‘ The “true founding” claim was the core element of the Project’s assertion that all of American history is rooted in and defined by white racial hatred of blacks. According to this narrative, trumpeted by Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones, the American Revolution was a preemptive racial counterrevolution waged by white people in North America to defend slavery against British plans to abolish it. The fact that there is no historical evidence to support this claim did not deter the Times and Hannah-Jones…’
---------- Forwarded message --------- From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW<h-review@...> Date: Wed, Sep 23, 2020 at 11:56 AM Subject: H-Net Review [H-Nationalism]: Wylie on Harmon, 'Presidents by Fate: Nine Who Ascended through Death or Resignation' To: <h-review@...> Cc: H-Net Staff <revhelp@...>
F. Martin Harmon. Presidents by Fate: Nine Who Ascended through
Death or Resignation. Jefferson McFarland, 2019. Illustrations.
231 pp. $39.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-4766-7742-2.
Reviewed by Roxy Wylie (University of Arkansas - Fort Smith)
Published on H-Nationalism (September, 2020)
Commissioned by Evan C. Rothera
In Presidents by Fate: Nine Who Ascended through Death or
Resignation, F. Martin Harmon examines nine US vice presidents who
ascended to the presidency: John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Andrew
Johnson, Chester Arthur, Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry
Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Gerald Ford. Harmon weighs their
legacies and their impact on US destiny in times of calamity and
crossroads. Presidents by Fate is a thought-provoking introduction to
the role of the vice presidency, particularly its direct access to
the Oval Office. Furthermore, this short work illustrates how the
office of the vice presidency has suffered at the hands of presidents
and citizens alike. Some vice presidents were chosen to garner votes,
while others were purposely ignored or maligned. The average voter
might not necessarily consider the vice president as vital, but nine
vice presidents-turned-presidents guided the country through social
upheaval, world wars, and political reforms and thus directly shaped
the trajectory of the US. These presidents by fate influenced
domestic policy and foreign policy in a number of ways.
Tyler, Fillmore, and Andrew Johnson had a tremendous impact on
debates about slavery, race, and citizenship. Tyler's annexation of
Texas put the US on a collision course with Mexico. The resulting war
sharpened the question of whether slavery should be allowed to spread
into new territory. Harmon applauds Fillmore's efforts to help pass
the Compromise of 1850, although he notes that Fillmore antagonized
some northerners with his determination to enforce the Fugitive Slave
Act. Johnson's staunch racism coupled with his strident unionism put
him at odds with many people during his political career. When the
South seceded, Johnson, a native Tennessean, remained in the Senate.
As the US Civil War concluded, Johnson's lenient program of
Reconstruction sparked a confrontation with Radical Republicans.
Harmon contends that Johnson's advocacy of states' rights and deeply
rooted prejudice drove his opposition to the Freedmen's Bureau, the
Civil Rights Bill of 1866, and the Fourteenth Amendment. While one
President Johnson proved a disaster when it came to reconstructing
the Union, another rose dramatically to the occasion a century later,
during the modern civil rights movement. Lyndon B. Johnson made great
strides in domestic policy, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964
and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which LBJ termed "his 'greatest
accomplishment'" (pp. 152-53). Sadly, as Harmon points out, the
Vietnam War overshadowed some of Johnson's domestic accomplishments.
Presidents by fate also made their mark in other aspects of domestic
policy. Arthur was "the classic example of what was known as a
political 'spoilsman' and product of the 'Spoils System' then in
place throughout American government" (p. 20). President Garfield's
assassination convinced many people of the need for civil service
reform. The resulting Pendleton Act of 1883 established civil service
entrance exams for government appointments. Ever-increasing
resentment against the Chinese led Arthur to sign the Chinese
Exclusion Act. This legislation, Harmon contends, ushered in "decades
of racial violence on the West Coast by severely marginalizing
Chinese laborers" (p. 104). Roosevelt attempted to break up the
trusts and expand government intervention in commerce and business.
His heavy-handed involvement in railroad and coal mine disputes
caused Harmon to claim that Roosevelt's "presidency marked the start
of America's modern age" (p. 26). In contrast to Roosevelt, Coolidge
sought to limit government intervention in domestic affairs and
"restrict expansion of government" (p. 124). Ford, the last of the
nine, faced a daunting challenge of his own: unifying the nation
after Watergate and Richard Nixon's resignation. Faced with a
disillusioned public, Ford chose to pardon Nixon and withdraw from
Vietnam. These decisions blighted Ford's short administration and
likely contributed to his defeat in 1976.
Some of the presidents by fate played critical roles in developing
foreign policy. Roosevelt and his "Roosevelt Corollary" created
considerable tension between the US and the nations of Latin America.
Harmon discusses Roosevelt's "steadfast defense of the Monroe
Doctrine" as "America's mentorship and near 'landlordial' maintenance
of the Western Hemisphere" (p. 115). This "Big Stick" philosophy
included the Panama Canal--an accomplishment that produced both
praise and condemnation. Franklin Delano Roosevelt died before World
War II ended and Harry S. Truman faced an extremely consequential
choice--whether or not to drop the atomic bomb. Ultimately, Truman
chose to drop the bomb. He also helped define the terms of the Cold
War with his Truman Doctrine--"It is the policy of the United States
to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by
armed minorities or outside pressures" (p. 138)--and superintended
the reconstruction of Europe with the Marshall Plan and European
Recovery Program.
Harmon's claim of "no revisionist history here" is somewhat unclear
(p. 2). For one, he relies heavily on published biographies of the
presidents by fate. Most historical writing tends to be revisionist
because historians frequently revise older understandings of the
past. Biographers, as much as historians, constantly revise,
reinterpret, and reinvent the lives and legacies of their subjects,
sometimes based on discoveries of new documents or in response to a
particular moment. In addition, basing the bulk of research on
secondary sources like biographies, rather than primary sources,
means that the author did not always go directly to the source.
Harmon outlines his use of two reference books--_The Complete Book of
U.S. Presidents_ (2013) by William A. DeGregorio and _Don't Know Much
about the American Presidents _(2012) by Kenneth C. Davis--in his
preface. He supplemented these volumes and biographies of presidents
with documentaries and other published sources but few manuscript
collections or other unpublished primary sources. Moreover,
augmenting research with book reviews does not enhance the
craftmanship of this work.
Distance and time can be considerable advantages when discerning a
president's legacy. Any fair assessment should consider the pressures
these presidents by fate faced. Harmon compares life experiences,
personalities, backgrounds, education, political partisanships, and
leadership of the nine men, in the end concluding "while all faced
the same awesome responsibility,... they approached their
presidencies differently ... and ultimately succeeded or failed due
to a variety of factors--many beyond their control" (p. 166). In
other words, every presidency has its own unique challenges and
comparison can be futile.
Comparisons, however, are nonetheless useful in understanding
society. Harmon looks to the polls as the ultimate factor of success,
commenting that "no better gauge of presidential success or failure
can probably be found than the ballot box" (p. 166). Five--Tyler,
Fillmore, Johnson, Arthur, and Ford--were unable to either establish
bipartisanships or create alliances within their party. The other
four--Roosevelt, Coolidge, Truman, and LBJ--successfully secured the
trust of US voters and won another term. In the end, success is
ambiguous. What is considered successful today may be considered
unsuccessful tomorrow. Perhaps Harmon might have remained focused on
the impact of each man rather than his alleged successes.
Presidents by Fate offers one window into the US presidency. Harmon's
passionate writing reminds readers of the potential power of the vice
presidency. Each of these men rose to power during times of crisis
and left, for better or worse, their mark on US history and the
world.
Citation: Roxy Wylie. Review of Harmon, F. Martin, _Presidents by
Fate: Nine Who Ascended through Death or Resignation_. H-Nationalism,
H-Net Reviews. September, 2020.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55182
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.
The WSWS's shit-slippery telescoping of the complex issues surrounding the 1619 Project into some adolescent outcry against eternal "racial hatred" is, as one would expect, and Louis Proyect demonstrates, a load of disingenuous, ill-intentioned nonsense. Michael Meeropol does a terrific job of anatomizing the complexities of race and capitalism.
Without too much duplication (one hopes), I would like to make a few high-level summary points:
1) Racism, however emotional, is at bottom a conceptual structure and a entails a continual process of structuring that evolves historically and continues to reproduce itself wherever it appears.
2) If racism were not useful to capitalism, it could disappear--initially through a process of "white people" beginning not to listen to its insidious voices, and then through the disappearance of the voices themselves.
3) In order for 2 to happen, a process of reeducation and cultural change aimed specifically at race would be necessary. Cuba--and insanely jingoistic Russia, which rolls in its racist imperial heritage like a dog in fish guts--show that racism and masculinism can easily survive purported socialist revolutions and "reseed" themselves if not addressed specifically. The fact that racism itself developed historically is no argument against this.
4) In the United States, racism is the biggest single bulwark, after consumerism, against the questioning of capitalism. Do you "white people" want to be like those "shithole" people? The neoliberal ideology that has developed recently around a handful of phrases from the Floundering Bothers is greatly weakened if there is no n* threat to keep the minimally privileged awake at night. A Yellow Peril makes a poor substitute.
Masculinism proves itself through racial murder in addition to rape and abuse of women and weak men in general, and is the passive-follower little brother of racism, though it can infect all races, and thus undermine the critique of racism. Settlerism--a vehicle for racism and masculinism and a further distracting ideology that functions to obfuscate capitalism--is impossible without a racial "other" to colonize and kill in pursuit of manly "liberty."
5) The process of development of racism under capitalism IMO reflects--to use a now highly unfashionable terminology--a process of bricollage, the adoption and adaptation of previously existing cultural and ideological materials to suit new circumstances.
The driving engine of class struggle, on the other hand, cannot be reduced to a latticework or syntax of intersecting ideological topoi. It is not at root a matter of semiotics but of observable and quantifiable material reality, but it can't move forward without the concealment, distraction, and access to the manipulation of the mass psyche made possible by multiple intersecting ideologies that can seem to move together independent of class struggle and to some extent independent of each other.
This independence is crucial to the functional effectiveness of these ideologies--to be convinced of racist ideology, you must first see and feel as an integral mental object the inferiority of blacks and other racial groups--as well, of course of queers and women in general. This must have the force of revelation, of plain-daylight self-evidence, and must inoculate the convinced racist against placing anything before race--for example, social equality.
So racism is in reality a separate evil, intricately intertwined with the class system, but capable of surviving outside it. To achieve a classless society, we must eradicate this intellectual and emotional pathology like any other virus or obstacle to socialist reconstruction--as a problem in its own right, not a mere function of class struggle.
6) The indentured servant entered into a compact but was precisely not a "free" laborer selling her labor power on the open market. The amount of coercion, reinforced by mental and physical cruelty, was vast. In reality, indentured servitude at its worst was almost chattel slavery and differed sharply from capitalist wage slavery or anything we would now understand as a "legitimate" contractual arrangement--however fraudulent our modern ideology around work contracts and "free" labor may be (or how terrible the unrestricted atrocities of "free labor," as seen for example in Engels's Condition of the Working Class in England, certainly were and are).
Richard Hofstadter (quoted, I admit it, in Wikipedia) pointed out, "Although efforts were made to regulate or check their activities, and they diminished in importance in the eighteenth century, it remains true that a certain small part of the white colonial population of America was brought by force, and a much larger portion came in response to deceit and misrepresentation on the part of the spirits [recruiting agents]."
There appears to have been a very significant difference, but the distance from indenture to slavery was perhaps far smaller than people nowadays may think.
College Football’s
Worst Fear in the Pandemic: The Death of a Player
Jamain Stephens was known as a big man on
campus. His death raised questions about how his university
is handling the coronavirus and prompted athletes to think
about their own risks.
PITTSBURGH
— Jamain Stephens did not need much of an introduction when
he showed up years ago for his first day of practice at
Central Catholic High School. His father, with the same
name, was a former first-round draft pick of the Pittsburgh
Steelers.
But
Stephens made a memorable entrance anyway, wearing a white
T-shirt, as was required by all freshmen, that happened to
be dotted with red Kool-Aid stains. A fitting nickname was
born: Juice.
Wherever
Stephens went, through high school and then to California
University, a small college in southwestern Pennsylvania, he
brought juice to the room.
Stephens grew into a
mountain of a young man, at 6-foot-3 and in the neighborhood
of 350 pounds, playing defensive tackle. His feet were so
enormous that his high school coaches went to the Steelers
to find size 19 cleats. His hands were so immense that he
carried a tablet in the palm of his hand as if it were a
phone.
His
personality was equally outsize. Juice always had a smile on
his face — even, as a former teacher said, when he wasn’t
smiling. At Cal. U., as the school is known, he was
typically the first player to reach out to a new recruit. A
professor could count on him to liven up discussions when
night classes inevitably dragged. The campus minister said
any father would be happy to have him date his daughter.
“If
you see Juice as a human being, you see a very large human
being,” said Garth Taylor, a youth football coach who had
known Stephens since he was a young boy. “His spirit was
twice as big as that.”
Stephens’s
impact explains why so many people were left reeling earlier
this month when the college senior died from a blood clot
after being hospitalized with Covid-19 and pneumonia.
His death devastated many at
his high school, where he had returned to work out this
summer, and at his college, where he was the embodiment of
the big man on campus, known for flashing his basketball
skills in intramural games, rounding up friends for a weekly
Krispy Kreme run and mentoring children back home.
But his death also rippled
through the sports landscape, as he is believed to be the
first college football player whose death can be traced to
the virus.
Image
The
football team at Central Catholic High School, led by
Coach Terry Totten, knelt in prayer for Jamain Stephens
at the beginning of a practice.Credit...Jeff Swensen for The New York Times
Most
colleges around the country, including Cal. U., which plays
at the N.C.A.A. Division II level, have canceled or
postponed fall sports because of thecoronavirus pandemic. But some schools have
forged ahead, hoping to salvage billions in TV revenue, and
perhaps some ticket sales.The Big Ten Conference said last weekthat
it would play football in October, reversing an earlier
decision to wait until at least next year.The Pac-12 is consideringa
similar pivot.
Stephens
during the 2019 season.Credit...California University of Pennsylvania
Athletics
So
as cases among college football players persist —Louisiana State Coach Ed Orgeron said last weekthat
“most” of his players had contracted the virus — Stephens’s
death may not be the last. More than 10,000 players are
expected to suit up this fall.
“This
is a billion-dollar industry — I get that,” Kelly Allen,
Stephens’s mother, said in an interview. “But not at the
risk of these boys’ lives. Nothing is worth that.”
CORONAVIRUS SCHOOLS BRIEFING:It’s back to
school — or is it?
Sign Up
Allen spoke last week in a
courtyard at Central Catholic overlooking the football
field, just after visiting a funeral home to make
arrangements for the burial of her only child. Even though
Cal. U.’s campus has been closed since March, and football
activities have been shut down since then, Allen said her
son returned to school in mid-August so he could work out
with his teammates in anticipation of a spring season. The
players were not tested for the coronavirus or even given
temperature checks upon their return.
Stephens
returned to school in mid-August so he could work out
with teammates for what they hoped would be a spring
season.Credit...California University of Pennsylvania
Athletics
Allen,
who spent Monday — her son’s 21st birthday — visiting his
grave site, said she had many questions for which she would
seek answers.
“My
heart is shattered in a million pieces,” she said. “I can’t
even describe the pain I feel. But do I have fight in me?
Absolutely. If it will save some parent’s grief,
absolutely.”
Although
California University has not allowed students on campus,
the school reported six Covid-19 cases this month among
students who returned to the nearby Vulcan Village, a
sprawling, 770-bed student-housing complex where Stephens
had lived since his freshman year.
A school spokeswoman,
Christine Kindl, said students had not been tested upon
their return to Vulcan Village and there had been no contact
tracing after the positive cases because unlike the dorms,
which are closed, Vulcan Village is owned by Student
Association, Inc., a nonprofit that funds student
organizations. Still, students pay their rent through the
university.
Image
California
University’s campus has been closed since March, and its
football activities have also been shut down since
then. Credit...Jeff Swensen for The New York Times
The university’s president,
Geraldine M. Jones, declined an interview request to discuss
the school’s coronavirus policies. Justin Schiefelbein, a
manager at Vulcan Village, did not respond to a message.
Cal.
U., a public school whose enrollment last year was 6,842, is
wedged into a bend in the Monongahela River, an hour south
of Pittsburgh. Allen drove her son there on Aug. 17 and
checked him into his ground-floor apartment at Vulcan
Village, which is popular with football players because it
is adjacent to the school’s football stadium.
When
they arrived, Allen wiped down the furnished, two-bedroom
suite, which shares a kitchen with another unit, with
disinfectant. She left her son with a bag of masks, plenty
of Lysol anda reminder to stay away from parties, which
have been linked to outbreaks at schools around the country.
Stephens had wanted to
return so he could work out with his teammates, even if it
were in small groups, his mother said. He was determined to
make the most of his senior season, no matter when it might
happen. He had lost 15 pounds over the summer with the help
of a nutritionist and had wanted to drop another 45 by the
start of the 2021 season. To help, his mother dropped off
prepared meals.
Image
Credit...Jeff Swensen for The New York Times
Sports
had taken root early for Stephens.
When
he was barely big enough to sleep in his own bed, Stephens
wrapped his hands around a baseball at night, and propped up
a football and basketball behind his pillow. Even though he
rarely saw his father, who settled in North Carolina after a
five-year N.F.L. career, Stephens began playing tackle
football by age 6. He was so big that, because of weight
limits, he was required to play with children twice his age.
“For five years, he was
basically a tackling dummy,” said Taylor, one of his youth
coaches. “He got his butt whipped, but his spirit was such
that he came back the next day.”
Image
Erick
Taylor, a close friend of Stephens’s since childhood,
plays quarterback for West Liberty University.Credit...Jeff Swensen for The New York Times
Stephens
befriended Taylor’s son, Erick, and they became so close
that they told people they were cousins. Juice loved to ask
people what position they thought Erick, who is 6-foot-4 and
265 pounds, played. They would guess lineman, linebacker or
tight end, and Juice would chuckle, revealing that Erick
played quarterback at West Liberty University.
The
inside joke also carried a message: Don’t prejudge me.
Juice fancied himself as
more than an immovable object on the defensive line. When he
played catch, he’d pluck passes out of the air with one
hand, like Odell Beckham Jr. On the basketball court, he
played like a rotund Stephen Curry, mesmerizing a hapless
defender with his dribble and footwork, then bouncing back
and draining a 3-pointer.
He
understood how sports could connect.
When
the Chain Gang — the nickname for his high school defense —
convened each Thursday for an open forum in the locker room,
it was Stephens who was the first to console a teammate
whose mother had breast cancer and another whose father had
just died, said Dave Fleming, the defensive coordinator at
Central Catholic.
Kurt
Hinish, a defensive lineman at Notre Dame who played with
Stephens at Central Catholic, cherished the talks they would
have when he drove Stephens home after practice. “It didn’t
matter where you came from, the color of your skin, your
religious affiliation or who you associated with,” Hinish
said. “Juice was going to interact with you in a genuine
way.”
Image
Stephens’s high school defense was nicknamed
the Chain Gang.Credit...Jeff Swensen for The
New York Times
That
empathy also was at the root of an improved relationship in
recent years with his father.
“My son and I had a great
relationship,” the elder Stephens said in a phone interview.
“That’s not to say there wasn’t strain over the years;
that’s not to say there wasn’t separation over the years. As
far as the time I wasn’t there as frequently as I should
have been — as they say, there’s two sides of every story.
My side is simply that I love my son and my relationship
with him was improving. I’ll tell you this: Jamain Allen
Stephens was the best part of me.”
If
the younger Stephens eagerly opened his heart to others, his
eyes were open, too.
He
watched as his mother helped others qualify for housing
assistance in her job with Pittsburgh’s housing authority.
And how she took on two other jobs — working as a bank
customer service representative at night and a tax preparer
on weekends — to help pay tuition. He also noted how the men
who ran the Garfield Park Gators, his youth program, taught
more than football to young, mostly Black boys, helping them
navigate difficult circumstances at home, at school or in
other parts of their lives.
Juice
and Erick had visions of one day opening a high school so
that it wasn’t only the select few who ended up at a place
like Central Catholic, where they could flourish
academically, socially and athletically.
“We’ve lost about 15
different childhood friends due to gun violence and things
they shouldn’t have lost their lives to,” Erick Taylor said.
“It was our dream to open up a school in Pittsburgh where
everyone could be exactly what they’re meant to be in this
world.”
Image
Alfonse
Allen, Stephens’s uncle, at his burial at Allegheny
Cemetery.Credit...Jeff Swensen for The New York Times
Erick
last spoke with Stephens two days before he died. They were
continuing a longstanding ritual: watching their favorite
athlete, LeBron James. Usually they watched together, but
this time they spoke by phone as James’s Los Angeles Lakers
blew a big lead but recovered for a playoff win over the
Houston Rockets. “He said, ‘They’re about to kick me out of
the hospital, I’m going so crazy about this game,’” Taylor
said.
By
then, it had been a little over a week since Stephens had
begun to feel ill.
When
his mother spoke to him on the phone on Friday, Aug. 28, she
asked if he was congested. He told her his allergies were
acting up. But he also said his roommate, Josh Dale, had
been fighting what he thought was a cold.
“The
next day, he said, ‘Oh, I think I caught Josh’s cold,’”
Allen said.
That night, Stephens
attended a party in his building, but left after a short
time because he was tired, according to one of his
teammates. School officials would not say if any of the six
reported coronavirus cases at Vulcan Village stemmed from
the party. But in an email to residents two days later,
Schiefelbein, the complex manager, said the party exceeded a
10-person limit on gatherings and warned that similar
parties could lead to dismissal.
When
Allen called her son on Aug. 31, Stephens was
uncharacteristically asleep at 10 a.m. She started reading a
list of Covid-19 symptoms to him: headache, sore throat,
loss of taste and others. “It was no, no, no, no,” Allen
said. “And when I got to the bottom of the list, I said
‘diarrhea’ and he said, ‘Mom, when I got up this morning, I
did have diarrhea.’”
Allen
picked Stephens up, and he was hospitalized later that day
after he tested positive for the coronavirus. A chest X-ray
revealed he had pneumonia.
Stephens
let some friends know he was in the hospital, sending a
Snapchat photo of a hospital bootee that covered only three
toes on his enormous feet. Doctors moved him into intensive
care for several days to increase his oxygen. He was moved
out of intensive care and told friends he hoped to be
released soon. But he was sent back the next day after he
said he had become lightheaded while taking a shower.
“And
mind you, this whole time he’s talking, he’s laughing, we’re
bantering back and forth like we normally do,” Allen said.
But
the next morning, Allen received a call from a physician
assistant: an ultrasound had revealed a blood clot in one of
Stephens’s lungs.
Allen
called her brother to tell him what was happening, and went
upstairs to get dressed and head to the hospital. As she
did, a nurse called again with an urgent message: Come now,
he’s gotten worse.
“I
drove like a bat out of hell,” Allen said, pausing to hold
back tears.
“When I got there, they
pulled me in the office for the doctor to talk to me, and I
just remember screaming, ‘Where’s my child?’ And then when
the chaplain came around the corner and told me he was gone,
I just remember screaming. The rest is just a blur,
honestly, after that.”
“My
heart is shattered in a million pieces,” said Kelly
Allen, Stephens’s mother. “I can’t even describe the
pain I feel. But do I have fight in me? Absolutely. If
it will save some parent’s grief, absolutely.”Credit...Jeff Swensen for The New York Times
For
nearly a week, Allen did not go back to her home. She stayed
with her sister and was comforted by her brother and other
relatives, with her son’s death coming four months after the
death of her mother.
She
wants to make clear that she does not blame Dale, her son’s
roommate, even if she has had that urge.
“I
don’t want that young man to torture himself, because I’m
sure he feels a certain amount of guilt already,” she said.
“This pain that I feel, I don’t wish this on anybody.”
In
an interview outside his apartment the day after Stephens
died, Dale said they had spoken less than 48 hours before he
died. “It’s so surreal that I’m going to be here by myself
and he’s just gone,” Dale said. “I’m still in shock. I still
don’t want to believe it.”
He
added: “He was the first person I met when I transferred
here, the first who took me around campus. ‘Hey, bro — I’m
going to show you — do this, don’t do that, eat here, don’t
eat here.’ That’s who he was 24-7.”
Dale said then that he was
awaiting coronavirus test results, but he did not have any
symptoms. The New York Times followed up with Dale several
days later, and a man who identified himself as Dale’s
father, James, returned the message. He disputed Allen’s
account that her son said he had gotten sick from Dale: “It
was the other way around,” he said before hanging up.
Stephens’s
funeral was held at the Pentecostal Temple Church of God
in Christ in Pittsburgh.Credit...Jeff Swensen for The New York Times
Stephens
was buried on Friday. The funeral procession from
Pentecostal Temple Church of God in Christ wove through the
city’s serpentine streets until it arrived at Allegheny
Cemetery, where he was laid to rest under a maple tree.
As
the college football season begins, few university
presidents or conference commissioners have invoked Jamain
Stephens, at least publicly.
His
father, as much as anybody, understands why.
“As
a competitor, as a parent with children in sports — there’s
an energy and excitement that go with that,” the elder
Stephens said. “It can cause us not to think straight about
something we don’t know enough about.”
Stephens
said his son’s autopsy showed the right side of his heart
was enlarged because of Covid-19. The effect, one of several
linked to the virus, elicits echoes to his time in the
N.F.L., when the league played down the severity of
concussions.
“It’s about money,” he said.
“We’re going to make it happen regardless of how it happens.
So what if we lose a few lives?”
Image
Stephens
would have turned 21 on Monday.Credit...Jeff Swensen for The New York Times
Stephens
was speaking just before Thursday’s viewing. It drew more
than 500 people, including dozens of his son’s former
teammates.
Some
went off to play at universities like Penn State,
Pittsburgh, Notre Dame and Clemson. They are big, strong and
imbued with the sense of invulnerability that football
requires, but after Stephens’s death they were as shaken as
anyone else who had lost someone to the coronavirus.
That
night, Allen said in a phone interview that many players, as
they had shared their sorrow, over and over again expressed
what they would likely not admit to anyone else — an
uneasiness about playing football during the pandemic.
“This makes Covid seem
really real,” Allen said, “having to look at their friend
and teammate in a casket.”
A new study on Viking genes won’t change our myths about them, because biology isn’t the answer and never has been, write ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and JOEL HELLEWELL
Eske Willerslev (seated), lead scientist on the Viking research paper, dressed up a Viking captive
THE recent rise of far-right ideologies and white supremacists in Europe has been associated with their appropriation of Viking iconography — and the appeal of the Viking myth to white supremacists is easy to see.
The ubiquity of the image of the violent sea-warrior resonates with half-formed ideas that we all carry as somehow associated with white skin and blond hair, the “Scandinavian looks” that can act as a helpful euphemism to bolster investment in “whiteness” now that Aryanism has fallen out of fashion.
Association with Vikings can be rightly identified as a historically meaningless fairytale for racists. Scientific, archaeological and historical work continues to shed light on who “the Vikings” really were. Between 800 and 1000AD, a number of seafaring cultures in northern Europe were particularly dominant. Rather than being identified as a single group, the term refers to a number of different populations that were prominent in colonisation and warfare.
We are now living in an age of genetic sequencing. The high-speed development of different types of genetic analysis now makes it possible to read DNA quickly and with a high degree of accuracy. Scientists are still trying to make out meanings from the genetic code.
One prominent use of the technology is the analysis of ancient DNA by digging up remains. While samples as old as 5,000 years have been analysed, the more recent the remains, the easier the analysis. Viking burial grounds from approximately 1,000 years ago are prime candidates.
The race to obtain valuable ancient remains is highly competitive. It is dominated by a few big-name scientists, who boast of their abilities to get access and thus secure funding to carry out the research. Along with economic capital, scientific capital accumulates: these scientists are concentrated in the richest and most famous institutions.
Last week, one of them, Eske Willerslev at the University of Cambridge published a study in Nature. The study analysed the genetic make-up of Viking skeletons found throughout Europe alongside their contemporary counterparts: the people who make up the modern day populations in the same geographical locations.
The results of the study show a mixture of stories. Vikings were less blond than the Scandinavians who have come after them; many distinctive populations are implicated in the Viking voyaging phenomenon; two prominent Viking graves on Orkney show no genetic link to other Scandinavian populations, although the graves otherwise appear to be Viking — the link being a cultural one rather than a question of biological relatedness.
Those believing a Scandinavian heritage is the key to any behaviour or cultural belonging will be disappointed. The Orcadians may have been sea-warriors and culturally and materially Vikings, but they were more closely related to people who were culturally Picts in what is now Ireland and Britain. It wasn’t genes that made them Vikings.
The Vikings were ethnically diverse and made more so by trading and colonisation. A team of many of the same authors showed earlier this summer that the Vikings carried smallpox by boat — just as coronavirus has been carried by plane this year.
As well as the short-term and sporadic movement of people as raiders and traders, there was a long-term genetic movement as populations migrated from regions south and east of Scandinavia to form the mixed-ancestry Viking populations.
Some people moved and didn’t mix; some people moved and mixed. Migration has always been part of human history.
Given what we know about people’s family histories, this complexity is entirely to be expected. More complexity is available to anyone who buys personalised gene testing; the same technology that lets us look into the genetic makeup of the Vikings is also available to tell you more about your own genetic makeup.
Unfortunately, the turn towards biological fascination has not been accompanied by genetic literacy. In return for your money, many companies offer a spurious race-based notion of ancestry linked to region or nationality: eg 3 per cent Iberian.
Although nominally shaking the notion of “race purity” as a possibility and carefully using neutral language of “populations,” the formulation cannot help but rest back on the abstract idea of racial purity and emphasise the links between race and place.
Race is a social, not a biological construct. The history of race shows it is based on colonial and supremacist power. The modern attempt to rebuild coalitions of people based on the percentages of ancestral DNA found in their cells is a threat to a serious understanding of genetics and to identity.
Besides, what of people who find they are “genetically homogenous” with genes recycled in the same family group for generations — are they to be encouraged in their racism? The risk is that by indulging the bad interpretation of genetics, we fail to formulate identities that speak to the real conditions we find ourselves in.
This Viking research will have no effect on the far right. They may as well call themselves Vikings. It has no basis in “real” Vikings but they understand the use of powerful stories and of imagined identities that allow them to believe and act as they like.
Those of us who oppose racial oppression owe it to ourselves and the people who will come after us to create better stories. We need shared ideas about where we came from and where we are going, rather than hoping that science will solve the problem for us.
WSWS is a lunatic asylum disguised as a political party. David North is a charlatan, he actively busted the attempt to form a union in the factory he owned prior to his reincarnation as the aspiring eminence grise of a Trot cult. Glen Ford wrote a brilliant takedown of his chicanery a few years ago that remains potent <https://blackagendareport.com/yes-white-people-are-also-killed-mass-black-incarceration-regime>:
A long-delayed grassroots movement finally emerged to confront the Mass Black Incarceration regime and its killer cops, under the umbrella of Black Lives Matter. The ruling class has attempted to co-opt this movement ever since, with varying degrees of success. But the WSWS critique of Black Lives Matter is bogus and ideologically driven, with numbers sprinkled in to give the illusion of social science. WSWS is opposed to independent Black political activity, including Black political self-defense against state oppression, which the WSWS brand of Trotskyists deems as narrow nationalist and objectively (or even consciously!) in league with the capitalist rulers. Which would be a great slander, if the WSWS were considered as serious Marxists. But, they are not. Although WSWS does some good work, they are also, unfortunately, crazy.
The operative question of racial slavery as opposed to indentured servitude, in the research that I have done, is twofold.
First, one must have an international survey of the legal statutes. OK, so maybe we can say that the British didn’t have a legal edifice for the chattel bond slavery system until later on. But that is unfortunately not taking into consideration the Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, and French systems, which DID have those systems in place as early as the 15th century. There also was an international component of the trade because of how the Caribbean colonies serviced the mainland throughout the entire period. As the British overtook the Atlantic seaboard, they absorbed many preexisting legal codes from their former enemies and integrated/“grandfathered” them into their legal system.
Second, there’s now research showing that the original gestures of racialization, imposing supposition onto humans based on phenotype, has antecedents in the Crusades and Catholic antisemitism.
Iago opens OTHELLO with a jaw-droppingly racist rant that has little variation from what Dixiecrats said about inter-ethnic marriage:
'Zounds, sir, you're robb'd; for shame, put on
your gown;
Your heart is burst, you have lost half your soul;
Even now, now, very now, an old black ram
Is topping your white ewe. Arise, arise;
Awake the snorting citizens with the bell,
Or else the devil will make a grandsire of you:
Arise, I say. -Act I Scene I
Right there you have Iago equating a Black man with a farm animal, a ram or male sheep. That’s not very different from what we get from Breitbart today. Ergo I don’t read the play as “pre-racial,” a text predating racism. Instead I see it as grappling with Renaissance racism, a variant that was not equivalent to the “scientific racism” of the 19th and 20th centuries but one that was still potent. Yes, Shakespeare had contradictions here, there’s no denying that Shylock is anti Semitic and that the playwright profited from investment in the Virginia slave trade.
The US embassy in .nl hosted a fundraising party meeting of the far-right dutch FvD because they know the US has not much credit left in the center. It is certainly a provocation and a violation of the 1961 Vienna treaty concerning diplomacy. Political outcry in parliament.
I don't see that version of the American Revolution as the cornerstone of the Project, but the quoted section seems unobjectionable in itself.
There is no historical basis for conjuring a British plan to eliminate slavery to which the American Revolutionists are alleged to have been revolting. The British didn't get rid of slavery until the 1830s. Arguably, this was largely predicated on the fact that their industrial development didn't need slavery because they were doing quite well profiting from the slave labor of the American South, supplying that cotton to the British textile industry. And the African Americans who gained freedom between the start of the American Revolution and the 1830s would have remained slaves had the British won.
There are other points to make on this but I think the chronological issue suffices.
You know
what else is a dead end? The Green Party.
I have no doubt that 20 years or so from now
there will be a mass revolutionary party with a membership made
up of the most exploited members of the working class. By
analogy, there were numerous anti-slavery parties in the 1840s
and 50s that flew beneath the radar because there was no
dominant class that was ready to take on the slavocracy. But if
I were alive back then, I would have supported any party
committed to eradicating slavery. You might argue, like Left
Voice does, that the GP is not specifically anti-capitalist.
Neither would a Labor Party have been in the 1980s that never
went anywhere because of the inability of the leftwing of the
labor movement to push forward with it. There was also a move to
build a Black Political Party that was also stillborn that also
withered on the vine. If there was a mass Labor or Black Party
in the USA, that would begin to open up the possibility of a
fracturing of the two-party system. That is why the bourgeoisie
hates the GP so much. It has one toe in the door leading to a
dismantling of the two-party system that they cannot tolerate,
especially in a period of advanced capitalist decay. Yes, it's
true that the GP is flawed but until something better comes
along, it gets my support especially running a Marxist like
Howie Hawkins who has been on Marxmail for well over a decade.
On Sep 23, 2020, at 8:17 AM, Louis Proyect <lnp3@...> wrote:
(In other words, the only kosher path for the left is to join a
party that does not yet exist. Until the people involved with Left
Voice gather the numbers they need to launch a section of their
International, you are permitted to engage in the class struggle
but refuse to vote for someone like Howie Hawkins. I love Left
Voice but this is dead-end sectarianism.)
A vote for the Greens presents to them
as an acceptable alternative to the two main parties of capital.
Rather than doing the preparatory work necessary to build a
socialist party of the working class, these socialists are
calling for a vote for a party that supports capitalism.
(In other words, the only kosher path for the left is to join a
party that does not yet exist. Until the people involved with Left
Voice gather the numbers they need to launch a section of their
International, you are permitted to engage in the class struggle
but refuse to vote for someone like Howie Hawkins. I love Left
Voice but this is dead-end sectarianism.)
A vote for the Greens presents to them
as an acceptable alternative to the two main parties of capital.
Rather than doing the preparatory work necessary to build a
socialist party of the working class, these socialists are
calling for a vote for a party that supports capitalism.
On Wed, Sep 23, 2020 at 04:26 PM, Michael Meeropol wrote:
The Doomsday Clock was set last January before the scale of the pandemic was understood. Humanity will sooner or later recover from the pandemic, at terrible cost. It is needless cost. We see that clearly from the experience of countries that took decisive action when China provided the world with the relevant information about the virus on January 10. Primary among them were East-Southeast Asia and Oceania, with others trailing along, and bringing up the rear a few utter disasters, notably the US, followed by Bolsonaro’s Brazil and Modi’s India.
Despite the malfeasance or indifference of some political leaders, there will ultimately be some kind of recovery from the pandemic. We will not, however, recover from the melting of the polar icecaps, or the exploding rate of arctic fires that are releasing enormous amounts of greenhouses gasses into the atmosphere, or other steps on our march to catastrophe.
When the most prominent climate scientists warn us to “Panic Now,” they are not being alarmist. There is no time to waste. Few are doing enough, and even worse, the world is cursed by leaders who are not only refusing to take sufficient action but are deliberately accelerating the race to disaster. The malignancy in the White House is far in the lead in this monstrous criminality.
It is not only governments. The same is true of fossil fuel industries, the big banks that finance them, and other industries that profit from actions that put the “survival of humanity” at serious risk, in the words of a leaked internal memo of America’s largest bank.
Humanity will not long survive this institutional malignancy. The means to manage the crisis are available. But not for long. One primary task of the Progressive International is to ensure that we all panic now – and act accordingly.
The crises we face in this unique moment of human history are of course international. Environmental catastrophe, nuclear war, and the pandemic have no borders. And in a less transparent way, the same is true of the third of the demons that stalk the earth and drive the second hand of the Doomsday clock towards midnight: the deterioration of democracy. The international character of this plague becomes evident when we examine its origins.
Circumstances vary, but there are some common roots. Much of the malignancy traces back to the neoliberal assault on the world’s population launched in force 40 years ago.
In a political season of dog whistles,
we must be attentive to how talk of American freedom has long
been connected to the presumed right of whites to dominate
everyone else.
PI Council Member Noam Chomsky’s keynote speech at the Progressive International’s inaugural summit.
Noam Chomsky pictured in Brazil 2018, HEULER ANDREY/AFP via Getty Images
Returning to the major crises we face at this historic moment, all are international, and two internationals are forming to confront them. One is opening today: the Progressive International. The other has been taking shape under the leadership of Trump’s White House, a Reactionary International comprising the world’s most reactionary states.
We are meeting at a remarkable moment, a moment that is, in fact, unique in human history, a moment both ominous in portent and bright with hopes for a better future. The Progressive International has a crucial role to play in determining which course history will follow.
We are meeting at a moment of confluence of crises of extraordinary severity, with the fate of the human experiment quite literally at stake. The issues are coming to a head in the next few weeks in the two great imperial powers of the modern era.
Fading Britain, having publicly declared that it rejects international law, is on the verge of a sharp break from Europe, on the path to becoming even more of a US satellite that it already is. But of course what is of the greatest significance for the future is what happens in the global hegemon, diminished by Trump’s wrecking ball, but still with overwhelming power and incomparable advantages. Its fate, and with it the fate of the world, may well be determined in November.
Not surprisingly, the rest of the world is concerned, if not appalled. It would be difficult to find a more sober and respected commentator than Martin Wolf of the London Financial Times. He writes that the West is facing a serious crisis, and if Trump is re-elected, “this will be terminal.” Strong words, and he is not even referring to the major crises humanity faces.
Wolf is referring to the global order, a critical matter though not on the scale of the crises that threaten vastly more serious consequences, the crises that are driving the hands of the famous Doomsday Clock towards midnight – towards termination.
Wolf’s concept “terminal” is not a new entry into public discourse. We have been living under its shadow for 75 years, ever since we learned, on an unforgettable August day, that human intelligence had devised the means that would soon yield the capacity for terminal destruction. That was shattering enough, but there was more. It was not then understood that humanity was entering a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, in which human activities are despoiling the environment in a manner that is now also approaching terminal destruction.
The hands of the Doomsday Clock were first set shortly after atomic bombs were used in a paroxysm of needless slaughter. The hands have oscillated since, as global circumstances have evolved. Every year that Trump has been in office, the hands have been moved closer to midnight. Two years ago they reached the closest they had ever been. Last January, the analysts abandoned minutes, turning to seconds: 100 seconds to midnight. They cited the same crises as before: the growing threats of nuclear war and of environmental catastrophe, and the deterioration of democracy.
The last might at first seem out of place, but it is not. Declining democracy is a fitting member of the grim trio. The only hope of escaping the two threats of termination is vibrant democracy in which concerned and informed citizens are fully engaged in deliberation, policy formation, and direct action.
That was last January. Since then, President Trump has amplified all three threats, not a mean accomplishment. He has continued his demolition of the arms control regime that has offered some protection against the threat of nuclear war, while also pursuing development of new and even more dangerous weapons, much to the delight of military industry. In his dedicated commitment to destroy the environment that sustains life, Trump has opened up vast new areas for drilling, including the last great nature reserve. Meanwhile, his minions are systematically dismantling the regulatory system that somewhat mitigates the destructive impact of fossil fuel use, and that protects the population from toxic chemicals and from pollution, a curse that is now doubly murderous in the course of a severe respiratory epidemic.
Trump has also carried forward his campaign to undermine democracy. By law, presidential appointments are subject to Senate confirmation. Trump avoids this inconvenience by leaving the positions open and filling the offices with “temporary appointments” who answer to his will – and if they do not do so with sufficient fealty to the lord, are fired. He has purged the executive of any independent voice. Only sycophants remain. Congress had long ago established Inspectors General to monitor the performance of the executive branch. They began to look into the swamp of corruption that Trump has created in Washington. He took care of that quickly by firing them. There was scarcely a peep from the Republican Senate, firmly in Trump’s pocket, with hardly a flicker of integrity remaining, terrified by the popular base Trump has mobilized.
This onslaught against democracy is only the bare beginning. Trump’s latest step is to warn that he may not leave office if he is not satisfied with the outcome of the November election. The threat is taken very seriously in high places. To mention just a few examples, two highly respected retired senior military commanders released an open letter to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Milley, reviewing his constitutional responsibility to send the army to remove by force a “lawless president” who refuses to leave office after electoral defeat, summoning in his defense the kinds of paramilitary units he dispatched to Portland Oregon to terrorize the population over the strong objection of elected officials.
Many establishment figures regard the warning as realistic, among them the high-level Transition Integrity Project, which has just reported the results of the “war gaming” it has been conducting on possible outcomes of the November election. The project members are “some of the most accomplished Republicans, Democrats, civil servants, media experts, pollsters and strategists around,” the Project co-director explains, including prominent figures in both Parties. Under any plausible scenario apart from a clear Trump victory, the games led to something like civil war, with Trump choosing to end “the American experiment.”
Again, strong words, never before heard from sober mainstream voices. The very fact that such thoughts arise is ominous enough. They are not alone. And given incomparable US power, far more than the “American experiment” is at risk.
Nothing like this has happened in the often troubled history of parliamentary democracy. Keeping to recent years, Richard Nixon – not the most delightful person in presidential history – had good reason to believe that he had lost the 1960 election only because of criminal manipulation by Democratic operatives. He did not contest the results, putting the welfare of the country ahead of personal ambition. Albert Gore did the same in 2000. Not today.
Forging new paths in contempt for the welfare of the country does not suffice for the megalomaniac who dominates the world. Trump has also announced once again that he may disregard the Constitution and “negotiate” for a third term if he decides he is entitled to it.
Some choose to laugh all this off as the playfulness of a buffoon. To their peril, as history shows.
The survival of liberty is not guaranteed by “parchment barriers,” James Madison warned. Words on paper are not enough. It is founded on the expectation of good faith and common decency. That has been torn to shreds by Trump along with his co-conspirator Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has turned the “world’s greatest deliberative body,” as it calls itself, into a pathetic joke. McConnell’s Senate refuses even to consider legislative proposals. Its concern is largesse to the rich and stacking the judiciary, top to bottom with far right young lawyers who should be able to safeguard the reactionary Trump-McConnell agenda for a generation, whatever the public wants, whatever the world needs for survival.
The abject service to the rich of the Trump-McConnell Republican party is quite remarkable, even by the neoliberal standards of exaltation of greed. One illustration is provided by the leading specialists on tax policy, economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman. They show that in 2018, following the tax scam that was the one legislative Trump-McConnell achievement, “for the first time in the last hundred years, billionaires have paid less [in taxes] than steel workers, school teachers, and retirees,” erasing “a century of fiscal history.” “In 2018, for the first time in the modern history of the United States, capital has been taxed less than labor” – a truly impressive victory of class war, called “liberty” in hegemonic doctrine.
The Doomsday Clock was set last January before the scale of the pandemic was understood. Humanity will sooner or later recover from the pandemic, at terrible cost. It is needless cost. We see that clearly from the experience of countries that took decisive action when China provided the world with the relevant information about the virus on January 10. Primary among them were East-Southeast Asia and Oceania, with others trailing along, and bringing up the rear a few utter disasters, notably the US, followed by Bolsonaro’s Brazil and Modi’s India.
Despite the malfeasance or indifference of some political leaders, there will ultimately be some kind of recovery from the pandemic. We will not, however, recover from the melting of the polar icecaps, or the exploding rate of arctic fires that are releasing enormous amounts of greenhouses gasses into the atmosphere, or other steps on our march to catastrophe.
When the most prominent climate scientists warn us to “Panic Now,” they are not being alarmist. There is no time to waste. Few are doing enough, and even worse, the world is cursed by leaders who are not only refusing to take sufficient action but are deliberately accelerating the race to disaster. The malignancy in the White House is far in the lead in this monstrous criminality.
It is not only governments. The same is true of fossil fuel industries, the big banks that finance them, and other industries that profit from actions that put the “survival of humanity” at serious risk, in the words of a leaked internal memo of America’s largest bank.
Humanity will not long survive this institutional malignancy. The means to manage the crisis are available. But not for long. One primary task of the Progressive International is to ensure that we all panic now – and act accordingly.
The crises we face in this unique moment of human history are of course international. Environmental catastrophe, nuclear war, and the pandemic have no borders. And in a less transparent way, the same is true of the third of the demons that stalk the earth and drive the second hand of the Doomsday clock towards midnight: the deterioration of democracy. The international character of this plague becomes evident when we examine its origins.
Circumstances vary, but there are some common roots. Much of the malignancy traces back to the neoliberal assault on the world’s population launched in force 40 years ago.
The basic character of the assault was captured in the opening pronouncements of its most prominent figures. Ronald Reagan declared in his inaugural address that government is the problem, not the solution – meaning that decisions should be removed from governments, which are at least partially under public control, to private power, which is completely unaccountable to the public, and whose sole responsibility is self-enrichment, as chief economist Milton Friedman proclaimed. The other was Margaret Thatcher, who instructed us that there is no society, only a market in which people are cast to survive as best they can, with no organizations that enable them to defend themselves against its ravages.
Unwittingly no doubt, Thatcher was paraphrasing Marx, who condemned the autocratic rulers of his day for turning the population into a “sack of potatoes,” defenseless against concentrated power.
With admirable consistency, the Reagan and Thatcher administrations moved at once to destroy the labor movement, the primary impediment to harsh class rule by the masters of the economy. In doing so, they were adopting the leading principles of neoliberalism from its early days in interwar Vienna, where the founder and patron saint of the movement, Ludwig von Mises, could scarcely control his joy when the proto-fascist government violently destroyed Austria’s vibrant social democracy and the despicable trade unions that were interfering with sound economics by defending the rights of working people. As von Mises explained in his 1927 neoliberal classic Liberalism, five years after Mussolini initiated his brutal rule, “It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aimed at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has for the moment saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history” – though it will be only temporary, he assured us. The Blackshirts will go home after having accomplished their good work.
The same principles inspired enthusiastic neoliberal support for the hideous Pinochet dictatorship. A few years later, they were put into operation in a different form in the global arena under the leadership of the US and UK.
The consequences were predictable. One was sharp concentration of wealth alongside of stagnation for much of the population, reflected in the political realm by undermining of democracy. The impact in the United States brings out very clearly what one would expect when business rule is virtually uncontested. After 40 years, 0.1% of the population have 20% of the wealth, twice what they had when Reagan was elected. CEO remuneration has skyrocketed, drawing general management wealth along with it. Real wages for non-supervisory male workers have declined. A majority of the population survives from paycheck to paycheck, with almost no reserves. Financial institutions, largely predatory, have exploded in scale. There have been repeated crashes, increasing in severity, the perpetrators bailed out by the friendly taxpayer, though that is the least of the implicit state subsidy they receive. “Free markets” led to monopolization, with reduced competition and innovation, as the strong swallowed the weak. Neoliberal globalization has deindustrialized the country within the framework of the investor rights agreements mislabeled as “free trade pacts. ”Adopting the neoliberal doctrine that “taxation is robbery,” Reagan opened the door to tax havens and shell companies – previously banned and barred by effective enforcement. That led at once to a huge tax evasion industry to expedite massive robbery of the general population by the very rich and the corporate sector. No small change. The scale is estimated in tens of trillions of dollars.
And so it continues as neoliberal doctrine took hold.
As the assault was just beginning to take shape, in 1978, the president of the United Auto Workers, Doug Fraser, resigned from a labor-management committee that was set up by the Carter Administration, expressing his shock that business leaders had “chosen to wage a one-sided class war in this country – a war against working people, the unemployed, the poor, the minorities, the very young and the very old, and even many in the middle class of our society,” and had “broken and discarded the fragile, unwritten compact previously existing during a period of growth and progress” – during the period of class collaboration under regimented capitalism.
His recognition of how the world works was somewhat belated, in fact too late to fend off the bitter class war launched by business leaders who were soon granted free rein by compliant governments. The consequences over much of the world come as little surprise: widespread anger, resentment, contempt for political institutions while the primary economic ones are hidden from view by effective propaganda. All of this provides fertile territory for demagogues who can pretend to be your savior while stabbing you in the back, meanwhile deflecting the blame for your conditions to scapegoats: immigrants, blacks, China, whoever fits long-standing prejudices.
Returning to the major crises we face at this historic moment, all are international, and two internationals are forming to confront them. One is opening today: the Progressive International. The other has been taking shape under the leadership of Trump’s White House, a Reactionary International comprising the world’s most reactionary states.
In the Western Hemisphere, the International includes Bolsonaro’s Brazil and a few others. In the Middle East, prime members are the family dictatorships of the Gulf; al-Sisi’s Egyptian dictatorship, perhaps the harshest in Egypt’s bitter history; and Israel, which long ago discarded its social democratic origins and shifted far to the right, the predicted effect of the prolonged and brutal occupation. The current agreements between Israel and Arab dictatorships, formalizing long-standing tacit relations, are a significant step towards solidifying the Middle East base of the Reactionary International. The Palestinians are kicked in the face, the proper fate of those who lack power and do not grovel properly at the feet of the natural masters.
To the East, a natural candidate is India, where Prime Minister Modi is destroying India’s secular democracy and turning the country into a racist Hindu nationalist state, while crushing Kashmir. The European contingent includes Orban’s “illiberal democracy” in Hungary and similar elements elsewhere. The International also has powerful backing in the dominant global economic institutions.
The two internationals comprise a good part of the world, one at the level of states, the other popular movements. Each is a prominent representative of much broader social forces, which have sharply contending images of the world that should emerge from the current pandemic. One force is working relentlessly to construct a harsher version of the neoliberal global system from which they have greatly benefited, with more intensive surveillance and control. The other looks forward to a world of justice and peace, with energies and resources directed to serving human needs rather than the demands of a tiny minority. It is a kind of class struggle on a global scale, with many complex facets and interactions.
It is no exaggeration to say that the fate of the human experiment depends on the outcome of this struggle.
I think one of the best ways to TRACE the "morphing" of indentured servitude to chattel race-based slavery in the US is in George Frederickson's outstanding book WHITE SUPREMACY. I used it for years in a comparative racism course about the US and South Africa because that is what Frederickson did -- with striking creative (and to my mind) convincing mining of the secondary historical literature. He traces the changes in Virginia Legislation concerning indentured servants between the 1640s and the 1680s (thereabouts) and notes that by the end of the 17th century, VIrginia had established race-based slavery --- which then of course was replicated in the rest of the South (and even many northern states).
I would argue that "racial hatred" was a construct used to justify the system that transformed even African "indentured servants" into chattel slaves --- the ability to do this was no doubt based on the emerging theories of racism (racism did not exist in the same way during the Middle Ages and into the early modern period --- otherwise, Shakespearea could never have made Othello into such a noble, tragic figure --- racism was created theoretically over the course of the 16th and 17th centuries --- at least that's how I read the history.
So (as a "vulgar" materialist) I would argue that the class needs of planters in the New World led to the justifications for slavery based on the newly discovered hierarchies of "the races of humankind" --- that "white racial hatred of black skinned people" was not a GIVEN that all white Europeans were born with ---- otherwise, Virginia would not have had to work very hard to craft legislation keeping white indentured servants from marrying black indentured servants --- why the South African racists would not have had to work VERY HARD not to permit "miscegenation"!!--- it (to remember the song in SOUTH PACIFIC "had to be carefully taught!")
(The NYT and Noam Chomsky ganging up on the Green
Party. That's some united front. Those of us who understand why
Lenin boarded a German train to get back to Russia understand
why the Republican Party is anxious to see Howie Hawkins on the
ballot. What the NYT and Chomsky, inc. can't engage with is the
openly repressive moves by their pals in the Democratic Party to
keep Howie Hawkins off the ballot.)
How Republicans Are Trying to Use the Green Party
to Their Advantage
By Maggie Haberman, Danny Hakim and Nick Corasaniti
Sept. 22, 2020
Four years ago, the Green Party candidate played a significant
role in several crucial battleground states, drawing a vote
total in three of them — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania —
that exceeded the margin between Donald J. Trump and Hillary
Clinton.
This year, the Republican Party has been trying to use the Green
Party to its advantage again, if not always successfully.
In Wisconsin, a G.O.P. elections commissioner and lawyers with
ties to Republicans tried to aid attempts by Howie Hawkins, the
current Green Party presidential candidate, to get on the ballot
there, which were ultimately unsuccessful. In Montana, state
regulators found that the Republican Party violated campaign
finance laws as part of an effort to boost the Greens in five
down-ballot races, including for senator and governor.
And in Western Pennsylvania, petitioners from Florida and
California were brought in to gather signatures for Mr. Hawkins
by an outside firm whose actions Mr. Hawkins and the party said
they could not account for. Mr. Hawkins also did not make the
ballot there.
With Mr. Trump trailing Joseph R. Biden Jr. in most national and
swing-state polls, Republicans are again trying to help third
parties that may appeal to Democratic voters and siphon off
votes from Mr. Biden. This is taking place alongside a broader
pattern of disinformation and skepticism by the president and
his allies that has sown confusion and undermined confidence in
the election.
Supporters of the president have also been trying to advance the
candidacy of Kanye West, the billionaire hip-hop artist,
confident that he can cut into Mr. Biden’s vote total. Democrats
have portrayed the effort as a “dirty trick” and exploitative of
Mr. West, who has bipolar disorder.
Republican efforts to aid the Green Party are not new. In 2016,
a billionaire backer of President Trump, Bernie Marcus, the
co-founder of Home Depot, provided support to Jill Stein, the
Green candidate, according to people with knowledge of the
strategy, who said the effort was done with the knowledge of
some officials at the Trump campaign and its chairman at the
time, Paul Manafort. (Mr. Manafort was subsequently convicted of
eight counts in an unrelated financial fraud trial.)
It was not clear if Mr. Marcus’s support, which has not been
previously reported, included bolstering the party’s effort to
get on the ballot or funding a social media campaign, or if it
went toward some other purpose.
Mr. Marcus did not respond to a question relayed to him through
his wife, Billi Marcus.
She and Mr. Marcus donated more than $7 million to groups
supporting Mr. Trump in 2016. His stalwart backing of Mr. Trump
has previously led to calls to boycott Home Depot; Mr. Marcus
retired more than a decade ago.
Three Republican operatives said that Steve Hantler, Mr.
Marcus’s top political adviser, had portrayed himself as
involved in efforts to bolster the Green Party in 2016. Mr.
Hantler declined multiple requests seeking comment. The people
who spoke of Mr. Marcus’s and Mr. Hantler’s involvement insisted
on anonymity in order to disclose private conversations.
There was no indication that Ms. Stein or her campaign knew
about Mr. Marcus’s involvement.
Ms. Stein, in a statement, said: “I’ve never heard of Bernie
Marcus or this alleged effort. Why is the NYT trying to make
this into a scandal and not the fact that superrich elites from
the same corporate interests give hundreds of millions every
election to buy off both establishment parties?”
The Trump campaign declined to comment on whether officials were
aware of Mr. Marcus’s and Mr. Hantler’s efforts in 2016, but
said that it was unaware of current support being given to the
Green Party.
As of this week, Mr. Hawkins was on the ballot in only 28
states, qualifying in Florida, Colorado and Michigan, but not in
other states where polls show relatively narrow margins,
including Wisconsin, New Hampshire and Georgia.
That’s a far cry from 2016, when Ms. Stein qualified in 44
states and drew almost 1.4 million votes overall. Some Democrats
blamed her bid for depriving Mrs. Clinton of critical votes that
year, while also condemning Russian efforts to boost Ms. Stein’s
candidacy.
Mr. Hawkins, a longtime party activist, acknowledged that
Republicans had likely tried to help him but dismissed the
efforts as irrelevant.
“I’m aware that some of that’s been done, Republicans collecting
signatures for Green Party ballot access,” he said in an
interview. “I heard about it after the fact. Voters should look
at the candidates. These operatives play their games. Myself, I
didn’t know they were doing this.”
The efforts on Mr. Hawkins’s behalf span several
states. In the Pittsburgh area this summer, numerous signature
collectors were brought in from Florida and California to get
Mr. Hawkins on the ballot, nominating papers filed in
Pennsylvania show. Mr. Hawkins’s campaign manager, Andrea Mérida
Cuéllar, said, “We did not contract with any firm directly for
petitioning work” in the state, and when told that it appeared
that an outside group brought the petitioners in, she did not
offer another explanation.
Documents reviewed by The Times, and interviews with people
involved in gathering signatures, indicate that the petitioners
were brought in by L&R Political Consultants, a
Florida-based company run by Larry Laws, who is well known in
the ballot petitioning business, two people with knowledge of
the effort said. Mr. Laws did not return calls and texts seeking
comment.
A landslide and a close race are both easy to imagine as polls
show Biden competing in red states.
One of the people said that a Republican consultant named Tim
Mooney was also part of the effort. The Dallas Morning News
reported in 2010 that Mr. Mooney had worked to get the Green
Party access to the ballot in Texas. He and Mr. Laws have a
history of working together, and were both reportedly involved
in a 2004 effort to get Ralph Nader on the ballot as an
independent candidate. Mr. Mooney has been linked more recently
to state ballot measures supported by the president.
In a text message, Mr. Mooney denied any involvement.
“Not working for the Greens,” he wrote. “Haven’t collected any
candidate signatures for any party this cycle.”
In Wisconsin, a number of Republican lawyers have been aiding
attempts by Mr. Hawkins to get on the ballot, and a Republican
member of the state elections commission informally advised the
Green Party after the commission deadlocked along party lines on
the question. Mr. Hawkins’s bid was rejected last week by the
Wisconsin Supreme Court.
Republicans have also been active on the Greens’ behalf in
Montana this year, where they bankrolled a signature-gathering
effort to get Green Party candidates on the ballot. In a
statement, Spenser Merwin, the executive director of the State
Republican Party, said “the Montana Republican Party openly
supported efforts to create additional options at the ballot
box.”
But state regulators found that the party “failed to accurately
report” its funding, and violated state campaign finance law.
The Supreme Court recently rejected an effort to keep the
candidates on the ballot.
There would seem to be little in common between the Green Party,
with its mission to protect the environment, and the G.O.P.,
with its goals of eliminating environmental regulations. But
distrust between the Green Party and Democrats goes back to Mr.
Nader, and the role he may or may not have played in tilting the
2000 election in favor of George W. Bush. Mr. Nader won more
than 97,000 votes in Florida in a race where less than 600 votes
delivered the state to Mr. Bush.
Sometimes Republican aid is done without the Green Party’s
knowledge, but sometimes it is overt. Carl Romanelli, the Green
Party Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, acknowledged receiving
financial support from Republicans to help him get on the ballot
in 2006.
In 2010, Mr. Mooney helped organize a successful petition drive
to get the Green Party on the ballot in the Texas race for
governor, working with a Missouri-based nonprofit called Take
Initiative America. Texas Democrats sued, and court documents
revealed Take Initiative America received $532,500 in anonymous
donations that they refused to reveal at the time. In the same
election, Mike Toomey, a former chief of staff to Rick Perry,
the Republican governor at the time, was also linked to an
effort to help fund a Green Party ballot petition drive, though
it never fully materialized.
This year, while the Green Party is already on the ballot at the
presidential level in Texas, multiple congressional candidates
failed to pay the required filing fees, and Democrats sued to
have them removed. After the conservative-leaning Texas Supreme
Court ruled in favor of the Green Party, the State Democratic
Party accused the court of taking “actions to benefit their own
political party.”
Sometimes the Green Party itself is not only unaware of
Republican efforts but has tried to restrain them. In 2009, the
party filed a lawsuit in Florida to determine who had arranged
for five unknown candidates to appear on the Green Party line.
Ronald G. Meyer, a Florida elections lawyer who handled the case
for the party, said they found “that a Republican operative
recruited a bunch of college-student-aged people, some
waitresses and college kids, and paid their qualifying fees.”
Asked about ballot chicanery, Mr. Hawkins said, “These people
plays these games, and they are just hacks for the two parties.”
He tried to distinguish his party, and its years of history and
organizing, from Mr. West’s candidacy.
“I tweeted at some point that Kanye West is a Republican dirty
trick,” he said. “If Roger Stone didn’t do it, he wished he
did,” he added, referring to the longtime political adviser to
Mr. Trump, and self-proclaimed master of dirty political tricks.
Mr. Stone was convicted of seven felonies in 2019, but his
sentence was commuted by the president earlier this year.
Mr. Hawkins has referred to his candidacy as “a second front
against Trump,” but said, “I’m not going to shame people for
settling for Biden if they’re really concerned about Trump, but
I’m not advocating that vote.”
‘The “true founding” claim was the core element of the
Project’s assertion that all of American history is rooted in
and defined by white racial hatred of blacks. According to
this narrative, trumpeted by Project creator Nikole
Hannah-Jones, the American Revolution was a preemptive racial
counterrevolution waged by white people in North America to
defend slavery against British plans to abolish it. The fact
that there is no historical evidence to support this claim did
not deter the Times and Hannah-Jones…’
This article is bullshit, just like everything
else WSWS has written about Project 1619. The NYT stopped
referring to 1619 as the start of slavery in the USA because
there is significant debate over whether the Africans brought to
Jamestown were indentured servants or slaves. For example, Nell
Painter, an African-American historian who is retired from
Princeton, maintains that they were indentured servants as does
Nikhil Pal Singh, an NYU professor who is about as far from WSWS
as you can get.
In my view, they were not indentured servants
since they only ended up in Jamestown as a result of being
seized from a Spanish slave ship. This wasn't a case of
Jamestown colonists going over to Africa to con some peasants
into signing a 5-year contract for a great job as servants in
Jamestown. Right?
As for the rest of the article, it is filled with
nonsense like this. Racial hatred? What the fuck? Do these
people base their analysis on Karl Marx or Stanley Kramer
movies?
These deletions are not mere wording changes.
The “true founding” claim was the core element of the
Project’s assertion that all of American history is rooted in
and defined by white racial hatred of blacks.
‘The “true founding” claim was the core element of the Project’s assertion that all of American history is rooted in and defined by white racial hatred of blacks. According to this narrative, trumpeted by Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones, the American Revolution was a preemptive racial counterrevolution waged by white people in North America to defend slavery against British plans to abolish it. The fact that there is no historical evidence to support this claim did not deter the Times and Hannah-Jones…’
In Spring 2017, Kasowitz told associates that he had been personally responsible for the abrupt dismissal of U.S. AttorneyPreet Bharara on March 11, 2017, having previously warned Trump, "This guy is going to get you".[23]
Kasowitz departed Trump's White House legal team on July 20, 2017.[5]
In 2017, ProPublica reported that Kasowitz may be ineligible for a federal security clearance due to his alcohol abuse.[30] After reading the articles, a currently unidentified individual sent an email to Kasowitz urging him to "resign now." Kasowitz replied with a series of profanity-laced emails, some of which took a threatening tone, writing, "I'm on you now. You are fucking with me now Let's see who you are Watch your back, bitch," as well as "Call me. Don't be afraid, you piece of shit. Stand up. If you don't call, you're just afraid." And later: "I already know where you live, I'm on you. You might as well call me. You will see me. I promise. Bro."[31]
The emailer forwarded the emails to the Federal Bureau of Investigation to report the threats, and Kasowitz subsequently issued a statement saying "The person sending that email is entitled to his opinion, and I should not have responded in that inappropriate manner...This is one of those times where one wishes he could reverse the clock, but of course I can't."[32] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Kasowitz#Donald_Trump
