U.S. News: Trump Delayed Revealing First Positive Test
Bender, Michael C; Ballhaus, Rebecca. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]05 Oct 2020: A.4.

WASHINGTON -- President Trump didn't disclose a positive result from a rapid test for Covid-19 on Thursday while awaiting the findings from a more thorough coronavirus screening, according to people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Trump received a positive result on Thursday evening before making an appearance on Fox News in which he didn't reveal those results. Instead, he confirmed earlier reports that one of his top aides had tested positive for coronavirus and mentioned the second test he had taken that night for which he was awaiting results.

"I'll get my test back either tonight or tomorrow morning," Mr. Trump said during the interview. At 1 a.m. on Friday, the president tweeted that he indeed had tested positive.

Under White House protocols, the more reliable test that screens a specimen from deeper in the nasal passage is administered only after a rapid test shows a positive reading. Based on people familiar with the matter, the president's tests followed that protocol.

As the virus spread among the people closest to him, Mr. Trump also asked one adviser not to disclose results of their own positive test. "Don't tell anyone," Mr. Trump said, according to a person familiar with the conversation.

Mr. Trump and his top advisers also aimed to keep such a close hold on the early positive results that his campaign manager, Bill Stepien, didn't know that Hope Hicks, one of the president's closest White House aides, had tested positive on Thursday morning until news reports later that evening, according to a person familiar with the matter. The Trump campaign said Friday evening that Mr. Stepien had tested positive.

The initial secrecy within Mr. Trump's inner circle has created a sense of anxiety within the West Wing. Publicly, the White House has issued evolving and contradictory statements about the president's health that have some officials worried about their own credibility.

"I'm glued to Twitter and TV because I have no official communication from anyone in the West Wing," an administration official said.

The White House didn't respond immediately to a request for comment.

The lack of clear communication about who was getting the virus has extended to reports on the president's status as he undergoes treatment.

At a press briefing Saturday, the president, who has been hospitalized at Walter Reed Medical Center since Friday, watched as the White House physician, Dr. Sean Conley, told reporters that his symptoms were improving. Minutes later, Mr. Trump grew alarmed when another person familiar with the situation warned reporters that Mr. Trump's recent condition had been concerning. An angry president quickly dialed an adviser from his hospital room.

"Who the f--- said that?" Mr. Trump demanded, according to a person familiar with the call. The Associated Press later identified the person as White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.

The president's doctors said Sunday that his condition was improving and that he could be discharged from the hospital as soon as Monday, but also said he was taking a steroid typically recommended for serious cases.

The fast-moving revelations began Thursday evening when Mr. Trump confirmed in a telephone interview with Fox News that one of his closest aides, Hope Hicks, had tested positive that day, and said: "I just heard about this." CBS News first reported that by that point, Mr. Trump had received his own positive result on a rapid test.

But Ms. Hicks had learned about her own positive test result that morning, and the information was kept to a tight circle of advisers, according to people familiar with the matter. Ms. Hicks's positive test results were first reported by Bloomberg News later that evening. The White House offered no official statement on Ms. Hope's positive test.

Mr. Stepien and the rest of the Trump campaign first learned of Ms. Hicks's positive test from Bloomberg News, and weren't consulted on whether to proceed with a Thursday trip to New Jersey, a campaign official said.

The White House has said the operations team deemed the trip safe. The president had tested negative on a rapid test that morning, according to a person familiar with the matter. Mr. Meadows has said the White House learned of Ms. Hicks's results right as Marine One was leaving for New Jersey, and said the administration pulled some advisers off the trip. The president left the White House just after 1 p.m. that day.

The decision not to cancel the New Jersey trip drew swift criticism from health experts. Lisa M. Lee, a public-health expert specializing in infectious-disease epidemiology and public-health ethics at Virginia Tech University, said "holding the [Bedminster, N.J.] event in spite of knowing that one of the team was infected and had exposed others was a recipe for spreading disease."

White House officials said their medical team is conducting contact tracing for staff that have tested positive, but uncertainty has also been infused into that process, people familiar with the matter said. Contact tracing is a crucial step, public health experts have said, to stem the spread of infectious disease.

That process is gaining importance since Mr. Trump and his senior advisers spent most of last week following their normal schedule rarely using other tools -- safe distance and masks -- to keep the virus at bay. In some instances, protocols were followed. At the New Jersey events, attendees had to test negative, complete a wellness questionnaire and pass a temperature screening. Guests were kept 6 feet from the president.

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Hibaq Mohamed organized her community in a fight against Amazon, protesting working conditions at a fulfillment center with one of the highest rates of injury.

https://inthesetimes.com/article/amazon-profile-hibaq-mohammed

 (I guess he would)

Would Trotsky Wear a Bluetooth?

After visiting Russia in 1921, the journalist Lincoln Steffens famously declared, "I have seen the future, and it works." Steffens referred to the social experiment of technological utopianism he found in the Soviet Union, where subway cars and farm tractors would carry the worker and peasant—figuratively and literally—into the twentieth century. Believing that socialism and technology together created a brave new world, Boleslaw Bierut of Poland and Kim Il Sung of North Korea—and other leaders—joined Russia’s Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky in embracing big technology with a verve and conviction that rivaled the western world's.

Paul R. Josephson here explores these utopian visions of technology—and their unanticipated human and environmental costs. He examines the role of technology in communist plans and policies and the interplay between ideology and technological development. He shows that while technology was a symbol of regime legitimacy and an engine of progress, the changes it spurred were not unequivocally positive. Instead of achieving a worker’s paradise, socialist technologies exposed the proletariat to dangerous machinery and deadly pollution; rather than freeing women from exploitation in family and labor, they paradoxically created for them the dual—and exhausting—burdens of mother and worker. The future did not work.

The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 marked the end of communism’s self-proclaimed glorious quest to "reach and surpass" the West. Josephson’s intriguing study of how technology both helped and hindered this effort asks new and important questions about the crucial issues inextricably linked with the development and diffusion of technology in any sociopolitical system.

(Some Neo-Luddite wisdom...)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsKHaCIwyaY

14 jan. 2011
TEDx Talks
27,1 mln. abonnees
WHY WE NEED TO BE NEO-LUDDITES

Paul Josephson is a specialist on the former Soviet Union and the place of big technology in the modern world. He is the author of nine books and many articles -- including a history of the fish stick. He teaches history and history of technology at Colby College. He focuses on technology and democracy and how large scale technological systems nearly always have irreversible human and environmental costs. Paul's field research has taken him to Siberia, the Russian Arctic, and Amazonia, and he has stood on the number 2 block of the Chernobyl reactor.

Partisans of the GND, when they are not harking back to FDR’s work programs, often compare the calamity ahead of us to the massive military buildup for WWII, but this is a fallacious analogy. Then relatively direct commands – build tanks, ships, guns – were assigned to corporate bosses who knew what to do. Our situation today doesn’t resemble a war-time economy. This is not to discount the patriotism of millions to civilians who entered the factories and shipyards (including many women who promptly lost their industrial status when the troops returned).

What we face is a country-wide diversity of tasks that no Captains of Industry (if any can be found) are equipped to undertake. And instead of patriotism driving the population to participate, an ecological internationalism seems more appropriate as current motivation. An internationalism, however, that’s grounded on democratic participation at the local level—all over world. The solidarity necessary to transform a profit-driven economy arises from local actions like, to choose one example, the rise of Mutual Aid groups across the world to mitigate the effects of COVID19 lockdowns. People participate in these activities because they are invested in fostering a good life for themselves and their neighbors. There’s no place for Progress here. Or, rather, we need to define progress as the avoidance imminent catastrophes in pursuit of a life of abundant joy.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/10/05/the-green-new-old-deal-a-new-industrial-policy-when-we-need-a-de-industrial-policy/

After a controversial event in the White House Rose Garden, Notre Dame's president has COVID-19. Some students and faculty members are not happy with him.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/10/05/reverend-john-jenkins-u-notre-dame-president-has-covid-19

People across the country are waking up to structural racism and coping with police brutality and civil unrest while also living through the nightmare of the COVID-19 pandemic. They’re mourning losses and longing for life to get back to normal.

But in St. James Parish, Louisiana, where I’m from — a predominantly Black and low-income community nicknamed “Cancer Alley” — racism, brutality, loss and unrest are normal. In fact, a new plastics complex and President Trump’s decision to gut the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) stand to make things even worse.

https://truthout.org/articles/if-we-dont-act-now-the-entire-us-could-become-a-cancer-alley/

New Republic
Emma Roller/October 5, 2020
How Wisconsin Became a Bastion of White Supremacy
The Badger State is designed to keep Republicans in power, at the expense of the minority vote. Can Joe Biden overcome these structural disadvantages?

On the night of October 23, 2004, Milwaukee police officer Andrew Spengler hosted a housewarming party. Katie Brown and Kirsten Antonissen brought two friends of their own: Frank Jude Jr., who is biracial, and Lovell Harris, who is Black.

Jude and Harris were the only people of color at the party, and immediately felt uncomfortable. They left the party five minutes later with Brown and Antonissen. In that time, Spengler announced that he could not find his badge, and accused the men of stealing it.

A crowd of 10 to 15 people from the party—many of whom were off-duty Milwaukee police officers—rushed outside and surrounded Antonissen’s truck, where the four were sitting inside. The mob demanded that they get out of the truck and turn over Spengler’s badge. “Nigger, we can kill you,” Spengler’s friends told Jude and Harris.

The mob eventually dragged them all out of the truck, though they did not find Spengler’s badge. One member of the mob cut Harris’s face, but he was able to free himself, and fled. The crowd then turned its attention on Jude. Spengler put Jude in a headlock against a car as the mob punched and shouted at him.

Antonissen called 911 on her cell phone. “They’re beating the shit out of him,” she told the operator. “Hang up the phone,” said a male voice in the background. Then the line went silent. Antonissen said when the men saw her calling 911, they wrested the phone from her and threw her against her truck. Brown called 911 twice before the men took her phone, too.

The group of off-duty police officers took turns punching and kicking Jude. Two on-duty police officers then arrived. One of them, Joseph Schabel, joined in on the beating and stomped Jude’s head “until others could hear bones breaking,” according to court documents. The men bent back one of Jude’s fingers until it snapped. Spengler put a gun to Jude’s head. “I’m the fucking police,” he said. “I can do whatever I want to do. I could kill you.”

As Schabel was handcuffing Jude, an off-duty officer named Jon Bartlett took a pen and stabbed it into both of Jude’s ear canals as Jude screamed in agony.

Two years earlier, in 2002, Bartlett had shot and killed Larry Jenkins, an unarmed Black man, as he fled from police. “If justice had been in my son’s case, the Frank Jude beating would never have taken place,” Jenkins’s mother, Debra, said in 2008. The Milwaukee district attorney’s office ruled the shooting justifiable.

After the group was satisfied with their work, Bartlett used a knife to cut off Jude’s jacket and pants, leaving him naked from the waist down in a pool of his own blood. Jude was taken to the hospital in a police wagon.

Jude’s injuries were extensive: a concussion, a broken nose, a sprained and fractured left hand, a fractured sinus cavity, cuts and bruises all over his body, and “gross swelling and bruising” in his left eye. The day his four-year-old son came to the hospital, he thought his father was wearing a Halloween costume. “He said, ‘Take off your mask, Daddy,’” Jude said at the time. An all-white state jury found the officers not guilty.

In 2007, a federal jury convicted Spengler, Bartlett, and another police officer, Daniel Masarik, of violating Jude’s civil rights. “The distance between civilization and barbarity, and the time needed to pass from one state to the other, is depressingly short,” Judge Frank Easterbrook wrote in his decision.

His statement could pass as a verdict on Wisconsin as a state, which, under its veneer of Midwestern Niceness, is home to men and women who are as animated by white supremacy as in any state in the Deep South (I know because I’m related to a few of them). In its folksy, mild-mannered way, the state’s blithe tolerance of systemic racism and police brutality foreshadowed the Republican Party’s national strategy of linking its electoral fortunes with racist demagoguery.

The protests that erupted this August in Kenosha over the police shooting of Jacob Blake signaled outrage not only over Wisconsin’s bloody record of police brutality, but also over a deeper racist turn in state politics—one that helped swing Wisconsin to Donald Trump in 2016. If Democrats want to win Wisconsin this fall—a big “if” still, according to Democrats on the ground—they will have to face down the ugly, and still largely unacknowledged, legacy of white supremacy in America’s Dairyland.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton infamously failed to visit Wisconsin after losing the state to Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary. She became the first Democratic presidential nominee to lose Wisconsin in the general election in 32 years—a fate that even Michael Dukakis was able to avoid. “I suppose it is possible that a few more trips to Saginaw or a few more ads on the air in Waukesha could have tipped a couple of thousand votes here and there,” Clinton wrote in her campaign memoir What Happened, but she added that “contrary to the popular narrative, we didn’t ignore those states.”

After the 2016 election, many post-mortems attributed Wisconsin’s right turn to simple voter apathy or Trump’s ability to tap into the “economic anxiety” of disaffected white voters. Less noted was the state GOP’s years-long assault on voting rights, the purpose of which was to make it harder for Black people and other people of color to vote. Nearly 90 percent of Black Wisconsin residents live in just six counties nestled in the state’s southeastern quadrant. According to a 2017 study conducted by Kenneth Mayer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the state’s voter ID law deterred or prevented more than 25,000 registered voters in the state’s two most populous counties (which also happen to be its two most liberal counties) from voting in 2016. Trump won Wisconsin by just 23,000 votes.

“Unfortunately, Wisconsin’s become sort of a poster child for many of the worst abuses, which is completely contrary to our progressive good government tradition,” Russ Feingold, the former Democratic senator from Wisconsin, told me.

It’s impossible to talk about Wisconsin’s politics without addressing the state’s deeply entrenched racism. As a state, Wisconsin is still much whiter than the rest of the country. Just 6.7 percent of Wisconsinites are Black, compared to 13.4 percent of the U.S. population.

Milwaukee is the most segregated metro area in the country, according to a 2018 Brookings study. Wisconsin locks up Black men at a higher rate than any other state, according to a 2013 University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee study, which found that 13 percent of Black men of working age in Wisconsin are in jail or prison, compared to the 6.7 percent national average.

Evictions also fall disproportionately on Black tenants in Wisconsin. In his 2016 book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, Matthew Desmond found that more than one in eight Milwaukee renters were forced to move involuntarily, either through eviction, landlord foreclosure, or building condemnations, over the course of three years. And as in many American cities, race and class follow similar fault lines. Fully 79 percent of Black families in Milwaukee County are poor or low-income, compared to 39 percent of white families in the county, according to a 2018 UW-Madison report.

You cannot understand what Trump support looks like in Wisconsin without understanding how much white Republican grandpas here love AM talk radio. For the past 30 years, two names have dominated Wisconsin’s conservative talk radio market: Mark Belling and Charlie Sykes. Since 2016, Belling has doubled down on his role as the Badger State’s own Rush Limbaugh, taking to Trumpism like a muskie to lake water. Sykes is a more interesting case. He’s probably most famous for airing racist grievances about welfare queens living large off of whites’ hard-earned tax dollars. In 2013, Sykes published a book called A Nation of Moochers, arguing that “those who plan and behave sensibly are being asked to bail out the profligate.” Two years later, Sykes rebranded himself as a #NeverTrump Republican, and he has spent the past five years expressing shock and disgust at the GOP’s racism.

Republicans in the state have engineered a system to keep Black and other minority voters as powerless as possible. Democrats may not have “ignored” Wisconsin, as Clinton wrote, but they have been overrun by a ruthlessly effective Republican campaign that began with Scott Walker winning the governorship in 2010. 

Walker has an unearned reputation for being placid and even boring, mostly because of his love of sad-looking ham sandwiches. But that characterization obscures the damage Walker inflicted during his time as governor. Wisconsin became a Koch-sponsored laboratory of the same regressive, anti-democratic policies that we’re seeing enacted all over the country during the Trump era. Walker shattered public employee unions, rolled back environmental protections, and gutted funding for public education. This agenda, wrapped in the language of white resentment, played well in the “WOW” counties—Washington, Ozaukee, and Waukesha—a trio of white-flight suburbs and exurbs that neighbor Milwaukee County and have historically acted as the engine of the state’s white grievance politics. But his most harmful work was passing the voter ID law and district maps meant to dilute the voting power of people of color.  

Over the past 10 years, Walker and his allies in the Wisconsin state legislature mastered the dark arts of gerrymandering, voter disenfranchisement, and general ratfuckery. “I sort of think of the Trump era as starting in Wisconsin in 2010,” Ben Wikler, the head of the Wisconsin Democrats, told me. “You can see in the way that Republicans here are operating in the state legislature that the Trump era will not end when Trump is gone. The obsessive pursuit of power at the expense of basic democratic norms is just deeply embedded in the Republican political culture here.”

2010 was the year that the Tea Party’s Ron Johnson ousted Feingold, a left reformist  champion. As ill luck would have it, 2010 was also a census year, meaning that Walker and Republican lawmakers were able to draw one of the most absurdly gerrymandered congressional maps in the country. “Wisconsin’s maps are so gerrymandered that Republicans can win close to a supermajority of House seats even with a minority of the vote,” the Brennan Center for Justice’s Michael Li wrote in April.

Ten years after the Tea Party wave, Wisconsin Republicans aren’t even trying to hide their agenda. After the 2018 midterm elections, state Assembly Leader Robin Vos all but lamented the fact that people who live in cities are allowed to vote. ​“If you took Madison and Milwaukee out of the state election formula, we would have a clear majority,” Vos said. The midterms saw the election of a Democratic U.S. senator and the end of Walker’s reign, but gerrymandering was key to the GOP’s ability to hold on to the state Assembly and its seats in the House.

All of which means that, no matter how badly Trump flubs his response to the pandemic or how deeply the economy sinks, and no matter how much Joe Biden leads in the polls, Democrats face a structural disadvantage in Wisconsin that has been built on the state GOP’s antipathy to people of color. And that disadvantage has only been exacerbated by the coronavirus crisis.

In 2017, I flew home from Washington to Milwaukee to see my parents. It had been a rough week for Democrats in Congress, as the GOP had once again tried to gut the Affordable Care Act. After we landed, I rolled my carry-on out of the airport and gave my mom a hug. I heard a voice behind me say, gloomily, “I need a hug.” I turned around to see Representative Gwen Moore, the only person of color to represent Wisconsin in Washington, who was on the same flight home as me. “I’ll give you a hug, Gwen Moore!” my mom said. I watched Moore and my mom—two proud Milwaukee women born in the same year—hug it out on the airport sidewalk.

When I told Moore this story in a phone interview, she let out a nervous laugh. “Oh, I’m so scared that was me,” she said. Moore lamented the way Covid-19 has kept people from literally embracing each other. “I’ve become this other person who doesn’t hug,” she told me. “It really is taking some adjustment for me.”

Like other Wisconsin Democrats, Moore is determined to rebuild the so-called “blue wall” that crumbled in 2016. But even state party leaders are uneasy about the odds, in no small part because of the obstacles to voting created by the pandemic.

“We should plan for a knife’s edge election,” Ben Wikler told me. “In Wisconsin, things tighten so much, so fast, so often, you have to organize as though every vote could be the one that tips the result.”

This fall will actually be Wisconsin’s second statewide election of the pandemic. In April, as Covid-19 was spreading across the country like wildfire, Wisconsin’s GOP lawmakers refused to postpone a state Supreme Court election. When Democratic Governor Tony Evers issued an order to delay the election to ensure voter safety, Republican leaders challenged it at the state’s hyperconservative Supreme Court, which ordered that the election continue as planned. As a result, Wisconsin faced a shortage of almost 7,000 poll workers in the April election.

“The way to understand what happened in April is only if you think about the context of all these attacks that have been going on for 10 years,” said Feingold, who now leads the nonpartisan American Constitution Society.

While Democrats ended up prevailing in the April election, Wisconsin is at risk of stepping on yet another rake in November. In mid-September, Wisconsin set a new daily record since the pandemic began, with more than 1,500 confirmed Covid-19 cases in the state. Earlier that week, the state Supreme Court—which in May showed new levels of judicial negligence by striking down the state’s stay-at-home order—temporarily delayed hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots from being sent to voters, lobbing yet another Molotov cocktail into an already chaotic election.

What’s happened here is so disheartening because, while Wisconsin’s history is steeped in the same injustices as the rest of America’s, it also provides one of the strongest liberal legacies in the country.
Compounding all this is the fact that 2020 is a census year. If Republicans maintain control of the state assembly and senate, which looks all but certain at this point, they will once again get to redraw the maps in their favor, effectively hand-picking their own electorate for the next 10 years. And if Republicans win a veto-proof majority in the state legislature, the governor will be powerless to reject the new maps. “The maps we draw next year will define our ability for a decade—that’s a long time—to get things done,” Evers said in August.

What’s happened here is so disheartening because, while Wisconsin’s history is steeped in the same injustices as the rest of America’s, it also provides one of the strongest liberal legacies in the country. You can’t tell the story of the progressive movement in the United States without Wisconsin, and especially not without Milwaukee. At the start of the twentieth century, Milwaukee elected not one but three socialist mayors. These “sewer socialists”—so-called because of Mayor Daniel Hoan’s dedication to improving the city’s sanitation system—governed Milwaukee for 38 years. During that time, they created the city’s parks system and fire department, championed public education, raised the minimum wage, led public vaccination campaigns, decontaminated the city’s drinking water, and fought for an eight-hour workday.

Milwaukee’s socialist leaders “called their fellow citizens to a higher conception of the common good, one that placed cooperation above competition and mutualism above bare self-interest,” local historian John Gurda wrote in 2010. “They believed that a government based on those ideals was humanity’s best hope for the future.”

Wisconsin has a strong history of environmentalism, starting with the state’s Native tribes. Conservationists from John Muir to Aldo Leopold kindled their love for the natural world at the University of Wisconsin. In the 1950s and 1960s, Democratic Governor Gaylord Nelson and his Republican successor, Governor Warren Knowles, each made conservation a top priority while in office.

Organized labor was once the bedrock of Milwaukee’s European immigrant community. My grandfather, George Prijic, was a card-carrying member of the Milwaukee bricklayer’s union for more than 50 years. His daughter, my mother, was a proud member of the Wisconsin public teachers’ union for more than 30 years. In the spring of 2011, she protested Scott Walker’s union-busting legislation at the state Capitol, shoulder to shoulder with thousands of fellow educators, state workers, and students.

Unfortunately, Wisconsin is also the birthplace of Senator Joseph McCarthy, and the state’s recent political history has been shaped by a group of white men (and occasionally, white women) who have picked up the conservative culture wars where McCarthyism left off. They cleared and sodded the field that became Trump’s golf course, all while insisting that they weren’t involved in the game. Look at Scott Walker, who, with other GOP governors in states like North Carolina, co-authored the instruction manual for his party’s voter disenfranchisement strategy. Look at former White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, who slunk out of the West Wing after six months on the job without even a book deal to show for it. In 2019, Vice President Mike Pence swore in Priebus as an ensign in the Navy Reserve—a rank usually reserved for recent college graduates rather than 47-year-old political operatives. Priebus beat out 37 other candidates to become a naval human resources officer, despite the fact that he had no prior military experience.

Or look at former House Speaker Paul Ryan, a self-mythologizing machine who stuck a smiley face on his party’s grievance politics while convincing the Washington press corps he was but a humble wonk. Ryan likes to tell friendly reporters that the only reason he stayed in Washington after Trump’s election was to protect the nation from the president’s own worst impulses. By Ryan’s telling, he acted as the noble statesman, throwing himself on the grenade of the Trump presidency (an act of self-sacrifice that entailed securing a tax windfall for the country’s richest people). These days, Ryan is as difficult to catch on camera as the mythical Hodag, offering little to no comment on police brutality or Black Lives Matter or Trump’s racist appeals, even as Kenosha, his own district of 20 years, went up in flames.

Wisconsin hasn’t always been this way. But a lot can change, quickly, when powerful people, feeding off the dark forces of this country’s racist politics, are willing to wrest power away from workers by any means necessary. If it can happen here, it can happen anywhere. Still, I have to believe my home state can return to its liberal roots. To think otherwise would be a disgrace to my grandfather, who laid brick upon brick toward a future better than this.

Emma Roller @emmaroller
Emma Roller’s work has appeared in Jezebel, Teen Vogue, In These Times, The Intercept, and The New York Times. She lives in Milwaukee

Donald and Lydia join human rights lawyer and fellow Marxist Anne McShane to discuss her recent PhD thesis on the Zhenotdel, the women’s department of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. They discuss the origins of the Zhenotdel,  how it attempted to solve the shortcomings of the women’s movement in the second international and its role in women’s liberation after the October Revolution. The conversation then pivots to the specific focus of Anne’s thesis: the changing role the Zhenotdel played in women’s emancipation in the Central Asian Republics. They discuss how the Zhenotdel related to and incorporated indigenous women into organizing, the Central Committee’s takeover of Zhenotdel policy that resulted in the hujum campaign of mass unveiling and the disastrous reaction that followed, how this campaign can be contextualized within the rise of Stalinist policies. They end the episode with the final dissolution of the Zhetnodel in 1930 and the sanitization of Nadezhda Krupskaya’s figure.

https://cosmonaut.blog/2020/10/04/the-zhenotdel-and-womens-emancipation-in-the-central-asian-republics-with-anne-mcshane/

The pandemic has opened up a Pandora’s box about the future of work.  The slump has caused a huge loss of jobs, hours and earnings, particularly for those who are in all sorts of service sectors, like retail, entertainment, leisure, events, food preparation etc and it is driving thousands of small businesses surviving on small margins and with large debt burdens to the wall.

https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2020/10/04/work-or-toil-in-the-pandemic/

ENCYCLICAL LETTER
FRATELLI TUTTI
OF THE HOLY FATHER
FRANCIS
ON THE FRATERNITY AND SOCIAL FRIENDSHIP

 

1. “FRATELLI TUTTI”.[1] With these words, Saint Francis of Assisi addressed his brothers and sisters and proposed to them a way of life marked by the flavour of the Gospel. Of the counsels Francis offered, I would like to select the one in which he calls for a love that transcends the barriers of geography and distance, and declares blessed all those who love their brother “as much when he is far away from him as when he is with him”.[2] In his simple and direct way, Saint Francis expressed the essence of a fraternal openness that allows us to acknowledge, appreciate and love each person, regardless of physical proximity, regardless of where he or she was born or lives.

2. This saint of fraternal love, simplicity and joy, who inspired me to write the Encyclical Laudato Si’, prompts me once more to devote this new Encyclical to fraternity and social friendship. Francis felt himself a brother to the sun, the sea and the wind, yet he knew that he was even closer to those of his own flesh. Wherever he went, he sowed seeds of peace and walked alongside the poor, the abandoned, the infirm and the outcast, the least of his brothers and sisters.

WITHOUT BORDERS

3. There is an episode in the life of Saint Francis that shows his openness of heart, which knew no bounds and transcended differences of origin, nationality, colour or religion. It was his visit to Sultan Malik-el-Kamil, in Egypt, which entailed considerable hardship, given Francis’ poverty, his scarce resources, the great distances to be traveled and their differences of language, culture and religion. That journey, undertaken at the time of the Crusades, further demonstrated the breadth and grandeur of his love, which sought to embrace everyone. Francis’ fidelity to his Lord was commensurate with his love for his brothers and sisters. Unconcerned for the hardships and dangers involved, Francis went to meet the Sultan with the same attitude that he instilled in his disciples: if they found themselves “among the Saracens and other nonbelievers”, without renouncing their own identity they were not to “engage in arguments or disputes, but to be subject to every human creature for God’s sake”.[3] In the context of the times, this was an extraordinary recommendation. We are impressed that some eight hundred years ago Saint Francis urged that all forms of hostility or conflict be avoided and that a humble and fraternal “subjection” be shown to those who did not share his faith.

Complete at http://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20201003_enciclica-fratelli-tutti.html#_ftnref1

JAI

Very interesting report by Ted Koppel on how Trump voters in West Virginia get their "news" from Facebook rather than newspapers, TV or radio. It is "Idiocracy" write large.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/news-consumers-in-the-heartland/

Last week, a handful of museums decided to postpone a retrospective of the painter Philip Guston over concerns that Ku Klux Klan imagery in his work, intended to criticize racism, anti-Semitism and bigotry, would upset viewers or that the works would be “misinterpreted.” On Wednesday, a letter drafted by the art critic Barry Schwabsky addressed to those museums — the National Gallery of Art in Washington; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Tate Modern, London — and signed by nearly 100 artists, writers and curators, was published by the Brooklyn Rail, protesting the postponement. To date, more than 2,000 names have been added — young and old, Black, Asian, Persian, Arab, L.G.B.T.Q.

For people outside the art world, however, the question remains: Who is Philip Guston and why did this postponement (already delayed by Covid-19) raise such a furor?

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The simple answer is that Guston (1913-1980) was an artist’s artist. The influence of his deceptively simple subjects and emphatic brush strokes still ripples through the work of many painters who signed the letter: Henry Taylor, Ellen Gallagher, Nicole Eisenman, Amy Sillman, Mickalene Thomas, Peter Doig and others. Guston’s enduring influence was also evident in his lifetime. He was famous in the 1940s, but exerted a large influence in the 1970s. Moreover, part of the reason he is embraced by artists in the current moment is that he stood up to the bullies in the art world who wanted art to be a certain way — notably writers like Clement Greenberg, one of the most influential art critics of the 20th century, who thought that serious, modern painting should be abstract, rather than representing humans, landscapes or still lifes.

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Born in Montreal in 1913 to Russian Jewish émigrés, Guston moved with his family to Los Angeles in 1919. He attended the same Los Angeles high school as Jackson Pollock, who would become a friend, and in the 1920s and ’30s was captivated by Mexican art, Picasso and Cubism introduced to him by a high school teacher. (In 1936, he and Pollock made a pilgrimage to New Hampshire to see the Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco’s graphic new 24-panel mural “The Epic of American Civilization” in the Baker-Berry Library at Dartmouth College.) His childhood was marked, however, by the suicide of his father, who hanged himself on the back porch of their house. (Another tragedy occurred in 1932, when Guston’s brother died after being crushed by his own car.)

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The specter of violence hangs over Guston’s early work — although it is often the politically incited conflict of the period. In 1932 Guston and some friends painted murals for a local John Reed Club in Los Angeles — part of a group of Communist clubs started by New York writers for the journal New Masses. The subject of the fresco murals was the Scottsboro Boys, nine young Black men falsely accused of a rape in Alabama and sentenced to death. However, the murals were vandalized by a band of raiders known as the Red Squad who went after Communists and strikers, a unit associated with the Los Angeles Police Department, according to the National Gallery’s Guston catalog. They entered the club with pipes and guns.

In 1934, with the artists Reuben Kadish and Jules Langsner, and arranged by the famed Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, Guston began “The Struggle Against Terrorism” (1934-35). This fresco in Morelia, Mexico, which depicts tyranny from the Spanish Inquisition to 1930s Fascism, includes the hooded figures that became a lifelong symbol of bigotry for the artist. Guston later created the disturbing “Bombardment” (1937), a maelstrom of figures, one with a gas mask, that he painted after reading a newspaper article about the atrocities carried out during the Spanish Civil War.

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Then, over the next decade, Guston began to switch gears, a new recruit from figurative work to full-blown abstraction. His paintings from the late ’40s — around the time his friends Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning were developing their signature abstract styles — carried titles like “The Tormentors” (1947-48), but the human figures were becoming geometric shapes and merging with the background.

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It would be another few years until Guston had his first exhibition of completely abstract works in New York — no human figures, no objects in sight, marked by clusters of color at their centers. In works like “Voyage” (1956) or “Native’s Return” (1957), urgent brush strokes coalesce into hovering almost-orbs that dominate the painting. In his 40s he was fighting battles with his own mental health as well as the long arm of Western art history from the Renaissance to de Kooning.

Then, still another shift, back toward representing objects and people. Human heads slowly started returning to his paintings, as in “Painter” (1959), which served as a kind of abstract self-portrait. It would take the spring and summer of 1968, after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and the attacks by police and National Guardsmen on crowds outside the Democratic Convention, to push Guston over the edge. “I got sick and tired of all that Purity!” he said in a 1977 interview, referring to abstraction. “Wanted to tell Stories!”

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In paintings like “Bad Habits” (1970), with its crudely drawn hooded goons in a dungeonlike space — one of them brandishing a whip or some other torture device — Guston showed a return to his obsessions of the ’30s; they demonstrate how our civilization’s “bad habits” (violence, racism, oppression) had hardly disappeared in the ensuing decades. Guston could turn the brush on himself, as well, in works like “The Studio” (1969), where a silent hooded figure paints a self-portrait suggesting the racism ingrained in all of us. The artist Glenn Ligon offers a more sympathetic reading of this painting in the National Gallery’s exhibition catalog; however, he writes, “The comedian George Carlin once said, ‘The reason they call it the “American Dream” is because you have to be asleep to believe in it.’”

“Guston’s ‘hood’ paintings, with their ambiguous narratives and incendiary subject matter, are not asleep,” Mr. Ligon goes on. “They’re woke.”

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Along with the return of figures and the hoods — now drawn in a crude, cartoonish fashion that shocked even his peers in the early ’70s — Guston continued to paint ordinary objects: shoes, cans, clocks and bricks that asserted both the materiality and everydayness of painting. The critic Harold Rosenberg called his later work “a liberation from detachment” — which is to say, it was unafraid to address messy politics, the body, failure, or the changes an artist goes through in his lifetime.

And this is why artists have rallied behind Guston: They see an ally in his work, a dedication to craft and self-reflection — but also a model of courage and liberation in the face of oppression, whether in the art world or beyond.