptoms, suffer damage to their heart and lungs. One recent study of 100 recovered adults found that 78 of them showed signs of heart damage. We have no idea whether this damage will cut years from their lives or affect their quality of life.

Second, it says little about how to protect the vulnerable. One can keep a child from visiting a grandparent in another city easily enough, but what happens when the child and grandparent live in the same household? And how do you protect a 25-year-old diabetic, or cancer survivor, or obese person, or anyone else with a comorbidity who needs to go to work every day? Upon closer examination, the “focused protection” that the declaration urges devolves into a kind of three-card monte; one can’t pin it down.

Third, the declaration omits mention of how many people the policy would kill. It’s a lot.

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, whose modeling of the pandemic the White House has used, predicts up to about 415,000 deaths by Feb. 1, even with current restrictions continuing. If these restrictions are simply eased — as opposed to eliminating them entirely, which would occur if herd immunity were pursued — deaths could rise to as many as 571,527. That’s just by Feb. 1. The model predicts daily deaths will still be increasing then.

Will we have achieved herd immunity then? No.

Herd immunity occurs when enough people have immunity either through natural infection or a vaccine so the outbreak eventually dies out. By Feb. 1, even with eased mandates, only 25 percent of the population will have been infected, by my calculations. The most optimistic model suggests herd immunity might occur when 43 percent of the population has been infected, but many estimate 60 percent to 70 percent before transmission trends definitively down.

Those are models. Actual data from prison populations and from Latin America suggest transmission does not slow down until 60 percent of the population is infected. (At present, only about 10 percent of the population has been infected, according to the C.D.C.)

And what will be the cost? Even if herd immunity can be achieved with only 40 percent of the population infected or vaccinated, the I.H.M.E. estimates that a total of 800,000 Americans would die. The real death toll needed to reach herd immunity could far exceed one million.

As horrific a price as that is, it could prove much worse if damage to the heart, lungs or other organs of those who recover from the immediate effects of the virus does not heal and instead leads to early deaths or incapacitation. But we won’t know that for years.

Some aftereffects of the 1918 influenza pandemic did not surface until the 1920s or later. For instance, children born during its peak in 1919 had worse health outcomes as they grew older, compared with others born around that time. There is speculation that the influenza caused a disease called encephalitis lethargica, which became almost epidemic in the 1920s and then later disappeared, and which affected patients in Oliver Sacks’s book “Awakenings.” Both the 1918 pandemic and other viruses have been linked to Parkinson’s disease.

Proponents of herd immunity point to Sweden. Swedish officials deny having actively pursued that strategy, but they never shut down their economy or closed most schools, and they still haven’t recommended masks. Its neighbors Denmark and Norway did. Sweden’s death rate per 100,000 people is five times Denmark’s and 11 times Norway’s. Did the deaths buy economic prosperity? No. Sweden’s G.D.P. fell 8.3 percent in the second quarter, compared with Denmark’s 6.8 percent and Norway’s 5.1 percent.

Finally, the Great Barrington Declaration aims at a straw man, opposing the kind of large, general lockdown that began in March. No one is proposing that now.

Is there an alternative? There was once a simple one, which the vast majority of public health experts urged for months: social distancing, avoiding crowds, wearing masks, washing hands and a robust contact tracing system, with support for those who are asked to self-quarantine and for selected closures when and where necessary.

Some states listened to the advice and have done well, just as many schools listened and have reopened without seeing a surge. But the Trump administration and too many governors never got behind these measures, reopened too many states too soon, and still haven’t straightened out testing.

Worse, the White House has all but embraced herd immunity and has also poisoned the public with misinformation, making it all but impossible to get national, near-universal compliance with public health advice for the foreseeable future.

As a result, the United States is not in a good place, and achieving near containment of the virus — as South Korea (441 deaths), Australia (904 deaths), Japan (1,657 deaths) and several other countries have done — is impossible. We can, however, still aim for results akin to those of Canada, where there were 23 deaths on Friday, and Germany, which suffered 24 deaths on Friday.

Getting to that point will require finally following the advice that has been given for months. That will not happen with this White House, especially since it is now all but openly advocating herd immunity, but states, cities and people can act for themselves.

Nothing, including monoclonal antibodies, rapid antigen testing, or even a vaccine, will provide a silver bullet. But everything will help. And hundreds of thousands of Americans will keep living who would otherwise have died under a policy of herd immunity.

John M. Barry is a professor at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine and the author of “The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History.”

Good letter. China's human rights offenses, from Uighur repression in Xinjiang to organ harvesting of prisoner is abominable and beyond any justification. That said, we in the U.S. are not in a good position to criticize anyone else on human rights. It is the duty of honest Marxists to do so however.

From the NYT article below. Note the mention of Harvard's Martin Kulldorff. He and another "herd immunity" advocate were featured in a Jacobin interview:

The declaration grew out of a gathering hosted in Great Barrington, Mass., by the American Institute for Economic Research, a think tank dedicated to free-market principles that partners with the Charles Koch Institute, founded by the billionaire industrialist to provide support to libertarian-leaning causes and organizations.

On Oct. 5, the day after the declaration was made public, the three authors — Dr. Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard — arrived in Washington at the invitation of Dr. Atlas to present their plan to a small but powerful audience: the health and human services secretary, Alex M. Azar II.

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A Viral Theory Cited by Health Officials Draws Fire From Scientists
A manifesto urging reliance on “herd immunity” without lockdowns was warmly received by administration officials. But the strategy cannot stem the pandemic, many experts say.
By Apoorva Mandavilli and Sheryl Gay Stolberg
NYT, Oct. 19, 2020

As the coronavirus pandemic erupted this spring, two Stanford University professors — Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Dr. Scott W. Atlas — bonded over a shared concern that lockdowns were creating economic and societal devastation.

Now Dr. Atlas is President Trump’s pandemic adviser, a powerful voice inside the White House. And Dr. Bhattacharya is one of three authors of the so-called Great Barrington Declaration, a scientific treatise that calls for allowing the coronavirus to spread naturally in order to achieve herd immunity — the point at which enough people have been infected to stall transmission of the pathogen in the community.

While Dr. Atlas and administration officials have denied advocating this approach, they have praised the ideas in the declaration. The message is aligned with Mr. Trump’s vocal opposition on the campaign trail to lockdowns, even as the country grapples with renewed surges of the virus.

The central proposition — which, according to the declaration’s website, is supported by thousands of signatories who identify as science or health professionals — is that to contain the coronavirus, people “who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal” while those at high risk are protected from infection.

Younger Americans should return to workplaces, schools, shops and restaurants, while older Americans would remain cloistered from the virus as it spreads, receiving such services as grocery deliveries and medical care.

Eventually so many younger Americans will have been exposed, and presumably will have developed some immunity, that the virus will not be able to maintain its hold on the communities, the declaration contends.

But it does not offer details on how the strategy would work in practice. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, has dismissed the declaration as unscientific, dangerous and “total nonsense.” Others have called it unethical, particularly for multigenerational families and communities of color.

Alarmed and angry, 80 experts on Wednesday published a manifesto of their own, the John Snow Memorandum (named after a legendary epidemiologist), saying that the declaration’s approach would endanger Americans who have underlying conditions that put them at high risk from severe Covid-19 — at least one-third of U.S. citizens, by most estimates — and result in perhaps a half-million deaths.

“I think it’s wrong, I think it’s unsafe, I think it invites people to act in ways that have the potential to do an enormous amount of harm,” said Dr. Rochelle Walensky, an infectious disease expert at Harvard University and one of the signatories to the Snow memo. “You don’t roll out disease — you roll out vaccination.”

The declaration grew out of a gathering hosted in Great Barrington, Mass., by the American Institute for Economic Research, a think tank dedicated to free-market principles that partners with the Charles Koch Institute, founded by the billionaire industrialist to provide support to libertarian-leaning causes and organizations.

On Oct. 5, the day after the declaration was made public, the three authors — Dr. Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard — arrived in Washington at the invitation of Dr. Atlas to present their plan to a small but powerful audience: the health and human services secretary, Alex M. Azar II.

Over the course of an hourlong meeting in a wood-paneled, sixth-floor suite atop the health department’s headquarters, the researchers walked the secretary and Dr. Atlas through their thinking.

Dr. Azar later tweeted: “We heard strong reinforcement of the Trump Administration’s strategy of aggressively protecting the vulnerable while opening schools and the workplace.”

Battered by lost jobs, pandemic fatigue and isolation, and worried for their children, there is little doubt that Americans loathe lockdowns, although many still see them as necessary to control the virus.

Among scientists, too, there is near-universal agreement that lockdowns are harmful. Even Dr. Fauci has suggested that another national lockdown must be instituted only as a last resort.

But mostly, scientific disagreement centers on whether lockdowns are a necessary move when other strategies to contain the virus have not even been put in place, or have failed.

“This has been wrongly framed as a debate between lockdown and no lockdown,” said Dr. Deepti Gurdasani, a clinical epidemiologist at Queen Mary University of London.

Dr. David Nabarro, a special envoy to the World Health Organization, has urged governments not to resort to lockdowns as the primary method to control the virus. Masks, social distancing, fewer crowds, testing and tracing — these are the ways to control the virus in the long run, he said in an interview.

But the lockdowns in the spring were necessary, he added, as emergency measures to give countries time to put in place strategies to control the virus.

“There is a middle way,” Dr. Nabarro added, between strict lockdowns and letting the virus freely infect people. “If only we had a few more world leaders who would understand this, we wouldn’t have this debate going on.”

But Dr. Bhattacharya and his supporters go further. They say that governments should never have imposed lockdowns at all, and never should have tried to institute coronavirus testing and contact-tracing. Instead, the trillions of dollars in economic aid approved by Congress should have been spent on programs to protect those at highest risk of illness and death.

The manifesto’s central tenet is that young people should be free to resume normal life — to re-enter the work force, attend college, dine in restaurants. They would become infected, hopefully without much illness, and gain immunity.

Eventually the virus would not be able to find new victims and would fade away.

“People who are more at risk may participate if they wish, while society as a whole enjoys the protection conferred upon the vulnerable by those who have built up herd immunity,” the declaration said.

The strategy includes keeping older people cloistered, with regular testing to detect possible outbreaks in nursing homes, and with groceries and other necessities delivered to anyone over 60 sheltering at home. Alternately, older people might move to other facilities for isolation or quarantine.

There would be no widespread surveillance for the coronavirus. People would be given information about testing, with an emphasis on those who have symptoms — but when and how to get tested, and whether to isolate if infected, would be left up to individuals.

“Testing and isolating indiscriminately causes too much collateral damage for it to be useful,” Dr. Bhattacharya said.

‘How’s this supposed to go?’

But some experts said the strategy was highly impractical, given the difficulty in determining who is truly susceptible. The risk of death from Covid-19 rises sharply with age, but about 37 percent of adults in America also are at significant risk because of obesity, diabetes or other underlying conditions.

The most recent statistics indicate that 20 percent of deaths from Covid-19 occur in people under age 65. And about a third of people who have recovered from the disease, including the young, still struggle with symptoms weeks later (a phenomenon the Barrington authors contest). “It’s amazingly irresponsible” not to take these risks into account, Dr. Nabarro said.

The declaration’s strategy is both unethical and fails to account for human behavior, said Ruth Faden, a bioethicist at Johns Hopkins University.

Many high-risk groups — people who live in multigenerational families or in crowded living situations, or who have diabetes and obesity — are disproportionately found in poor communities, she said. The declaration’s strategy would require them to move away from their families or to risk having younger family members bring the virus home.

“Are we going to compel these people to leave? And if we’re not going to compel them to leave, then how’s this supposed to go?” she said. “Then you are going to see the deaths that you say we’re not going to see.”

Reopening schools when community levels of the virus are high similarly rests on a misguided assumption that parents and teachers would agree to the strategy, she added.

Scientists who have signed the declaration did not offer many details for putting its ideas in place.

“I don’t know exactly how it would work,” said Gabriela Gomes, a mathematical modeler at the University of Strathclyde in Britain and one of 42 co-signers.

Another supporter, Paul McKeigue, a genetic epidemiologist at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, said, “Specific control measures for preventing coronavirus transmission are not my area of expertise.”

The lack of a clear plan has turned away even some would-be supporters. Dr. Stefan Baral, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, attended part of the Great Barrington, Mass., meeting and said he was sympathetic to the effort.

But Dr. Baral, a Swedish citizen who supports that country’s approach, said he did not sign the declaration because it did not lay out a plan for workplace or housing accommodations for people at risk.

Sweden adopted an unrestrictive approach, offering guidelines to its citizens but leaving compliance up to them. The country is often cited as the model for controlling the virus without restrictions, but has among the highest death rates in the world, particularly among the elderly. It has also suffered economic losses comparable to those of other Nordic countries.

It’s possible to avoid even those risks without lockdowns if governments impose some reasonable restrictions like physical distancing and universal masks and install test and trace strategies, Dr. Nabarro said.

“I will contest anybody who says it is undoable,” he added. “It’s doable without collateral damage if you bring together all the local communities.”

The town of Great Barrington, Mass., home to the American Institute for Economic Research, recently distanced itself from the declaration, saying the strategy it proposed could “cost millions of lives.”

“Anyone who might avoid Great Barrington, due to confusion over the Declaration, is invited to visit and see how COVID-safe works in a small New England town,” the town’s leaders wrote.

“Please wear a mask.”

Overlooked No More: Eleanor Flexner, Pioneering Feminist in an Anti-Feminist Age
“Century of Struggle,” her 1959 history of the women’s rights movement, uncovered previously ignored narratives, like the contributions of African-American women.
By Ellen Carol DuBois
NYT, Oct. 16, 2020

This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times. It is also part of The Times’s continuing coverage of the centennial of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the vote.

In the 1950s, Eleanor Flexner, a left-wing activist and writer, decided to compile a comprehensive history of the women’s rights movement in the United States, exploring a span of more than 300 years. Her timing could not have been less auspicious. Feminism was virtually a dirty word, described in Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia F. Farnham’s celebrated book “Modern Woman: The Lost Sex” (1947) as “at its core, a deep illness.”

Moreover, the House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC, was engaged in a ruthless investigation of Communist influence in the United States, attacking left-wing artists and intellectuals. Flexner had been a member of the Communist Party from 1936 through 1956, and although she was not hauled before HUAC, the careers of some of her closest friends and associates had been ruined.

Nonetheless, Flexner, with no formal training as a professional historian, began what became a pathbreaking, wide-ranging account of activism for women’s rights in America.

“Century of Struggle: The Women’s Rights Movement in the United States” (1959) was the first authoritative narrative of one of the great dimensions of American democratic history. The book, based largely on her original research in the Library of Congress, the Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History at Smith College and elsewhere, covered an immense amount of material, from Anne Hutchinson, the 17th-century rebel against Puritan clerical authority in Massachusetts, to the dramatic final years of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, by which women won the right to vote. It remained the pre-eminent text on the topic for more than half a century, and is still taught in schools and consulted widely by historians today.

For the book, Flexner said she tracked down the aging heroine of the Triangle shirtwaist factory strike, Clara Lemlich Shavelson, and uncovered information on the nearly forgotten Knights of Labor pioneer Leonora Barry from a granddaughter, who she said was thrilled that “somebody was going to finally take notice of my wonderful grandmother.”

SUFFRAGE AT 100To mark the anniversary of the 19th Amendment, we’re revisiting the stories of how women won the right to vote in the United States.
She also wrote about the struggles of African-American women. With the support of her brother-in-law, the head of the Industrial Records Division of the National Archives, she was able to access petitions to abolish slavery that women had sent to Congress in the 1830s. “I practically cried,” she said — but, she added, “I was afraid of getting tears on the petitions.”

Flexner came from a distinguished family. She was born on Oct. 4, 1908, in Georgetown, Ky., about 15 miles north of Lexington, the second daughter of Abraham and Anne Crawford Flexner. Abraham Flexner, the first college graduate of an immigrant German Jewish family, published “Medical Education in the United States and Canada” (1910) for the Carnegie Foundation. Also called “The Flexner Report,” it led to a major reorganization of medical education.

Anne Crawford Flexner was a successful playwright. Her big hit was the theater and film adaptation of the Alice Hegan Rice novel “Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch,” a tale of urban poverty. She wanted Eleanor to become a writer and supported her research with royalties from “Mrs. Wiggs,” along with additional money she left her when she died in 1955. Eleanor Flexner dedicated “Century of Struggle” to her mother, whose “life was touched at many points by the movement whose history I have tried to record.”

The Flexners were related by marriage to M. Carey Thomas, a suffragist and founding dean of Bryn Mawr College. Eleanor met Thomas at 14, when she went to her sister’s graduation at Bryn Mawr. Flexner recalled in a 1988 interview that Thomas put her hand on her head and said to her father, “Abe, when are we getting this one?” Eleanor was determined to go to Swarthmore instead.

There, after she was kept out of a sorority because of her Jewish background, she and her best friend organized a campaign to bar Greek societies from campus (they weren’t successful).

After a brief stint doing graduate work in London, Flexner moved to Manhattan, living in her parents’ apartment while they were in Princeton, N.J., where her father was charged with establishing the Institute of Advanced Study, a pioneering institute for scholars and scientists pursuing independent research. (Albert Einstein was one of its first faculty members.)

She alternated between writing and left-wing activism. In 1938 she published her first book, “American Playwrights, 1918-1938: The Theater Retreats From Reality,” an indictment of contemporary playwrights for their lack of interest in the social conditions shaping their writing. She helped to organize clerical workers and to break down racial segregation in the nursing profession in connection with the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses (now part of the American Nurses Association).

In 1946 she became, at the urging of the Communist Party, the executive director of the Congress of American Women, a popular front organization with links to the heyday of the suffrage movement — its members including the granddaughter of the suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the grandniece of Susan B. Anthony. It was the training ground for several other important pioneering women’s historians, including Gerda Lerner and Aileen Kraditor.

From the beginning of her research for her book, Flexner knew that she wanted to highlight African-American women, whose presence and contributions to securing women’s rights were almost entirely absent from earlier accounts. But she was discouraged from many sides.

When she visited W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the great African-American historians, he dismissed her project offhand, a curt rejection that continued to smart for decades.

Although her first book had been published by Simon & Schuster, Flexner had trouble finding a publisher for this new project. When she brought an early draft to Harper & Brothers, she was told to remove the material on Black women because it would be of no interest to general  readers.

Flexner at her home in Massachusetts in 1988. Even decades after her book achieved success, she said she was still smarting from the lack of support she initially received.Credit...Lionel Delevingne
She secured the material she needed with support from two African-American librarians, Dorothy Porter of the Negro Collection of Howard University and Jean Blackwell Hutson of the Schomburg Collection of the New York Public Library.

And she eventually found a way to share her work, when the Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger Sr. persuaded Harvard University Press to publish it. The initial reviews of “Century of Struggle” were almost entirely from women historians (writing in The New York Times, the biographer Ishbel Ross complimented Flexner’s “impressive picture of the long fight for emancipation”), with the rare male historian concerned that she might be “too sympathetic” with her subjects. Soon after Betty Friedan’s 1963 blockbuster, “The Feminine Mystique,” cited Flexner’s work, “Century of Struggle” became a must-read book for a new young generation of women’s historians and feminist scholars.

In 1957 Flexner moved to Northampton, Mass., to research her biography of Mary Wollstonecraft, which she published in 1972. Never married, she shared a home with her “beloved companion,” Helen Terry, until Terry’s death in 1983. In 1988, when she was living, not very happily, in a retirement home in Westboro, Mass., she said in an interview that she was still smarting from the lack of support she initially received for “Century of Struggle.”

When asked what prompted her to write her book despite the obstacles, she gave many answers, none definitive. There was hearing the labor activist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn speak of the “Lowell Girls,” young textile workers who went on strike in the 1830s for better wages. There was stumbling on the 1911 “History of Women in Trade Unions,” a federally funded study of the history of women in organized labor. And there was meeting Alma Lutz, whose biography of Elizabeth Cady Stanton had been “one of the early books that fired me up.”

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/10/20/large-scale-permafrost-thawing/

Always good information from Hunziker.

However, he makes this case:

"Already, over just the past two years, other field studies have shown instances where thawing permafrost is 70 years ahead of scientists’ models, prompting the thought that thawing may be cranking up even as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) fails to anticipate it. After all, permafrost is not included in the IPCC’s carbon budget, meaning signatories to the Paris accord of 2015 will need to recalculate their quest to save the world from too much carbon emitting too fast for any kind of smooth functionality of the planet’s climate system."

It's certainly easy to make the case that IPCC scientists are slackers, and that leadership failed to stand up to self-interested politicians and industry.

And there's also a powerful new argument from Larry Lohmann not only to avoid IPCC-style reduction of the climate catastrophe to carbon and methane as units of analysis, but to take imperialism and racism firmly into account, which scientists, administrators, policy wonks, researchers, NGOs and advocacy groups are rarely capable of, much less willing to. Larry's latest talk is online, to be discussed this week at a UCal climate justice conference: https://ehc.english.ucsb.edu/?p=21251 (we share a panel discussion on foibles of capitalist pricing).

Still, what would be much more helpful than Hunziker's throwaway critique of the IPCC is a more serious engagement with whether there 2019 work on permafrost, summarised below, is as weak as the other documents look in retrospect. If so, why?

***

https://www.carbonbrief.org/in-depth-qa-the-ipccs-special-report-on-the-ocean-and-cryosphere

What is happening to permafrost?

The IPCC report describes permafrost as “ground (soil or rock containing ice and frozen organic material) that remains at or below 0C for at least two consecutive years”. The chapter generally focuses on the northern hemisphere, which has an area of permafrost three orders of magnitude larger than Antarctica’s.

It occurs “on land in polar and high-mountain areas, and also as submarine permafrost in shallow parts of the Arctic and Southern oceans”. The thickness of permafrost ranges from less than one metre to more than a kilometre. Typically, it sits beneath an “active layer” that thaws and refreezes every year.

The fate of permafrost is particularly important because it is a “large, climate-sensitive reservoir of organic carbon”, the report says. This is carbon which has accumulated from dead plants and animals over thousands of years. (There is approximately twice as much carbon in permafrost than is currently in the Earth’s atmosphere.)

A warming climate raises the “potential for some of this pool to be rapidly decayed and transferred to the atmosphere as CO2 and methane as permafrost thaws”, the report warns, “thus accelerating the pace of climate change”.

Permafrost is one of a number of changes to the Earth system that are “expected to be irreversible on timescales relevant to human societies and ecosystems”, the executive summary for chapter one (pdf) says. It also notes:

“Ice melt or the thawing of permafrost involve thresholds (state changes) that allow for abrupt, nonlinear responses to ongoing climate warming (high confidence).”

The report says there is “very high confidence” that record high temperatures at ~10–20m depth in the permafrost have been “documented at many long-term monitoring sites in the northern hemisphere circumpolar permafrost region”. In some places, these temperatures are 2-3C higher than 30 years ago. It adds:

“During the decade between 2007 and 2016, the rate of increase in permafrost temperatures was 0.39C for colder continuous zone permafrost monitoring sites, 0.20C for warmer discontinuous zone permafrost, giving a global average of 0.29C across all polar and mountain permafrost.”

While temperature and rainfall changes act as “gradual” and “continuous” pressures on permafrost, it is also affected by “abrupt” or “pulse” disturbances, such as fire, and soil subsidence and erosion resulting from ice-rich permafrost thaw (thermokarst)”. The most widespread of these pressures is wildfire, the report says:

“There is high confidence that area burned, fire frequency, and extreme fire years are higher now than the first half of the last century, or even the last 10,000 years. Recent climate warming has been linked to increased wildfire activity in the boreal forest regions in Alaska and western Canada where this has been studied. Based on satellite imagery, an estimated 80,000 km2 of boreal area was burned globally per year from 1997 to 2011.”

There is high confidence that “changes in the fire regime are degrading permafrost faster than had occurred over the historic successional cycle”, the report notes, “and that the effect of this driver of permafrost change is under-represented in the permafrost temperature observation network”.

Overall, “there is medium evidence and low agreement that this warming is currently causing northern permafrost regions to release additional methane and CO2,” the report concludes.

The report has “high confidence” in projections of “widespread disappearance of Arctic near-surface permafrost…this century as a result of warming, with important consequences for global climate”. It notes:

“By 2100, near surface permafrost area will decrease by 2-66% for RCP2.6 and 30-99% for RCP8.5. This is projected to release 10s to 100s of billions of tonnes [or gigatonnes, GtC], up to as much as 240 GtC, of permafrost carbon as CO2 and methane to the atmosphere with the potential to accelerate climate change (medium confidence).”

The projection for RCP4.5 is a 15-87% decrease, the report adds. The carbon emissions estimates above are from expert assessment and laboratory soil incubation studies. They are supported by model simulations, which give an average estimate of 92GtC under RCP8.5, with range of 37-174GtC.

The chart below illustrates historical and future permafrost area change.

An estimate using a subset of the CMIP5 models projects a 90% loss of permafrost area by 2300 for RCP8.5 and 29% loss for RCP4.5, “with much of that long-term loss already occurring by 2100”.

These projections do not include “pulse disturbances”, the report notes, and “there is high confidence that fire and abrupt thaw will accelerate change in permafrost relative to climate effects alone, if the rates of these disturbances increase”.

Methane will contribute a small proportion of the carbon released from permafrost, the report says – “on the order of 0.01-0.06 GtC per year”. However, it could contribute 40-70% of the total warming impact from permafrost emissions because of methane’s higher warming potential.

The report notes that there is the potential for “stimulated plant growth” in permafrost areas – from warmer conditions and CO2 fertilisation – that could “offset some or all of these losses, at least during this century, by sequestering new carbon into plant biomass and increasing carbon inputs into the surface soil”.

Future carbon emissions from permafrost “would be a significant fraction of those projected from fossil fuels with implications for allowable carbon budgets that are consistent with limiting global warming”, the report says, “but will also depend on how vegetation responds (high confidence)”. It also notes:

“Furthermore, there is high confidence that climate scenarios that involve mitigation (e.g. RCP4.5) will help to dampen the response of carbon emissions from the Arctic and boreal regions.”

Similarly, there is “high confidence that mitigation of anthropogenic methane sources could help to dampen the impact of increased methane emissions from the Arctic and boreal regions”.

Finally, the report also warns that permafrost thaw, along with a decrease in snow, “will affect Arctic hydrology and wildfire, with impacts on vegetation and human infrastructure (medium confidence)”. For example, “about 20% of Arctic land permafrost is vulnerable to abrupt permafrost thaw and ground subsidence, which is expected to increase small lake area by over 50% by 2100 for RCP8.5”.

It adds:

“By 2050, 70% of Arctic infrastructure is located in regions at risk from permafrost thaw and subsidence; adaptation measures taken in advance could reduce costs arising from thaw and other climate-change related impacts such as increased flooding, precipitation, and freeze-thaw events by half (medium confidence).”

^{Back to top}

The Nation, NOVEMBER 2/9, 2020, ISSUE
The Metamorphosis: The making of the unequal city.
By Kim Phillips-Fein

As the coronavirus ricocheted through New York City this spring, among its many casualties was a certain image of life in the Big Apple. The foodie destinations, posh galleries, and pricey cocktail lounges sat deserted while city hospitals long scorned as antiquated, clunky, and ineffective became crowded, bustling centers of activity and pandemonium. If they didn’t abscond to their second homes, financiers and lawyers huddled in their apartments, and grocery store employees, doormen, UPS drivers, and postal workers all became consummate risk-takers. Spaces segregated from the middle class—homeless shelters, nursing homes, jails—were revealed as inextricably linked to the rest of the city on a microbial level, as the virus could not be kept out or contained within. In the pandemic city, the oft-praised prosperity of New York in the early years of the 21st century proved illusory or at least misdirected: a world of glittering condos and luxe hotels that somehow could not provide enough hospital masks to its nurses or figure out a way to keep its children safe.

BOOKS IN REVIEW
SAVING AMERICA’S CITIES: ED LOGUE AND THE STRUGGLE TO RENEW URBAN AMERICA IN THE SUBURBAN AGE
By Lizabeth Cohen


The virus held up a mirror to the city that revealed a very different image from that of a gleeful elegance and striving opportunity: a distorted, cruel urban landscape divided between those with the means and resources to depart and those who had no choice but to keep taking the subway, even as the viral wave crested. Zip code maps showing infection rates in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens compared with those in Manhattan told the story. When George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis, his death seemed to magnify the vulnerability, racism, and exclusion already evident, and New York, like many other places in the United States, justifiably erupted in protest.

As cities across the country and around the world struggle to cope with the ongoing pandemic, it is an opportune time to read Saving America’s Cities, Lizabeth Cohen’s excellent study of postwar urban planning. The period she chronicles is at once near and far from our own. Over the years that followed World War II, the federal government sought to address the problems of urban poverty and deindustrialization through a series of attempts at urban renewal. Much of the historical literature on these programs has focused on their failings—especially and most damningly with regard to public housing, which created what scholar Arnold Hirsch, writing about Chicago, called a “second ghetto.” Cohen, by contrast, views the contradictory legacy and aspirations of postwar urban liberalism as having much within them to admire, a case she makes by taking up the life of urban planner Ed Logue.

Logue’s name is little known today, but he was a renowned figure in the mid-20th century, dubbed “Mr. Urban Renewal” by The New York Times and the “Master Rebuilder” by The Washington Post. He brought federal redevelopment money to New Haven. He used public money to rebuild downtown Boston. He built the apartment towers on Roosevelt Island for New York City as well as affordable housing elsewhere throughout the state. For Cohen, his career was representative of a certain liberal hope: that professional expertise and federal funds could reverse the racial inequalities, suburban flight, unemployment, and disinvestment that plagued American cities in the second half of the 20th century.

Cohen makes a compelling case that a renewed faith in the public sector and the active participation of the federal government in rebuilding urban infrastructure and public housing are essential for any progress today, and she argues that Logue’s work demonstrates the potential of this approach as well as some of its successes, however partial. Yet at the same time, Saving America’s Cities is, purposefully or not, a study in urban liberalism’s failings and of the profound pressures that always constrained and shaped its aspirations and accomplishments. In the end, Logue’s career—which began with his trademark sunny confidence and brash appeal but ended with his back against the wall of declining federal money and slipping public support—cannot help but suggest the limits of postwar urban renewal as much as its possibilities.

Ed Logue hailed from the heart of urban America, Philadelphia. Born in 1921, he grew up the oldest of five children in an Irish Catholic household. His father was a tax assessor, a well-paid public sector job that enabled him to send his children to private school and to summer at the Jersey shore. But after he died when Logue was just 13, the family fell into near poverty. The charity of an uncle enabled them to avoid destitution.

Despite the family’s travails, Logue went to Yale on a scholarship. During his time in college, he became involved in New Haven’s labor movement. He worked in the Yale dining room and gained a reputation as a firebrand; a supervisor later told the FBI that Logue had been known for spreading “malicious rumors” about management, calling Yale administrators “dictators” and “slave drivers.” After he graduated, he went to work as an organizer for the local that represented the university’s janitors, maids, and maintenance workers. He may have been a radical, but he was also a committed anti-communist, skeptical of the Communist Party’s role in local politics and dismissive of its broader program. As Cohen puts it, he was a “rebel in the belly of the establishment beast,” a New Dealer who believed in the role of the federal government and in the power of labor unions, but he was not someone who sought broader social transformation.

Logue fought in World War II and then attended Yale Law School on the GI Bill. But he was quickly bored and alienated by the life of an attorney. “The law is a whore’s trade,” he explained to a law school mentor. “I don’t want a nice law practice for anything but the income, and I’m a son of a bitch if I’ll throw away ten or twenty years of my life building up an income.” He considered a career in labor law, but here, too, his ambitions were larger than the role. Being a labor lawyer meant serving the labor movement but not leading it. Logue found himself drawn to politics instead, albeit not as a politician but as the labor secretary to Chester Bowles, a former New Dealer (and head of the Office of Price Administration, which regulated prices during World War II) who had become the governor of Connecticut. Logue then traveled with his boss to India when Bowles became the US ambassador, observing with great interest the community development work the Ford Foundation was doing in rural parts of the country.

In 1954, Logue returned to New Haven to work with the city’s new mayor, Richard Lee. Federal support for suburban development was most evident in subsidized home loans and tax breaks for homeowners as well as road construction, but there was still ample money available for cities, and Logue was able to win more than $130 million in federal aid (over $1 billion in today’s dollars). Cohen details how Logue and Lee used this money to make New Haven a “model modern city” and an example of “what can be accomplished when a full-scale attack on blight and poverty is undertaken.” With federal aid as well as foundation money, Logue and Lee rebuilt schools, developed an industrial center, and helped reshape the downtown commercial district. Logue also helped give shape to an increasingly familiar figure in East Coast cities: the urban planner who would operate with political reserve to create a city in the best interests of all.

With the emergence of civil rights and Black activism in New Haven, many of the problems with Logue’s model of urban planning came to the fore. The kind of renewal that Logue promoted at times involved displacing poorer residents and people of color. It also privileged a certain kind of rule by experts rather than the voices and power of the people most directly affected. Throughout the United States, the anti-communist liberalism embodied in Logue’s top-down urban planning was coming under pressure from below—from the civil rights movement and the New Left, from people who did not want to fight in Vietnam, and from those who rejected the terms of the postwar affluent society.

The tensions in Logue’s liberalism were on full display in New Haven. At first, the city’s Black residents greeted urban renewal with optimism, recognizing that it held the potential for them to gain better housing. But over time these hopes faded, especially as many displaced by redevelopment found it difficult to find new homes and were often relocated in neighborhoods or projects that were no improvement over what they left behind. Community organizers began to show up at public meetings to criticize Logue and his fellow planners for making decisions about their city without consulting the people who would feel the strongest impact of those choices. As one area resident said at a 1967 hearing held by Illinois Senator Paul Douglas on redevelopment in New Haven, “You people have listened to the Mayor. How about listening to us?”

By the time of that forum, Logue had left for Boston. He claimed he moved on because of his program’s success. “I had done about as much as I could do in New Haven except stay the course and see it through,” he recalled. “After a while there’s not much challenge in that.” But it was already becoming clear that his complacent sense of optimism about New Haven as a model city was unjustified. As early deindustrialization set in, the city’s racism and racial inequality became only more glaring. Local white resistance to school desegregation expanded, and Yale continued to benefit far more from its relationship to the city than the city’s residents did, especially those of color.

Logue’s time in Boston was equally marked by victories and frustrations. There, too, he relied centrally on leveraging federal money to stimulate development and also came up against the challenges of a declining industrial economy and white resistance.

He began his time in the city with ambitious plans to rebuild its downtown. He oversaw the construction of Government Center, a new set of headquarters for city, state, and federal offices that helped encourage commercial development. Building on this success, he embarked on a series of renewal programs in Boston’s neighborhoods, where he sought to encourage racial integration by improving housing and constructing infrastructure and services, including better public schools. In practice, getting white and Black Bostonians to live side by side in racially integrated neighborhoods was far harder than it looked on paper. Logue had trouble building as much affordable replacement housing as the city needed, which meant that Bostonians were displaced by his projects, leading only to further segregation and housing inequality.

Logue claimed to want to work with the neighborhoods to make sure his programs fit the needs and visions of residents, but he was more comfortable with communities that were willing to accept his expert knowledge, and in fact, he was often surprised by the community organizing that resisted his urban renewal efforts or sought to redirect them in a way that more closely fit local needs. When he tried to run for mayor of Boston in 1967, he finished fourth in the primary—well behind Louise Day Hicks, whose claim to fame was her vigorous defense of segregation in Boston’s public schools. Logue’s efforts could not keep open expressions of racism from surging to the forefront of the city’s politics.

From Boston, he went to Albany, where New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller tapped Logue to lead the Urban Development Corporation. After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, Rockefeller established the UDC with a mandate to construct affordable housing in the state. Under Logue’s leadership, the UDC was responsible for building about 25 percent of government-subsidized housing there, for some 100,000 people. Among these were three “new towns” built from the ground up, including on Roosevelt Island.

In contrast to Logue’s earlier efforts, undertaken in the heyday of postwar liberalism, the UDC could not rely in the same way on federal money. Instead, it sought to combine some public money (from the state as well as the federal government) with private investment raised through moral obligation bonds that carried no legal obligation to repay and thus did not require voter approval. Logue and the UDC relied on Rockefeller’s close connections to real estate developers and the financial community. (Rockefeller’s brother David Rockefeller was, after all, the president of Chase Manhattan Bank.) But after the governor left the state to become vice president under Gerald Ford, the problems with relying on the bond market to carry out the construction of affordable housing quickly became evident. With the absence of public money, it was difficult to build low- and moderate-income housing that would be profitable—and unless it was, private lenders would call in their debt.

The UDC faced serious political 
obstacles as well. When it sought to build low-income housing in Westchester County, just north of New York City, the proposals seemed crafted to mollify the residents of leafy enclaves such as Bedford and Scarsdale, with projects that contained no more than 100 units of low-income housing mixed with moderate-income units, with veterans, area residents, employees of local businesses, and town and school district staffers to be given priority for them. Instead, the plans met with intransigent opposition from suburbanites who had no intention of allowing their towns to become more diverse racially or economically. As Cohen puts it, “In town after town, something like a civil war broke out.” Organizations like United Towns for Home Rule sprang up to marshal resistance. At one point, a barn that the UDC was planning to convert into a community center was burned to the ground. Logue received death threats and was taunted at community meetings: “Get out, we don’t want you in Bedford!” Meanwhile, the Nixon administration imposed a moratorium on the housing subsidies that had been key to the UDC’s financial projections, and Nelson Rockefeller’s departure meant that the UDC no longer had a key ally in Albany. Still, Logue kept building and borrowing to build, using the moral obligation bonds even though he no longer had a clear way of repaying the debt the UDC was accumulating.

By the mid-’70s, the declining commitment of the federal and state governments to build affordable housing, the resistance the UDC faced locally, and Logue’s general indifference to the finances of the agency created a perfect storm. Banks began refusing to lend to the UDC, and in February 1975 the agency defaulted on more than $100 million in debt. As a spokesperson for the bankers put it, the underlying problem was that “social goals are funded one way in this country and economic goals another.” Logue and the UDC’s leaders had assumed that their obligation was to the people who might live in the homes they built, not to the bondholders, but the corporation officials soon realized their mistake. An agency like the UDC could not fund itself through ever-increasing piles of debt.

The rules of the game for people like Logue had been changing even as they played, but above all else, what the UDC’s failure suggested was that only a massive public commitment of resources could address the housing crisis. Relying on the bond markets only empowered the financiers. As Logue said, “We cannot allow basic public policy of this importance to be made in corporate board rooms and issued to public men by fiat.” The problem was that in the absence of taxes and redistributive mechanisms that enabled social resources to be used for public goods like housing, there was no choice but to rely on the credit markets—and that would always mean that corporate boardrooms, in the end, made the rules.

Logue’s reputation was seriously tarnished by the UDC debacle. It marked not only the failure of the agency but also the failure of the kind of urban liberalism to which he had devoted his life. His last major project was an effort at redemption of sorts. In New York City he headed the South Bronx Development Office under Mayor Ed Koch. No love for him was lost upstate, and people in the governor’s office sought to divert funding from his new post. The new governor of New York, Hugh Carey, insisted, “I don’t want any of my money to go to him.”

Despite the governor’s hostility to Logue, the SBDO undertook a variety of projects aimed at rehabilitating the South Bronx, including the construction of Charlotte Gardens: 90 single-family homes, subsidized for purchase, a pocket of suburbia abutting the area’s crumbling apartment towers. Relying less and less on federal or state money, Logue found himself forced to depend primarily on private foundations like Ford to help finance the construction. The Charlotte Gardens project incorporated input from the Black and Puerto Rican neighborhood in which he worked and broke from his early top-down centralism, pointing toward a more democratic and inclusive model of urban renewal.

Yet at the same time, the project’s scale was much more limited and its ambitions smaller than those that defined his earlier career. Logue retired from the SBDO in 1985 and returned to Massachusetts, where he was involved in local development efforts but moved increasingly into obscurity. He wrote letters to the editor and got in touch with his contacts in city government and at The Boston Globe to share his thoughts on public matters. “In a way he tried to go about doing things the same way he had done when he had the power,” said one former colleague. “I think it was hard for him.” Logue died suddenly in 2000 at almost 79.

It is hard not to see in Logue’s story a parable for many of the problems of postwar liberalism and some of the political dilemmas this legacy creates today. On the one hand, he always believed in the importance of the public sector, especially the federal government, as a force that had the capacity to transform cities. The problems of urban poverty, racism, inequality, and substandard housing were for Logue profound moral and political issues—ones that the private sector alone could never resolve and that required the commitment of the state. It is as true today as it was in the mid-20th century that landlords and developers will not provide the affordable housing that people so desperately need and that the consequences of overcrowded housing, rent instability, and eviction wreak havoc.

But on the other hand, the political framework Logue relied on frustrated his biggest goals. Instead of seeing the key problems in terms of money, resources, and power, he treated the challenges posed by deindustrializing cities as issues of development—problems that could be solved by intelligent men working rationally and capably from above.

The issue was not simply one of participatory democracy versus top-down control; it was that men like Logue never really had the power they wanted to begin with. They tried to execute their visions and plans, but they did so in a context that favored suburbia, in which capital had free rein to leave the cities, in which bondholders had the final say, and in which white homeowners saw Black neighbors as a threat to all they held dear. Logue and his ilk also tried to do so in a context in which they purposefully distanced themselves from the political ideas and radical social movements that might have pushed urban liberalism toward a more egalitarian outcome, one that took more seriously questions of power, class, race, and resources. In other words, midcentury urban planning failed not because it was too ambitious but because from its outset, it was not ambitious enough, never really getting at the deeper inequalities that structured American society. It stayed at the level of urban policy when what was needed was a challenge to power.

With deep archival research and a narrative sweep that fixes her subject in the arc of midcentury US history, Cohen sketches Logue vividly, illuminating his forcefulness, his passion, his masculine confidence. She also provides a painful account of what he and so many liberals of his generation were up against. The contrast between these two aspects of her story—Logue’s certitude crashing into the limits of what he was able to accomplish—at times makes Saving America’s Cities read a bit like a claustrophobic horror story. Logue is increasingly hemmed in, his dreams and aspirations frustrated by the ever-dwindling federal resources on which they depended. He comes to seem like the King Lear of urban planning, following a dimming star of liberalism that was so clearly inadequate to its time.

The limits of Logue’s vision are evident all around us today. The 21st century city in the United States has all but abandoned the ideals of integration and affordability. Instead, American cities are organized around accumulated wealth, racial disparities, and delivering luxury consumption to a rarefied elite. Given where we have ended up, it is hard to see Ed Logue and the political tradition he embodies as saviors. The gap between what they sought to achieve and the outcome was too great. After the collapse of the UDC, the journalist Joseph Fried wrote a postmortem in The Nation in which he argued that the “fundamental issue” the UDC raised was that “only a long-range, public effort will make possible the construction and rehabilitation needed” for millions of Americans “to live in decent housing and decent neighborhoods.” The “skittish and volatile” private market could not accomplish this; “the job must be done by American society generally.” To survey the failures of local and federal bodies today is to hear Fried’s words echo down the years. The problems of American cities remain, as he put it then, a “harsh and vivid reminder that American society is still a long way from meeting a moral obligation of its own.”

Kim Phillips-FeinKim Phillips-Fein is the author of Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal and Fear City: The New York City Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of the Age of Austerity.

Ghostly analogies drawn from the gothic imaginary are common in the Marxist canon, with the most famous case in point being the incipit of Marx and Engels’s Manifesto of the Communist Party, where readers are told that ‘the spectre of communism’ is haunting Europe. Far from being considered curious aberrations, these preternatural metaphors have given rise to a whole literature on spectral capitalism that spans to our present stage of late capitalism. In the 1980s, Aihwa Ong made waves with her study of spirit possessions on the shop floors of modern factories in Malaysia, in which she argued that these spectres represented a form of resistance by workers otherwise powerless in the face of capital. In another instance from the 1990s, Jean and John Comaroff introduced the idea of ‘occult economies’ to make sense of the wave of episodes in which real or imagined magical means were deployed in pursuit of material gains that occurred in South Africa after the end of apartheid. While both conceptualisations received a fair share of criticism—not least for presenting the ghosts of capitalism as dreams and the anthropologist as the psychoanalyst instead of dealing with the proper social and historical context of these phenomena—this issue of the Made in China Journal cuts the Gordian knot by focusing on how individuals in China and other contexts in Asia live and interact with the supernatural. In some cases, ghosts, fortune-tellers, shamans, sorcerers, zombies, corpse brides, and aliens merely assist people to get by and cope with the difficulties they face in their daily lives; in others, these beings play subversive roles, undermining the rules that underpin contemporary society. In both cases, they challenge the status quo, hence the title ‘spectral revolutions’.

https://madeinchinajournal.com/2020/10/19/spectral-revolutions/

OPEN LETTER TO MONTHLY REVIEW

19 October 2020

Dear friends at Monthly Review,

As scholars and activists committed to charting a course for an anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist left in the midst of rising US-China tensions, we write in response to your recent republication of a “report and resource compilation” by the Qiao Collective on Xinjiang.

We fully acknowledge the need for a critique of America’s cynical and self-interested attacks on China’s domestic policies. We are committed to that task. But the left must draw a line at apologia for the campaign of harsh Islamophobic repression now taking place in Xinjiang.

Qiao’s “report” is written in a style that is sadly all too common in leftist discussions of China today. While the report “recognize[s] that there are aspects of PRC policy in Xinjiang to critique,” it finds no room for any such critique in its 15,000 words. Eschewing serious analysis, it compiles select political and biographical facts to suggestively point at, but not articulate, the intended conclusion – that claims of serious repression in Xinjiang can be dismissed.

https://www.criticalchinascholars.org/interventions/?fbclid=IwAR1wTlGfmAPWqEWIs_MeQJo8UD0yY8-FYJL85JX--oQ6LPkM1bAnfYnnpFo