Sunday, February 27, 2022

The Problem With Democrats

By GENE NICHOL

President Biden said recently he was confident his Supreme Court nominee would secure bi-partisan support:

“I’m not looking to make an ideological choice. I’m looking for someone to replace Justice Breyer with the same kind of capacity Judge Breyer had, with an open mind who understands the Constitution in a way consistent with mainstream interpretation.”

Who could argue with that? An ‘open mind,” a “Justice Breyer,” a “mainstreamer.”

Well …

It’s lousy and modestly unseemly, I realize, to say a word against the retiring. Good grace demands the bestowal of the gold watch and, then, the moving on. Unless, perhaps, a larger and continuing problem lurks in the balance.

Stephen Breyer is a good fellow. And given my odd career, I can even say he’s a congenial lunch guest — thoughtful, professorial, happily interested in a world of learning and culture outside the law. He’s a student of the intricacies – perhaps overly so. After all, he was an administrative law professor at Harvard.

But now let me speak the unforgivable. Stephen Breyer has been on the US Supreme Court for over a quarter century and, for my money, no modern justice has served so long and had so little impact on American constitutional law. I know some will vigorously disagree with that assessment, and disagree even more with having the boorishness to proclaim it. But upon his announced retirement, it was not uncommon, in professorial circles, to ask, can you think of any Breyer opinions that will be remembered?

Maybe I overstate. I sometimes do. But consider the last dozen or so retirements (or deaths) of Supreme Court justices. Folks like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Sandra Day O’Connor, William Rehnquist, John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Harry Blackmun, Byron White, Lewis Powell, Thurgood Marshall, William Brennan. Whether one agrees or disagrees with their respective legacies, the footprint is notably larger and decidedly more enduring.

I’m sure President Biden finds the purported Breyer tendency to quietly (and unsuccessfully) seek consensus appealing; and his disingenuous, self-serving assertions that all the justices simply struggle mightily to give meaning (apart from politics) to the constitution reassuring, but they are brutally misplaced on this Trumpist high court. With six, or at least five, zealously committed partisans on the tribunal, such “virtues” only aid and abet.

So why mention the unseemly? First, the times call for a jurist of clarion skill, vision and temperament. The US Supreme Court is now a democracy-threatening, partisan behemoth. A new member, no doubt, will be cast principally, for years to come, in the role of eloquent dissenter – explaining to the nation, and to history, the actions of her majority colleagues. This is, to understate, no time for a timid cobbler and patcher. Any justice Mitch McConnell or Susan Collins warms to will likely fail the test. They’re Kavanaugh folks.

Second, and maybe even more importantly, this notion of definingly accommodationist Democratic decision-making crushes us. For decades, Democratic hopefuls have explained, effectively, they’re just like Republicans, only not so mean. Vote for us, we’re not quite as bad as the other guys. But a diluted right-wing agenda is still a right-wing agenda. It’s no bragging right to be a weaker, paler, softer version of your adversaries.

This absence of actual commitment disserves most profoundly when a nation is undergoing a battle to secure its democratic foundations. We need a champion not a cordial teammate. Bill Clinton appointed two Supreme Court justices — Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer. Biden sounds like he’s trying to replicate the wrong one.

Gene Nichol is Boyd Tinsley Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina School of Law and in 2015 started the North Carolina Poverty Research Fund after the UNC Board of Governors closed the state-funded Poverty Center for publishing articles critical of the governor and General Assembly. 

Satire: Manchurian Candidate, 2.0

By ROSIE SORENSON

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and China’s President Xi Jinping, made a splashy show of unity, standing in front of massive flags of their respective countries, on Feb. 4, 2022, at the Bejing Olympics.

China’s Foreign Ministry proclaimed, “In a warm and friendly atmosphere, the two Presidents had an in-depth and thorough exchange of views on China-Russia relations and a series of major issues that concern international strategic security and stability.” In his meeting with Putin, Xi even congratulated both China and Russia for having “safeguarded the true spirit of democracy.”

Behind closed doors a different sort of discussion took place at President Xi’s palace. The dictators sat at a mammoth huanghuali table in the leader’s personal conference room, while interpreters stood beside them.

Putin flashed his reptilian smile as he leaned forward and listed for Xi all of his accomplishments toward bringing America to heel.

“I am proud to report that over 70% of the Republican party is now one gigantic sleeper cell—the largest cell in the world. Installing Trump as President made my job easier.”

“Admirable,” said Xi. “Tell me more, comrade.”

“You no doubt know all of the players: Ted Cruz, Ron Johnson, Jim Jordan, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, Clarence Thomas, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Leonard Leo, the entire Federalist Society and others. I could go on. They have been activated and are doing a superb job.

“Civil rights is now a thing of the past, no matter how much African Americans complain.

“Women’s rights? On their way out, thanks, in part, to Judge Amy Coney Barrett.

“Children’s rights? Thanks to book banning and book burning to come in many states, their brains will be limited to what our American comrades, such as Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott wish them to know.

“Voting rights? Being suppressed in 30 or more states. They’re eating their young and finding it tasty.”

President Xi says, with a satisfied smile, “We have each come a long way during our many years of friendship, yes?”

“Indeed,” Putin says. “One more version of Trump as president, Trump 2.0, and America is finished.”

“Very fine work, President Putin.” Xi rises up, walks forward to shake Putin’s hand. On the way out of the the conference room, Putin hands Xi a slim package, wrapped in shiny red paper.

As Xi accepts the gift, Putin nods toward it and says, “The 1962 version of ‘The Manchurian Candidate,’ dubbed into Chinese.”

“Many thanks. This one I’ve not yet seen.”

Rosie Sorenson is a humor writer in the San Francisco Bay Area. You can contact her at: RosieSorenson29@yahoo.com

Film Review: Melancholy Danes: A Scandinavian Sunset Blvd.

By ED RAMPELL

“The Pact” is reminiscent of Billy Wilder’s 1950 classic “Sunset Blvd.,” wherein the has-been silent film star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) interacts with the “promising young writer” Joe Gillis.

Academy Award-winning Danish director Bille August’s screen adaptation of Thorkild Bjørnvig’s (played by Simon Bennebjerg) memoir “The Pact,” about his experiences with the celebrated “Out of Africa” novelist Karen Blixen (who was portrayed by Meryl Streep in the 1985 Sydney Pollack-directed film of the same name, but is here played by the Copenhagen-born actress Birthe Neumann), is a movie meditation on the nature of celebrity, wealth, power and how they affect (and afflict) artists. Endowed with fame, Blixen, a baroness ​whose pen name is Isak Dinesen, takes Thorkild – who’s less than half her age – under her wings, arranging for businessman Knud Jensen (Anders Heinrichsen) to subsidize the handsome aspiring writer.

As part of his eponymous “pact” with Blixen, Thorkild moves from his home to reside at the famous authoress’ estate so he can pursue his writing, unobstructed – and so the lonely Blixen can have a young male companion. But not necessarily a lover per se, as Blixen has been afflicted by venereal disease that causes her great pain and rendered her, alas, apparently unable to consummate her amorous longings.

But this doesn’t keep Blixen from meddling in Thorkild’s sex life. She scorns his marriage and parenting as a bourgeois convention, insisting upon a credo whereby artists are an exceptional breed set apart from ordinary people as talents who must be wild and free to pursue passion. Family, Blixen insists, is antithetical to artists’ need to devote themselves solely to creativity and their desires. “The Pact” reveals the impact this has on Thorkild and his literary process, as well as on his wife Grete (Nanna Skaarup Voss) and their little son. One almost expects the much put- upon Grete to write a rejoinder to the meddling Blixen entitled: “Get Out of Africa!”

Thorkild is caught in a web woven by the string-pulling Blixen, whose pact with her young mentee provides the wannabe writer with subsidization, access to Denmark’s glitterati at dazzling soirees, plus a place to live and work. Thorkild’s benefactor, Knud, actually says that financially successful people without talent are obligated to support those who are gifted. This is a dream come true for starving artists everywhere! Blixen even manipulates Knud’s wife, Benedicte (Asta Kamma August), to seek a romance with Thorkild. It all seems to be too good to be true – and it is, as it comes with Blixen’s idiosyncratic strings attached and at too high a price.

“The Pact” is reminiscent of Billy Wilder’s 1950 classic “Sunset Blvd.,” wherein the has-been silent film star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) interacts with the “promising young writer” Joe Gillis (William Holden). Swanson played the “over-the-hill” Norma as being the same age Gloria actually was when she shot “Sunset Blvd.,” about 50. In “The Pact,” Blixen is meant to be 63 years-old, although Birthe Neumann (who co-starred in artsy European films such as 1998’s “Festen,” or “The Celebration”) is really about 75. I realize that in the postwar period being 63 was not the same then as it is now, and to be candid, although she retains some of her beauty, Neumann’s Blixen does look much older than 63.

Onscreen, Blixen resembles Norma Desmond, and I imagine that some of the Dane’s headgear is deliberately intended to evoke memories of Gloria Swanson’s, who was Oscar-nommed for her role as the fading film star who was enraged at being displaced by talkies and then TV, because: “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.” “Sunset Blvd.” was a Hollywood Noir and Blixen, too, uses the marksmanship she presumably learned in Kenya in a way similar to how Norma did.

Bille August directs “The Pact” with a deft eye, depicting the highfalutin world of the high arts, where artistes are meant to be philosopher kings, above and unlike the rest of we mere mortals, in a naturalistic style. One thing that I didn’t find to be realistic is that this movie set in 1948 in postwar Denmark has absolutely no reference at all to the then-recent Nazi occupation of the Scandinavian nation. Be that as it may, August is a gifted filmmaker who previously directed Max von Sydow in 1987’s “Pelle the Conqueror”; von Sydow was Oscar-nommed for Best Actor, while “Pelle” scored the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. August’s star-studded1993 adaptation of Isabel Allende’s novel “The House of the Spirits” featured Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons.

The 73-year-old Danish helmer’s almost two-hour “The Pact” is a thought provoking, moody movie. It reminded me of other films about how celebrityhood affects writers and other artists, such as the 2021 documentary “The Capote Tapes.” Neumann’s Karen Blixen is, like Norma Desmond, “Ready for her closeup.”

“The Pact” opened at New York’s Quad Cinema on Feb. 11 and at Los Angeles’ Nuart Theatre and San Francisco’s ​Landmark’s Opera Plaza on Feb. 18.

Ed Rampell is a film historian and critic based in Los Angeles. Rampell is the author of “Progressive Hollywood, A People’s Film History of the United States” and he co-authored “The Hawaii Movie and Television Book,” now in its third edition. This first appeared at hollywoodprogressive.com.

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Unfair Labor Practice Strike at California Art College

By SETH SANDRONSKY

California College of the Arts employees in the Service Employees International Union Local 1021 walked off the job Feb. 8-11 at the Oakland and San Francisco campuses. The labor union, which also represents CCA adjunct faculty, alleged that the employer is committing unfair labor practices that violate federal law in the first such labor action at a private college in California since a brief one-day work stoppage at Pepperdine University 46 years ago.

The employer and represented employees began the bargaining process for a first contract in October 2019. According to Bloomberg Law, the median time (half above and below) to negotiate a first labor contract is one year. Early last December, 97% of the CCA staff that SEIU Local 1021 represents, voted to authorize its contract negotiating members to call a strike.

The protracted contract negotiations did not sit well with about 100 CCA staff (admissions officers, librarians, IT specialists and studio managers) in SEIU Local 1021 who in early February, walked a picket line to win economic demands, such as higher pay, in the high-rent SF Bay Area. Most represented workers have had no raises since January 2020 and no retirement contributions for a full year, according to SEIU. 

The lowest paid SEIU Local 1021 worker earns just under $37,000 annually, the highest gets $110,000 per year, according to the union. One of the strikers walking the picket line is Cynthia Santos. She is a CCA support specialist and alumnus, who has been involved with the private college since 2011.

David Owens-Hill is a CCA spokesperson. “CCA remains ready and willing to negotiate as frequently as needed to achieve a fair and mutually beneficial collective bargaining agreement with our unionized staff,” he told The Progressive Populist. “The college has a comprehensive proposal on the table that provides wage increases for our valued staff while also maintaining our ongoing commitment to student financial aid and a financially sustainable future for the college. At a time when we are making rapid progress in negotiations and have reached agreement on so many items, a strike benefits no one—not our staff, not our faculty, and certainly not our students, who have just returned to fully in-person classes for the first time in nearly two years. 

“The college has called on the union to show respect for the process and continue our progress by coming back to the negotiating table. Our goal is to work together to reach an agreement as quickly as possible, and return everyone’s full energy and focus to our core mission of educating students.”   

The CCA strike shut down regular operations and classes during the four day-strike, and put the administration’s unfair labor practices and refusal to bargain in good faith into news media and public discussion, Jennie Camejo of SEIU Local 1021, told The Progressive Populist. “We hope that administration will be ready to come back to the table serious about reaching a fair, equitable agreement for all staff and for adjuncts as well. We will continue to keep the pressure on until that happens.”

Employee militancy is part of—not apart from—the pandemic economy. There is a demographic angle on militant employees. 

According to labor reporter Mike Elk in “How Black & Brown Workers Are Redefining the Strike in a Digital COVID Era,” nonwhite workers are in the vanguard of the strike wave during the pandemic. “With essential workers disproportionately hailing from communities of color, the strike wave movement has been particularly strong in these communities,” he writes.

Where do things go next for CCA and its union employees seeking a fair first contract? “We have agreed to enter mediation and have offered dates for both the staff unit and the adjunct unit,” according to Camejo, “but CCA has not responded, despite claiming publicly that they want to go back to the table and reach an agreement as quickly as possible.”

Seth Sandronsky lives and works in Sacramento. He is a journalist and member of the Pacific Media Workers Guild. Email sethsandronsky@gmail.com.

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When Rock-and-Rollers Grow Up

By ROB PATTERSON

One could fill a small library with the plethora of books about the music and culture of the 1960s and the times to follow. For readers who wish to revisit or get acquainted with the era, Jonathan Taplin’s aptly-titled memoir, “The Magic Years: Scenes from a Rock-and-Roll Life,” stands head and shoulders above the usual fare of memories and tales from that era.

When your associations are the likes of Bob Dylan, The Band, George Harrison and Martin Scorsese and you were in the hurricane’s eye at such landmark events as Dylan going electric rock at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, Woodstock, the Concert for Bangladesh and The Last Waltz, you have stories well worth reading. But what makes Taplin’s book distinctive to me is as much his own life as those noted and celebrated people he’s worked and interacted with.

Admittedly, I identify with Taplin, who like me is an Episcopalian from an upper-middle class family who was enchanted by the bohemian musical and intellectual ideals of our youth and the Leftist political strains that aspired to imbue higher purpose and richer humanity into the culture at large. As well, we both landed by fate as much as our own pursuit into fascinating lives in the upper slipstreams of rock’n’roll (we spell it differently) and the times that were a-changin’ and continued to do follow that wind in the decades to follow. I’ve also been a road manager, as Taplin did with Jim Kweskin Jug Band and The Band. I grew up not that far behind him into the countercultural hopes for a better, fairer, more just and enlightened world.

When Taplin says “scenes,” he’s not kidding. The chapters and his remembrances of the events and movements he’s traveled through read rather much like the best advice I’ve ever run across for composing a film scene: Be like the best kind of party guest by arriving late and leaving early. To wit, after his earlier rock and folk music life he produced Martin Scorsese’s debut feature film, “Mean Streets,” as well as “Under Fire” and “To Die For,” plus TV documentaries for PBS. 

The book travels at an efficient clip through some of the major cultural movements of the last six decades right up to our current rather dire and turbulent times. His previous book is “Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy.” is a dive into a major skein that affects our contemporary culture, media commerce and politics. On finishing “The Magic Years,” I immediately checked it out from my local library as (fittingly) an ebook.

Taplin’s smarts and sagacity are to be treasured today. As a passage early in this tome reads, “[A]s I am finishing this book, those painfully functioning institutions are putting our society – savaged by a pandemic, a financial depression, and a racial justice crisis – into danger … This book is about the sense of possibility that allows culture to be at its most vital and powerful, even in difficult times. It’s about culture eating politics for breakfast.” Let’s hope it can.

Taplin is something of a Mr. Tambourine Man as a storyteller, enchanting the reader to follow him into the jingle jangle morning of what truly were “Magic Years.” His stories of his times among the celebrated at key cultural junctures are the appetizing breadcrumbs that make this book an eminently readable joy. But it’s the soulful resonances that mark it as important.

Without his explicitly saying so, I am confident that Taplin – even after a stint in the quite compromised realm of high finance – still holds to the ideals and aspirations that nourished the spirit of the ‘60s. I believe that his Episcopal faith, like mine, underlies that. At time when too often the “Christianity” of too many represents repugnant notions that contradict the teachings and mission of Jesus, we dearly if not desperately need more public voices like his.

Populist Picks

TV Documentary: “The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power” – Coincidentally, I was viewing this 1992 six-part series produced by Taplin from Daniel Yergin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book. The story of oil-based energy is the story of how our modern times came to be.



TV Documentary: “The Port of Last Resort” – A fascinating look at how some 20,000 European Jews were spared from the Nazi Holocaust and made it through World War II alive by emigrating to Shanghai, China.

Rob Patterson is a music and entertainment writer in Austin, Texas. Email orca@prismnet.com.


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Fierce Urgency of Now

 By HANK KALET

Edward Abbey has described the American wilderness as our collective home. The radical anarchist/environmentalist erected this metaphor to justify an aggressive program of targeted vandalism, referred to as “monkeywrenching.”

“Monkey-wrenching,” as defined by his fellow anarchist Dave Foreman, is the strategic disruption of commercial systems by individuals gumming up the works, by tossing a “monkeywrench into the gears of the machine that is destroying natural diversity.”

Abbey and Foreman saw the erosion and destruction of wilderness areas and the natural diversity they contained as an existential threat. Defense of the wild, they would argue, is defense of ecological diversity, of clean air and water, of a livable planet. Corporate interests, Abbey argued, were “bashing their way into our forests, mountains and rangelands and looting them for everything they can get away with,” all for “short-term profits in the corporate sector.”

These “three-piece-suited gangsters” of industry were the stranger at the door, the push-in robber who “threatens your family and yourself with deadly weapons, and proceeds to loot your home of whatever he wants.” We, as the “householder,” Abbey says, have “both the right and the obligation” to defend ourselves, our family and our property “by whatever means are necessary.”

Abbey and Foreman make these points in “Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching,” which was originally published in 1985 and updated several times since, well before we understood the full calamity facing the planet. In the intervening three-plus decades, the existential threat has only grown worse and encompasses ore than just the loss of biodiversity and undeveloped land. Sea levels are rising dramatically, droughts and extreme weather events are occurring more frequently, and parasitical species are spreading. And we are to blame.

Despite this, the national conversation about the climate has been lacking. Extensive programs like the Green New Deal — a collection of polices that would redesign our infrastructure and economy — has been dismissed as too expensive, while climate-change-deniers have taken over one of the two major political parties in this country, effectively ending any chance to shift direction.

So, where does this leave us? Environmental summits like COP26, which took place last fall, are useful but limited. As Grist reported, an agreement was reached “limiting global warming to below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit),” which “represents the most dramatic step forward for international climate progress since the Paris Agreement in 2015.”

The Glasgow agreement, said Alok Sharma, president of the conference, “charts a course for the world to deliver on promises made” in the past.

And yet, they remain pledges, promises, dependent on national political will to actually make the changes needed. Much of this will leaves us at the mercy of corporate interests that have little incentive to change and that use their vast wealth to influence government action. Already, the major petroleum and natural gas companies are seeking ways to protect their businesses from international action, even as they pay lip service to going green. And government officials, especially in the United States, are shying away from straight talk on carbon, fearing the inevitable backlash when gasoline prices rise or energy companies threaten to jettison jobs.

This brings me back to Abbey, Foreman and “monkeywrenching.” I’ve taught Abbey’s essay numerous times, and its prescriptions have always seemed problematic to me, mostly because they seem less likely to harm the prospects of corporations than of the men and women who do the work. Spiking trees — which does not harm the trees — damages chain saws and other equipment, often leaving workers without the tools of their trades while the larger corporations write off the losses.

Still, we can look to Abbey and Foreman for inspiration, look to their calls for civil disobedience and direct action, and see in their willingness make trouble a way of challenging power. As Heather Alberro writes at The Conversation, the traditional lobbying organizations that have long been the public face of the environmental movement are more interested in nibbling at the edges and “making industrial capitalism more sustainable.” They ply their trades in the halls of Congress, but need help from the grassroots to push the agenda.

Civil disobedience is needed: occupation of land (see Dakota Pipeline protests, the early labor movement), small-scale and targeted vandalism (such as the actions taken by the Ploughshares group against nuclear weapons), and mass protests.

“These are desperate times,” she writes. And desperate times, what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. might describe as “the fierce urgency of now,” require immediate action, forceful action.

Hank Kalet is a poet and journalist in New Jersey. Email, hankkalet@gmail.com; Twitter, @newspoet41; Instagram, @kaletwrites; Substack, hankkaltet.substack.com.


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Yuri Andropov, Mitch McConnell and the Search for Humanity

By BARRY FRIEDMAN

Reviewing the unmitigated disaster of “The Greek Tycoon” (1978), which starred Jacqueline Bisset and Anthony Quinn, and the penance they should pay for appearing in such dreck, Jack Kroll, the great film and drama critic for Newsweek, said the two actors should be forced to take a written exam before being allowed back into the human race.

If you’ve seen the movie, you know Kroll was being kind.

Which brings us, believe it not, to two people, at various times in their lives, who needed to sit for the exam: Yuri Andropov, former Soviet Union premier, and Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), presently the minority leader of the United States Senate.

After he became the sixth paramount leader of the Soviet Union and the fourth general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (the place had as many titles as the Corleone Family had buffers), Andropov was inexplicably treated to a kinder, gentler American press looking for a kinder, gentler Soviet premier. 

Andropov, a short, dull brute of a man — earlier in his career, he had been described by the New York Times as engaging “in a fairly successful campaign to throttle the recent wave of liberal dissidence” — was being characterized in the Washington Post as “silver-haired and dapper … tall and urbane,” and someone who collected “abstract art and likes jazz and Gypsy music.” Time magazine, in fact, said he was a “witty conversationalist and a bibliophile.” 

The softening of Andropov, the former head of the KGB, was disturbing in part because KGB heads, like today’s Republicans, don’t spend much time wrestling with life’s ambiguities. It’s just easier for some to throw physicists in the gulag, fine teachers for assigning Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” and rail against Jewish space lasers than it is for others.

Even if the stories about Andropov were true — and according to a piece by Edward Jay Epstein in the Feb. 7, 1983, New Republic, they weren’t — you’d like to think reporters wouldn’t have been so quick to talk of a new and improved Yuri just because there were stories he might be sitting barefoot in a dacha, toe-tapping to Ellington at Newport. Andropov, after all, was the guy chosen to head the KGB after Nikita Khrushchev was ousted for being too liberal. Not sure what the thinking was at the time, unless it was “Sure, Andropov crushed dissidents, imprisoned Andrei D. Sakharov for speaking out on human rights, and restored and invigorated the Soviet Union’s secret police, but he liked ‘Jeep’s Blues,’ so how bad can he be?”

“We all were here. We saw what happened. It was a violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election from one administration to the next.”

The same person also said this: 

“There is no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the event of that day.”

That the above two quotes came from Mitch McConnell made some wonder if there was something fundamentally different about him than the rest of the invertebrates in the Republican Party who would sell America down a polluted river for 18 holes at Mar-a-Lago. 

Was there a humanity to McConnell we had all missed?

Here was the president of the United States — the current one — during a joint address to Congress last year. Joe Biden’s son, Beau, and the story has been well told, had died of brain cancer in 2015, and McConnell called on the Senate to rename in his honor a bill accelerating cancer research. 

“I’ll still never forget when we passed the cancer proposal in the last year I was vice president, almost $9 million going to NIH,” Biden said, referring to the National Institutes of Health. “You’ll excuse the point of personal privilege — I’ll never forget you standing, Mitch, and saying, naming it after my deceased son. It meant a lot.”

When Beau Biden died, one national Republican officeholder went to the funeral: Mitch McConnell.

Does this make him any less of a blight on our national discourse? Did the books on Andropov’s shelf make him any less of one?

Debatable.

McConnell’s sins — and I’d need this entire edition of The Progressive Populist to elucidate them all — are vast and deep and unconscionable, so at the end of the day, at the end of the election cycle, at the end of the Republic, if it comes to that, it really doesn’t matter whether he hugged Joe Biden at a memorial service or gave lip service to Trump’s culpability for an insurrection any more than it matters that Yuri Andropov could be a witty raconteur at the end of a long day of crushing Hungarian and Czech resistance.

But their quirks — the good ones, anyway — are worth mentioning.

Unless they’re not. Occasional flashes of humanity can be overrated and confusing. 

If only those written tests actually existed.

Barry Friedman is an essayist, political columnist, petroleum geology reporter and comedian living in Tulsa, Okla. In addition to “Funny You Should Mention It,” “Road Comic,” “Four Days and a Year Later” and “The Joke Was On Me,” his first novel, “Jacob Fishman’s Marriages,” a book about the worst love story ever, was published by Balkan Press in February. See barrysfriedman.com.


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The Promise

By WAYNE O'LEARY

The awkwardness of identity politics Democratic-style has come back to smack President Biden and his administration full in the face and create a mini political crisis where none previously existed. At issue is the Supreme Court opening created by the pending retirement of Justice Stephen G. Breyer, a leftover Clinton appointee, whose seat Biden will now seek to fill.

Putting aside for the moment whatever roadblocks Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell will throw in front of any Democratic nominee to slow down and frustrate the process, the fact remains that the president is faced with a problem of his own making dating back to the 2020 campaign. Biden is in a box. He mortgaged his first Court selection to South Carolina’s Democratic political boss Rep. James E. Clyburn, whose loyal Black supporters pushed Biden across the line in that state’s pivotal presidential primary; now Clyburn is calling in payment for his crucial endorsement, the price Biden readily agreed to at the time — a Black, female appointment to the high court at the earliest opportunity.

Clyburn not only wants a Black woman justice, he’s already submitted his preference, further tying the president’s hands. The anointed choice is J. Michelle Childs, a South Carolina US district court judge and longtime Clyburn ally, who also has the backing of state Republicans (including GOP Senators Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott); it appears they would consider her a safely “bipartisan” (read: sufficiently conservative) selection.

If picked, Childs promises to continue what has become a party tradition in recent decades: the naming by Democratic presidents of relatively conservative justices to the high court, a pattern begun under Bill Clinton and carried on by Barack Obama. Childs’ sponsor, Rep. Clyburn, is a centrist Democrat — some would say a conservative — who would never counsel Joe Biden to pick an out-and-out liberal.  His previous foray into national party politics was joining the successful effort last year to deny Bernie Sanders ally Nina Turner a congressional nomination for Ohio’s heavily black Cuyahoga County in favor of an establishment alternative.

At this writing, Biden’s Court selection remains to be announced, but if recent experience is any guide, it won’t be anyone especially progressive. Another leading contender, California State Supreme Court Judge Leondra Kruger, is described by The Economist as somebody who has often sided with conservative jurists. Other possible choices have similarly “moderate” records.

Over the last 50 years, Democratic presidents have submitted five Supreme Court nominations (Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonya Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and the non-confirmed Merrick Garland), none of them left-leaning in historical terms and each appearing “liberal” only in comparison to their Republican-appointed contemporaries. None of these Democratic jurists, furthermore, rank anywhere close ideologically to the most aggressively progressive Court members of the past century.

In 2016 and again in 2018, academic Court analysts, led by Prof. Lee Epstein of Washington University in St. Louis, positioned the modern-day justices along a left-right spectrum and concluded, based on their decisions, that only two, Sotomayor and Ginsburg, truly qualified as liberals, while Kagan and Breyer fell into the Court’s ideological middle, earning the label “median” justices. Notwithstanding Ginsburg’s media-driven reputation as a liberal feminist icon, Sotomayor was the furthest left of the group, with Breyer furthest right, followed by Kagan.

The ill-fated Garland, had he joined the Court, would have fallen close to the more conservative Breyer. Breyer, it should be noted, exhibited an annoying tendency to align himself with GOP members on questions involving corporations and business interests, a fact that should mute his departure celebrations; he voted the conservative position on cases over 40% of the time during his career.

The foregoing is another way of saying that Biden’s predecessors, Clinton and Obama, were not primarily motivated to seek out crusading liberal jurists. For both of them, the top priority appears to have been satisfying the needs of gender-based identity politics. Things are no different for Joe Biden in 2022 except that, in his case, race has been added to the mix.

Ideally, the president should be looking for the best possible legal mind available and, since he represents a liberal party presently submerged by right-wing jurisprudence, the most progressive confirmable nominee obtainable to help redress the balance. Sadly, however, legal philosophy doesn’t appear to be remotely a part of the White House calculations.

Instead, it’s all about racial politics. Whichever Black woman is selected will serve to pay off James Clyburn and his nonwhite constituency. To be fair, Republican presidents follow the same course.  Recent Court addition Amy Coney Barrett was obviously picked in part to pay off the GOP’s conservative White evangelicals. Supreme Court nominations have regrettably become an occasion for stroking the respective party bases and massaging their group identities.

An ABC News/Ipsos opinion poll published on Jan. 30 suggested the public is far ahead of the politicians when it comes to the makeup of the Supreme Court. Three quarters (76%) of those interviewed agreed the president should consider “all possible nominees” for the high-court opening and not just Black women; those favoring a restricted selection process were a distinct minority.

It should be stressed that competence and credentials are not the issue here. As far as interested observers can tell, the Black women candidates mentioned are qualified for the bench. But the fact is so are representatives of other deserving groups lacking insider status, who’ve been neglected. Black women comprise approximately 6% of the US population; that leaves 94% of Americans, including many whose race or ethnicity has never been represented on the Court, among them Native Americans, Asian Americans, Mexican Americans, Polish Americans, Greek Americans, Franco Americans — to name just a few.

Or take religion. At present, the Court is made up entirely of Catholics and Jews. But what about Protestants, whose last representative, David Souter, retired in 2009? And what about unblievers? Atheists and agnostics comprise 20% of the population. Don’t they deserve a sitting justice? Surely, Muslims should be represented as well. It’s obvious that if we wish, identity politics as regards the law can be carried to absurd extremes.

It’s not a question of what racial-ethnic-religious affiliation a prospective justice has, but what their thought process is, how they view the law, and how they would fairly apply the Constitution to modern life. Someone tell Joe Biden.

Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books. 


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Have Gun Will Rattle

By SAM URETSKY

Harper’s Magazine, August 2010, had a cover article “Happiness Is a Worn Gun:  My concealed weapon and me” by Dan Baum. Mr Baum wrote, “in every book about concealed carry that I read, much was made of “conditions of readiness,” which are color-coded from white to red. Condition White is total oblivion to one’s surroundings—sleeping, being drunk or stoned, losing oneself in conversation while walking on city streets, texting while listening to an iPod. Condition Yellow is being aware of, and taking an interest in, one’s surroundings—essentially, the mental state we are encouraged to achieve when we are driving: keeping our eyes moving, checking the mirrors, being careful not to let the radio drown out the sounds around us. …” Essentially, people carrying guns are on the alert for reasons to use the gun.

An interesting description of the personality of a firearms advocate of the past appears in a book by Bat Masterson, who, in 1902, moved to New York and became a sports writer for the Morning Telegraph. Like any freelance writer he would write anything that promised a paycheck, including the 1907 “Famous Gunfighters of the Western Frontier.”) “… Doc Holliday was a weakling who could not have whipped a healthy 15-year-old boy ... and knowledge of this fact was perhaps why he was so ready to resort to a weapon of some kind whenever he got himself into difficulty. ...”

Currently, 28 states have some version of a “stand your ground” law, which would permit the use of deadly force in self defense. The best known is probably Florida’s, which states, “a person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked in any other place where he or she has a right to be has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force, if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.” 

Other states may limit the right to use deadly force to specific locations, such as home, business, or automobile. As for “reasonably believes” – there is something of a presumption of reasonableness, which would be impossible to disprove if the only person who might testify against it is dead.

According to the web site , “Beginning Sept. 1, 2021, HB1927 made it legal in Texas for most people 21 or over to carry a handgun in a holster without a permit both openly and/or concealed. This law modified the previous open carry law from 2016 by eliminating the requirement to have a license to carry. This means that most people 21 or over may carry a handgun without a license to carry.” There are still a few locations where carrying a weapon is not permitted, but not that many.

Basically, if you’re a Texan, you can buy a gun, strap it on your hip, and go wandering the streets feeling either safe or at least patriotic. Gov. Greg Abbott said that he was signing a bill to protect gun rights and freedom. Texas police, on the other hand, were disappointed, particularly since there was a 65% growth in the number of mass shootings in Texas in 2021.

The simple reality is that there are many people, in Texas and elsewhere, who are afraid of any sort of confrontation, even somebody trying to cut the line in a supermarket, or racing to a parking space. This is the type of argument that should be resolved by an exchange of insults, and usually one person will back down or walk away. But, if each person can see that the other is carrying a firearm, that may initiate an escalation to violence. The prevalence of paranoia has been estimated at between 2.3 and 4.4%, more commonly among men. According to the Merck Manual “(People with paranoid personality disorder) are hypervigilant for potential insults, slights, threats, and disloyalty and look for hidden meanings in remarks and actions. They closely scrutinize others for evidence to support their suspicions. For example, they may misinterpret an offer of help as implication that they are unable to do the task on their own. If they think that they have been insulted or injured in any way, they do not forgive the person who injured them. They tend to counterattack or to become angry in response to these perceived injuries. Because they distrust others, they feel a need to be autonomous and in control.”

And in Texas they’re increasingly likely to be armed and dangerous.

Sam Uretsky is a writer and pharmacist living in Louisville, Ky. Email sdu01@outlook.com.

Mercury: A Victory for this Administration

By JOAN RETSINAS

Mercury! To think that this Roman God, who evoked speed, who was a messenger, whose Greek counterpart Hermes inspired a line of fashion (the link between the god of transit and the god of fashion eludes me), who gave his name both to a planet and an element could prove toxic. 

Mercury, a liquid metal, which occurs naturally in the planet’s core, is eminently useful. It is malleable, it conducts heat and electricity; and we use it in fluorescent lamps, thermometers, float valves, et al. All of us have non-toxic levels in our bodies.

But exposure to too much mercury can leave people with severe neurological damage, damaged vision, birth defects, heart disease, cancer. 

Typically, coal and oil-fired power plants (sewage, incinerators, factories) release mercury (with lead and other toxins) into the air. We end up with not only contaminated air, but contaminated water — and from there, contaminated fish. That grilled swordfish steak may make you sick. 

In 2011, the Environmental Protection Agency  issued guidelines for power plants (the Mercury and Air Toxic Standards Act). Subsequently the EPA sought to regulate exposure. Consumers are now cautioned about mercury in thermometers, in canned fish, in cleaning supplies. It ruled that those restrictions were “appropriate and necessary.” 

Enter Donald Trump. He discounted those egg-head arguments about the dangers. He accepted all those actuarial arguments about the costs of regulations. And his Administration ruled: enough! His predecessor, President Obama, was stifling American capitalism, yoking it to arcane science that nobody took seriously anyway. So he rescinded those rules, arguing that the regulators miscalculated the costs versus the benefits. 

Enter Joe Biden. He trusted scientists on the danger of exposure to mercury; he accepted the wisdom of regulation; and in January 2022 he restored those environmental protections.

The question is not the potential danger of mercury: on that, even non-scientists can agree. The data stand. The calibration of harm, though, is tricky. Mercury exists in our atmosphere, in our bodies. How much additional mercury can we allow into our air, our water? If we lower the limits of “acceptable,” how many people will suffer? 

As for the costs of environmental safeguards, of course those will raise the costs of production. Again, though, the calibration of costs is flexible. Will different scenarios yield different estimates? If we tighten the regulations, how much higher the costs of production, and what will those higher costs mean for manufacturers, investors, workers, consumers? Production is not static, but changes as technology, and productivity change. If the country segues into solar power, the need for so many coat and oil-fired power plants will drop. 

The ultimate question: who decides, weighing the harm of too much mercury, versus the harm of higher costs of production? In a laissez faire world of capitalists run amok, those who produce the power would decide on the means of production; and they would focus on actuarial, not morbidity statistics. 

We have only the government, in the guise of an under-funded Environmental Protection Agency, to argue for “public health” in the ultimate decision. The Biden Administration’s decision to restore the Trump-rescinded rules on power plants is a below-the-fold story in the back of the newspaper. It deserves praise. As you eat grilled swordfish, thank the scientists at the EPA and the politicians courageous enough to back them. 

Joan Retsinas is a sociologist who writes about health care in Providence, R.I. Email retsinas@verizon.net.

The Republican Party is No Longer the Party of Abraham Lincoln

By JOEL D. JOSEPH

You will often hear the Republican Party boast that it is the party of Abraham Lincoln. That may have been true 100 years ago, or even 50 years ago, but President Lincoln would now be turning over in his grave at what the Republican Party has become. After the 2020 election and its massive voter turnout, the Republican Party’s goal has been to restrict voting, reduce the number of polling places, minimize vote by mail and remove voter ballot drop boxes.

The Republican Party formerly had a proud history of protecting civil rights. Under Republican congressional leadership, the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution—which banned slavery in the United States—passed the Senate in 1864 and the House in 1865; it was ratified in December 1865.

The next year, the 14th Amendment was added to the Constitution, mandating equal protection of the laws, granted citizenship to all people born in the United States and provided other rights to citizens, was passed with 93% Republican support.

The 15th Amendment that gave black men the right to vote, was passed with 100% Republican support and became part of the Constitution in 1870.

Ninety-five years later, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was jointly sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-Montana) and Senate Minority leader Everett Dirksen (R-Illinois). They worked together with Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach to draft the bill’s language. 

President Lyndon Johnson worried that Southern Democrats would filibuster the legislation, as they opposed other civil rights legislation. Because of the opposition of Southern Democrats, Johnson enlisted Minority Leader Dirksen to help gain Republican support. Dirksen did his job and garnered enough Republican support to outweigh Southern Democratic opposition. Thirty Senate Republicans voted for the Voting Rights Act and only two voted against it, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and John Tower of Texas.

Now we cannot find a single Republican who will vote for either the John Lewis Voting Rights Act or the Freedom to Vote Act. Not even Mitt Romney, nor Lisa Murkowski, nor Susan Collins will vote for either bill.

The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act is proposed legislation that would restore and strengthen parts of the Voting Rights Act of 1965; Certain portions of this law were struck down by the Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder. In that case the Supreme Court ruled that it was no longer necessary for Southern states to submit changes in voting laws to the US Attorney General for review. The states of Georgia and Texas are among states that have recently passed laws that make voting more difficult, demonstrating that the Supreme Court was wrong. Southern states still have a tendency to make it difficult for Black Americans to vote, as demonstrated by Georgia and Texas.

The Freedom to Vote Act addresses voter registration and voting access, election integrity and security, redistricting, and campaign finance. The bill expands voter registration (automatic and same-day registration) and voting access (vote-by-mail and early voting). It also limits removing voters from voter rolls and establishes Election Day as a federal holiday.

Republicans are now the anti-civil rights party who want to take away the right to vote by mail, the right to vote early, the right to have election day a federal holiday. A Georgia law makes it a criminal act to provide food or drink to voters waiting in line to vote. In 2018, some voters in Georgia had to wait eight hours in order to exercise their right to vote. Depriving citizens of the right to give those waiting in line to vote a glass of water, or a sandwich, shows how cruel Republican legislators have become. They are not in the party of Abraham Lincoln, nor even in the party of Everett Dirksen.

Joel D. Joseph is a civil rights lawyer and chairman of the Made in the USA Foundation, promoting American-made products. He is the author of “Black Mondays: Worst Decisions of the Supreme Court,” with a foreword by Justice Thurgood Marshall. Email joeldjoseph @gmail.com.


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Eliminating Offensive Mascots, the Tomahawk Chop and Denigrating ‘War Cries’

By Dr CINTLI

Recently, the world witnessed a spectacle of blatant racism that has been so embedded and normalized in US culture that very few people even took notice. Not talking about one of the recent trials stemming from issues of police or vigilante  violence/killings, but rather racist behavior against Indigenous peoples this past World Series and via the KC Chiefs [fans] in their recent unsuccessful Super Bowl run.

This behavior can be eliminated, though sports franchises and governing bodies refuse to do so. Contrarily, the Mexican Football Federation recently announced that any fan caught doing hate/homophobic chants could result in a five-year ban from national games.

That this needs to be explained boggles the mind. But even the killings alluded to above, seemingly also need to be explained. One part of the country is OK with violence, especially when it is inflicted upon peoples they see as less than human. Translation: Black and Brown hordes. Indigenous peoples are not even supposed to exist anymore, whereas the Black and Brown masses don’t even belong in this country as they are but “in the way.” And Asian peoples are the primary cause of all this nation’s problems, at least that’s what the former president continues to say, and it is not coincidental that hate crimes against them continue to skyrocket. For example, recently, Michelle Go, an Asian woman was thrown in front of a train in New York.

At the core of all of this is dehumanization.

That’s where the tomahawk chop and the team names and denigrating mascots come in — along with the accompanying “war chant. For the World Series, it was the Atlanta Braves. Anyone who follows sports knows that the Cleveland Indians are now the Guardians (Chief Wahoo is no more) and the Washington football team is now the Commanders. This was due to a generation’s worth of pressure by Indigenous rights activists. This has involved many hundreds of teams, including at the collegiate and professional levels. The idea that people would not know that the tomahawk chop was offensive, as shamefully performed by the former president and his wife, during the World Series, is not in the least credible.

While it is undisputed that dehumanization leads to violence, etc., the issue should simply be, why do these governing bodies continue to permit these dehumanizing practices to continue? Because in their minds, Indigenous peoples no longer exist? Arguably, the flip side of genocide is denigration and invisibilization.

Sports fans worldwide have the tradition of performing dehumanizing and often homophobic chants and of being extremely rowdy. In Mexico, there are two particular homophobic chants which are aimed at the opposition during fútbol matches. Fans do not see them as dehumanizing or homophobic; it’s just a way of putting down or distracting the opposing team, it is argued. One of the terms: “culeros,” is also aimed at corrupt politicians and bureaucrats at political rallies. A friend once told me, that because it refers to the anus, that it is homophobic. After that, I stopped using it. It wasn’t difficult to stop, regardless of what sports season we are in.

The other one is accompanied by the chant: “eeeey,” followed by the homophobic term that begins with a “p” and ends with an “o.” Those that use it say it actually means weak or cowardly, but the LGBTQ community begs to differ.

A few years ago, Mexico’s fútbol governing body started penalizing teams that used those chants, including games without fans. Which brings to mind, if it can be done in Mexico, why not in the United States when fans exhibit racist behavior? They should not even permit teams to be named after Indigenous peoples or have dehumanizing mascots. These teams often argue that they are honoring native peoples by using native names or mascots or that chop, though native peoples roundly reject these “honorings.” During the World Series, the National Congress of American Indians unequivocally denounced that chop and “war cry.”

Do teams and their governing bodies not know that the chop is a highly offensive act of racism — often alluding to murder and scalping? If the pressure ever gets intense, a commissions will be set up to “study” if there is a causal relationship between dehumanization and violence? Really?

When fans do the chop or “war cry”, they know precisely what they are doing. For them, it is a bold act of defiance. And in the case of the recently concluded World Series, it was unquestionably Trumpian. Think Colin Kaepernick.

How can US sports governing bodies put a stop to these practices? Simple. Follow the lead of the Mexican governing bodies. It would be a good place to start.

Despite being a Rams and Chiefs fan, the Bengals should be thanked for ensuring that the chop was not part of the Super Bowl.

Roberto Dr. Cintli Rodriguez is an associate professor emeritus at the University of Arizona Mexican American Studies and is the author of several books, including “Our Sacred Maiz is Our Mother” (2014), “Yolqui: A Warrior Summoned from the Spirit World” (2019) and “Writing 50 years Amongst the Gringos,” published recently by Aztlan Libre Press. Email XColumn@gmail.com.

Eliminar las mascotas ofensivas, el hacha de guerra y los denigrantes “gritos de guerra”


Por Dr. CINTLI


Recientemente, el mundo fue testigo de un espectáculo de racismo descarado que se ha arraigado y normalizado tanto en la cultura estadounidense que muy pocas personas se dieron cuenta. No estamos hablando de uno de los juicios recientes derivados de problemas de violencia/asesinatos policiales o de vigilantes, sino más bien de comportamiento racista contra los pueblos Indígenas en la Serie Mundial pasada y a través de los KC Chiefs [fanáticos] en su reciente carrera fallida del SuperBowl.


Este comportamiento puede eliminarse, aunque las franquicias deportivas y los órganos rectores se niegan a hacerlo. Por el contrario, la Federación Mexicana de Fútbol anunció recientemente que cualquier aficionado sorprendido haciendo cánticos de odio/homofóbicos podría resultar en una suspensión de 5 años de los juegos nacionales.


Que esto necesite ser explicado aturde la mente. Pero incluso los asesinatos a los que se alude anteriormente, aparentemente también necesitan ser explicados. Una parte del país está bien con la violencia, especialmente cuando se inflige a personas que ven como menos que humanos. Traducción: Hordas Afroamericanos y de la Raza. Se supone que los pueblos Indígenas ya no existen, mientras que las masas  Afroamericanos y de la Raza, ni siquiera pertenecen a este país como son, simplemente "en el camino". Y los pueblos Asiáticos son la causa principal de todos los problemas de esta nación, al menos eso sigue diciendo el expresidente, y no es casualidad que los crímenes de odio contra ellos siguen aumentando. Por ejemplo, recientemente, Michelle Go, una mujer Asiática, fue arrojada frente a un tren en Nueva York.


En el centro de todo esto está la deshumanización.


Ahí es donde entran el hacha de guerra (“Tomahawk chop”), los nombres de los equipos y las mascotas denigrantes, junto con el "cántico de guerra" (”war cry”)  que lo acompaña. Para la Serie Mundial, fueron los Bravos de Atlanta. Cualquiera que siga los deportes sabe que los Indios de Cleveland ahora son los Guardianes (el mascota Chief Wahoo ya no existe) y el equipo de fútbol de Washington ahora son los Comandantes. Esto se debió a la presión de una generación por parte de los activistas de los derechos Indígenas. Esto ha involucrado a muchos cientos de equipos, incluso a nivel universitario y profesional. La idea de que la gente no supiera que el chop fue ofensivo, vergonzosamente realizado por el expresidente y su esposa, durante la Serie Mundial, no es lo más mínimo creíble.


Si bien es indiscutible que la deshumanización conduce a la violencia, etc., el problema debería ser simplemente, ¿por qué estos órganos de gobierno continúan permitiendo que continúen estas prácticas deshumanizantes? ¿Porque en su mente los pueblos Indígenas ya no existen? Podría decirse que la otra cara del genocidio es la denigración y la invisibilización.


Los fanáticos del deporte en todo el mundo tienen la tradición de realizar cánticos deshumanizantes y tambien, homofóbicos y de ser extremadamente ruidosos. En México, hay dos cánticos homofóbicos particulares que están dirigidos a la oposición durante los partidos de fútbol. Los fanáticos no los ven como deshumanizantes u homófobos; es solo una forma de menospreciar o distraer al equipo contrario, se argumenta. Uno de los términos: “culeros”, también está dirigido a políticos corruptos y burócratas en mítines políticos. Una amiga me dijo una vez, que porque se refiere al ano, que es homofóbico. Después de eso, dejé de usarlo. No fue difícil parar, independientemente de la temporada deportiva en la que estemos.


El otro va acompañado del cántico: “eeeey”, seguido del término homofóbico que comienza con “p” y termina con “o”. Aquellos que lo usan dicen que en realidad significa débil o cobarde, pero la comunidad lgbtq discrepa.


Hace unos años, el organismo rector del fútbol de México comenzó a penalizar a los equipos que usaban esos cánticos, incluidos los juegos sin fanáticos. Lo que trae a la mente, si se puede hacer en México, ¿por qué no en los Estados Unidos cuando los fanáticos exhiben un comportamiento racista? Ni siquiera deberían permitir que los equipos lleven nombres de pueblos Indígenas o que tengan mascotas deshumanizantes. Estos equipos argumentan que están honrando a los pueblos nativos mediante el uso de nombres nativos o mascotas o el “chop”, aunque los pueblos nativos rechazan rotundamente estos "honores". Durante la Serie Mundial, el Congreso Nacional de Indios Americanos denunció de manera inequívoca ese golpe y “grito de guerra”.


¿Los equipos y sus órganos gobernantes no saben que el “chop” es un acto de racismo altamente ofensivo, que alude al asesinato y al cuero cabelludo? Si alguna vez la presión se vuelve intensa, ¿se creará una comisión para “estudiar” si existe una relación causal entre la deshumanización y la violencia? ¿En serio?


Cuando los fanáticos hacen el chop o el “grito de guerra”, saben exactamente lo que están haciendo. Para ellos, es un atrevido acto de desafío. Y en el caso de la recién concluida Serie Mundial, fue indiscutiblemente trumpiana. Piensa en Colin Kaepernick.


¿Cómo pueden los órganos rectores del deporte de EE. UU. poner fin a estas prácticas? Simple. Seguir el ejemplo de los órganos de gobierno de Fútbol Mexicano. Sería un buen lugar para comenzar.


A pesar de ser fanático de los Rams y los Chiefs, se debe agradecer a los Bengals por asegurarse de que el “chop” no fuera parte del SuperBowl.


Roberto Dr. Cintli Rodríguez es profesor asociado emérito en la Universidad de Arizona y es autor de varios libros, incluido "Yolqui: un guerrero convocado desde el mundo espiritual". También dirige el Raza Killings Database Project: Xcolumn@gmail.com


What Happened, Ms. Yellen

 How the Treasury has become the graveyard of progressive financial regulation

BY ROBERT KUTTNER 


In 2013, progressives cheered when key senators blocked President Obama’s likely appointment of Larry Summers to chair the Fed, in favor of Janet Yellen. She was not just the first woman to chair the central bank, but also the first labor economist and the only liberal Fed chair since Marriner Eccles in the Roosevelt era.

Yellen, unlike most Fed chairs, honored the Fed’s “dual mandate” to pursue full employment as well as price stability. When Joe Biden turned to Yellen as his Treasury secretary, she seemed the ideal candidate.

That was then. It’s been a long way down. Janet Yellen has turned out to be the big disappointment of the Biden administration.

During her years at the Fed, Yellen increasingly took on the outlook of the institution—willing to support the economy with large bond purchases, but overly friendly to the financial industry. Between 2018, when she left the Fed, and 2020, Yellen took over $7 million in speaking fees from financial companies such as Barclays, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Citadel.

When she moved to the Treasury, Yellen not only brought with her a Fed outlook. She also brought over several career Fed officials. Critics inside and outside the administration refer to Yellen’s “Fedification” of the Treasury.

The most powerful and conservative of these is Nellie Liang, whose title is Under Secretary for Domestic Finance. But that understates Liang’s role. On financial regulatory issues, Liang is de facto secretary. Never has the adage been truer that personnel is policy.

The Fed is an independent agency. The Treasury secretary is part of the president’s Cabinet. But Yellen continues to view herself as an independent player, much as she did at the Fed, and resists anything that seems partisan or political. This sensibility, of course, gives her a profound status-quo bias, since all of the regulatory decisions or non-decisions made by Treasury are nothing if not political. The mentality is reinforced by Liang and the other top policymakers Yellen has brought with her from the Fed.


IN 2010, CONGRESS PASSED the Dodd-Frank Act to prevent a recurrence of the abuses that led to the 2008 financial collapse. Arguably, the most important single concept in Dodd-Frank is the idea that both banks and non-banks that are “too big to fail” (and thus would be bailed out in a crisis) need to be more carefully monitored and regulated. In the great bailout of 2008–2009, the Treasury and Fed spent or lent trillions to rescue lightly regulated investment banks and insurance companies such as AIG, whose impending collapse risked taking down the system.

It was the Obama Treasury, under Secretary Tim Geithner and Assistant Secretary Michael Barr, that drafted most of what became Dodd-Frank. Not surprisingly, the new law concentrated authority in the Treasury.

Dodd-Frank’s key mechanism for increased monitoring and discipline is the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), which is chaired by the Treasury secretary and includes heads of nine other key financial regulatory agencies. The idea is to coordinate financial regulation across the government and prevent what’s called “regulatory arbitrage”—bankers finding ways to play off one regulator against another and to slip between the cracks.

Among FSOC’s key responsibilities is to identify “systemically important financial institutions” (SIFIs) that would pose serious risks if they collapsed. A non-bank designated as a SIFI is subjected to tougher regulatory requirements, such as higher capital requirements, periodic stress tests, and so-called “living wills” that provide plans to wind down operations in cases of losses without triggering a financial crisis. A SIFI displaying signs of financial stress can be required to suspend dividend payments, forgo share repurchases, or raise additional capital. Needless to say, financial institutions resist this designation.

In December 2019, Trump’s Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin, formerly of Goldman Sachs, issued new Treasury guidelines supposedly changing the SIFI criteria from identifying institutions to identifying “activities.” This was a transparent ploy to prevent any new SIFI designations. Mnuchin had already removed three non-bank SIFIs that had been designated by the Obama Treasury—AIG, MetLife, and Prudential—and raised the SIFI threshold for banks from $50 billion to $250 billion. As a result, today there are no non-bank SIFIs.

Yellen has the power to reverse Mnuchin’s guidelines, which do not require a formal rulemaking. But despite pleas from dozens of consumer groups and other regulators, she has not done so. This inaction also reflects the priorities of Nellie Liang, whose division has responsibility for FSOC.

Yellen continues to view herself as an independent player, much as she did at the Fed, and resists anything that seems partisan or political.

On January 24, 30 groups sent Yellen a formal letter requesting Yellen to act. The groups included Americans for Financial Reform, Better Markets, Center for American Progress, Consumer Federation of America, Open Markets Institute, Public Citizen, and the Revolving Door Project.

The letter pointed out that in 2019, Yellen as a private citizen had joined former Fed chair Ben Bernanke and former Treasury secretaries Jack Lew and Tim Geithner, warning Mnuchin that his guidelines “make it impossible to prevent the build-up of risk in financial institutions whose failure would threaten the stability of the system as a whole.”

The public-interest groups received no response to their letter. I asked Yellen’s office for a comment, and did not get a reply.

Another key part of the Dodd-Frank Act intended to prevent systemic risks before they become critical was the creation of a new Office of Financial Research, also lodged at the Treasury. The idea was that Treasury researchers could take a deep look at new financial techniques such as cryptocurrencies, non-bank fintech players, and other hybrids that blur banks and non-banks and create risks requiring remedies. OFR was intended to be the research arm of FSOC. This was also neutered by the Trump Treasury, and not revived by Yellen or Liang.

Trump’s Treasury cut OFR staffing by 40 percent, from 214 authorized positions to 128. Its research output dropped from 27 reports in Obama’s last year to just seven in 2021. Even worse, the Trump appointee to head the office is still in place. He is Dino Falaschetti, a far-right economist who was head of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

One of the best things about Biden is the quality and vigor of his regulatory appointees. But because of Yellen’s institutional and ideological conservatism when it comes to regulating finance, the administration is badly divided between the more assertive regulators—Gary Gensler at the SEC, Rohit Chopra at CFPB, Lina Khan at the FTC, Martin Gruenberg at the FDIC—and Yellen’s Treasury and her more conservative allies, such as yet another career Fed official, Michael Hsu, whom Yellen picked to lead the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

Not long into Hsu’s tenure, last December, there was a public confrontation between Hsu and the two liberals on the board of the FDIC, on which Hsu sits, over whether Hsu would side with the FDIC’s holdover Trump-appointed chair or the liberals on a proposal to seek tighter regulation of bank mergers. Hsu initially supported the idea, then backpedaled when the Republican chair, Jelena McWilliams, opposed it. But after McWilliams found that the law was not on her side, she abruptly resigned, leaving Gruenberg, a progressive, as acting and presumably long-term FDIC chair. But Hsu remains an uncertain ally of robust regulation.

Yellen has also rankled the more progressive senior staff at the White House. In most cases, the naming of top subcabinet officials is a matter of negotiation between the Cabinet official and the White House staff. According to my reporting, Yellen has had a freer hand than most.

Though Yellen’s regulatory agenda is far from that of most Biden appointees, some of Biden’s closest-in longtime staffers, such as Mike Donilon and Steve Ricchetti, are said to value her as a reassuring figure for financial markets in a time of crisis. This gives Yellen leverage for her premise that she functions as a free spirit. Nor is there anyone on the White House senior staff for whom financial regulation is a high priority.

It was exactly this reassurance mentality that led Obama’s appointees in 2009 to prop up rather than break up the biggest banks that were the biggest offenders in causing the 2008 collapse. Fed Chair Ben Bernanke, supposedly a reassuring figure to Wall Street like Alan Greenspan before him, was useless in holding back the tides of collapse that were the result of bad policies.


YELLEN AND LIANG ARE ALSO at odds with the more assertive Biden financial regulators on how to deal with cryptocurrencies. Nellie Liang recently testified before the House Financial Services Committee on stablecoins and crypto generally. Her testimony, echoing the November 1 report of the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets, conceals deep divisions within the Biden administration.

The White House report, drafted by former Fed people at the Treasury, takes the position that stablecoins need to be brought into the banking system and regulated by the Fed; and that Congress needs to legislate in the whole area of crypto. But SEC Chair Gary Gensler, joined by CFTC Chair Rostin Behnam, argued persuasively that the regulatory agencies already have plenty of authority to regulate in this area, and that any legislation that could get 60 votes in the Senate would be far worse than the present regulatory framework.

The drafting of the report was the object of great contention. After some offending language was deleted and other language added, Gensler as a member of the working group reluctantly signed it. But he immediately issued a release of his own as SEC chair, declaring that stablecoins “raise emerging financial stability concerns” and that regulators already had plenty of authority and reason to act.

Though cryptocurrencies are blindingly complicated, both in their technology and in their potential for financial risk, they basically fall into a few broad categories, most of which can and should be regulated under current laws either as securities or commodities. What’s new is the technology, not the underlying concepts.

Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency in terms of market value, is the object of speculative investments as well as a vehicle for payments. It is analogous to gold, and thus can be regulated as a commodity. Other kinds of cryptocurrencies, like Uniswap tokens, are basically investment vehicles and can be regulated as securities. And entities that operate in this space, like FTX, can be regulated under the SEC’s and CFTC’s authorities to regulate exchanges. Non-fungible tokens—pictures of objects—are more analogous to art and can be regulated by the FTC to prevent fraud.

Because of Yellen’s institutional and ideological conservatism when it comes to regulating finance, the administration is badly divided.

The point is that any likely legislation, or delegation of authority to the Fed, would likely weaken existing regulatory powers to guard against criminal activity, fraud, and speculative bubbles. One very knowledgeable observer of the process says, “The recommendation that Congress needs to act is a feint to pretend that the SEC does not already have the authority to regulate.”

At Liang’s testimony last week, she called for stablecoins to be made part of the banking system and regulated mainly by the Fed. This idea alarms other regulators, who are not thrilled with stablecoins as one more new form of money brought under the federal financial safety net. Liang is one of those who stress the innovative potential of crypto more than the systemic risk.

Yellen was invited to come, but opted to send Liang. The other financial regulators who signed the report were also invited. According to my sources, they declined to participate because they neither wanted to lend credence to the report and Liang, nor to get into an open squabble with the Treasury. Gensler, who has taught courses on crypto at MIT, is far more expert on the subject than Liang. His course, which MIT just put free online, is better than most HBO offerings.

On last Sunday’s televised Super Bowl, among the several crypto companies advertising was FTX, a cryptocurrency derivatives exchange incorporated in Antigua. The FTX ads featured Larry David, in his role as curmudgeon, disparaging history’s great new inventions, from the wheel to the light bulb. The tagline: “Don’t miss out on the next big thing.” One issue that divides the Biden administration is whether crypto is more in the category of the wheel or credit default swaps.


TREASURY DOES HAVE ITS progressive appointees, but they are either marginalized or work on issues peripheral to financial regulation. Former Sherrod Brown staffer Graham Steele is assistant secretary for financial institutions. That sounds like a power position, but Steele reports to Liang, and has been told to stay away from FSOC issues. A source tells the Prospect that Steele’s staff was imposed on him, with the majority coming from the Fed. Julie Siegel, a former Warren economic policy adviser, has also been sidelined.

The deputy secretary, in principle the second-in-command, is Wally Adeyemo, also an ally of Elizabeth Warren. In practice, he has far less influence than Liang.

Something similar was done to Sarah Bloom Raskin, when she served as deputy to Obama Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, who gave her little authority over policy. Raskin, who has been nominated to serve as vice chair of the Fed for supervision, will be an important counterweight to Yellen, assuming that ailing Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) makes an early recovery from his stroke and can provide the 50th vote for Raskin’s confirmation.

On tax issues, to her credit, Yellen has appointed a progressive team led by Lily Batchelder. Better tax enforcement is important, but doesn’t make up for feeble financial regulation.

Just last week, Politico reported that a decision had been made to fill the other key undersecretary post, in charge of international issues. This power position, once held by Larry Summers, is reportedly set to go to Jay Shambaugh, until recently head of Robert Rubin’s Hamilton Project at Brookings. He is a traditional free-trader, quite at odds with Biden initiatives on industrial policy, reshoring, and China. Like Yellen, Shambaugh has described tariffs as a tax on consumers.

Yellen watchers expect her to be gone within a year, especially if the Democrats lose one or both houses of Congress. She has denied this. But the sense that the boss is a lame duck is also not great for morale.

One close observer, who takes a charitable view of Yellen, explains that financial regulation is just not something that interests her much. Her thing is monetary policy. When she was at the Fed, Yellen relied on the strong and progressive Fed governor Daniel Tarullo for regulation and supervision. But at Treasury, she relies on the much more pro–Wall Street Nellie Liang.

The Yellen saga is an object lesson in how even when progressives govern, they are subject to undertows. “We are a coalition government,” says one administration official, ruefully. Given Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, we know that’s true of Congress. It turns out that despite all of Biden’s superb regulatory appointees, the executive branch is also an uneasy coalition.


Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect (prospect.org) and professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School. Like him on facebook.com/RobertKuttner and/or follow him at twitter.com/rkuttner.See the original linked version at <https://prospect.org/economy/what-happened-ms-yellen/>



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