Why Power Is Getting Woke

The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations is one of the nation’s top diplomats, second only to the Secretary of State. And one of the most basic, fundamental duties of a diplomat, especially at such a high level, is to manage the image and reputation of a country throughout the rest of the world. And that’s no small or superficial task — a country’s reputation and public image is a core part of its foreign policy. Often referred to in more academic circles as “soft power,” the positive attitudes and feelings that both the leaders and average citizens of foreign nations have toward a country’s culture, people, and political system are one of its major tools for influencing global affairs and managing international conflicts. And it’s generally believed that the more soft power a country has, the less it has to rely on more coercive “hard power” measures like military action, economic sanctions, etc.

So with that in mind, consider the recent controversy-generating comments made by President Biden’s newly appointed UN ambassador, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, in a remote address:

I have seen for myself how the original sin of slavery weaved white supremacy into our founding documents and principles. But I also shared these stories to offer up an insight, a simple truth I’ve learned over the years: Racism is not the problem of the person who experiences it. Those of us who experience racism cannot, and should not, internalize it, despite the impact it can have on our everyday lives. Racism is the problem of the racist. And it is the problem of the society that produces the racist. And in today’s world, that's every society. In America that takes many forms. It's the white supremacy that led to the senseless killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and so many other black Americans. It's the spike in hate crimes over the past three years against Latino Americans, Sikh, Muslim Americans, Jewish Americans, and immigrants. And it's the bullying, discrimination, brutality, and violence that Asian Americans face every day, especially since the outbreak of COVID-19. That's why the Biden administration has made racial equity a top priority across the entire government. And I'm making it a real focus of my tenure at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations.

The reason I highlight these comments now is not to litigate them directly, however controversial they are. And they indeed remain controversial, on multiple levels, despite what feels like a thorough cultural revolution in every institutional power center in the country. But I think in this instance there is far more to be learned by setting aside that debate, resting your culture war trigger finger for a moment, and instead asking the question: What on earth could possess America’s UN ambassador to decide to broadcast the message that America is a deeply racist country down to its bones? Even if you were to accept some, or maybe even all, of what she’s saying as being true, what sort of powerful incentives could convince a top diplomat to engage in a highly controversial debate that not only has nothing to do with her job, but is in fact quite literally the opposite of her job description? How did we get here?

Wokeness isn’t radical, it’s repressive

One thing to know about Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield is that she isn’t exactly a radical activist storming the gates of power. She is power. Prior to becoming the UN ambassador, Thomas-Greenfield was a Senior Vice President at a “global business strategy” firm called Albright Stonebridge Group, an international lobbying and PR firm for multinational corporations and financial institutions, and perhaps the most powerful and influential of its kind. It was founded and is chaired by former Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. The main service it offers is to help the world’s wealthiest and most powerful corporate and non-governmental entities navigate political and regulatory hurdles in foreign countries (often very poor countries: Thomas-Greenfield headed their Africa practice).

But perhaps an even better example of this phenomenon is the very man who appointed Thomas-Greenfield: President Biden. In the nearly half century he spent in political office before assuming the presidency, Joe Biden wasn’t exactly known for being a social justice crusader. From his tough on crime focus, anti-busing stance, and drug war hawkishness to his open affection for colleagues who were former segregationists and his trademark habit of making politically incorrect gaffes, Biden was about as unwoke of a politician as they came. But that all now seems to have completely reversed: It feels as if not a day goes by where Biden isn’t heard decrying the country’s “systemic racism” while branding every new initiative as a step toward achieving the newly fashionable concept of “equity.”

And while he might be the most high profile (and perhaps most consequential) example, Biden’s overnight conversion characterizes a broader elite “awokening” that seems to have infected nearly an entire leadership class. What could explain all of it?

It’s extremely common to find critics of “wokeness” and critical race theory decrying it as a radical activist- and academic-driven plot to upend the basic foundations of American society. And while it certainly does like to present itself that way, and is even believed to be exactly that by its most true believers, it’s an analysis that fails to explain why every Fortune 500 company, establishment politician, media executive, and entertainer has become an evangelist for these ideas. After all, radicalism is about threatening and upending existing power structures. What we’re seeing now is quite the opposite. Far from seeing these ideas as a threat, the existing power structure is enthusiastically adopting them as something of a ruling class ideology. So unless you think all of these people are critical theory sleeper cells who are just now being awakened to carry out a plot decades in the making, the more likely explanation is that not only are these ideas compatible with power, but something about them must actually lend themselves to protecting and even enhancing that power. In other words, it’s an ideology that seems much more suited not to radicalism, but to the opposite: repression.

The privatization of politics

One of the most conspicuous things about woke politics is that it politicizes everything. It inserts politics into every space, interaction, and relationship. It problematizes, deconstructs, and dismantles. It calls out and it cancels. And above all, it personalizes politics. But in doing so, it redefines politics itself away from something that takes place in the public sphere — as a way of taking collective action to solve public problems and hold powerful people and institutions accountable — and instead into a matter of personal morality, behaviors, and actions. It privatizes, diffuses, and decentralizes politics. Something that we used to do collectively with a set of defined common purposes with clear objectives is increasingly becoming something we do in the office, with our friends and family members, or while sitting alone at home on the internet.

Woke politics makes politics less about what powerful people do, and more about what everyone does. Sometimes it’s even about what dead people did, in which case we might take down a statue if there is one, or just call for a “reckoning” (whatever that is).

But at a certain point, this stops looking like politics at all, and instead a sort of “anti-politics” — something that diverts energy and attention away from traditional political activity and toward something completely different. And when you see the most powerful people in society, from CEOs to elected officials — the people for whom politics is explicitly an accountability and power-limiting mechanism — championing and encouraging this trend, it has to make you wonder at least a little bit: Maybe the point of politicizing everything is to make you forget what actual politics is?

by Shant Mesrobian, Inquire | Read more:
Image: uncredited

[ed. Interesting perspective (as are the comments to this article). Something is clearly up, although I'm not sure what, exactly. The late Harvard law professor Derrick Bell coined the term “interest convergence” to note that the interests of Black people in achieving racial equality are accommodated only when they converge with the interests of white people. So what are those interests now? Simple voter demographics? Virtue signalling, tribal identification, marketing, pacification, distraction, accomodation, redirection? Personally, I don't think policing speech or behavior and shaming everyone into submission is a good strategy for winning minds, but as the author suggests, might be great for obfuscating the real levers of power (or pushing the pendulum in an opposite direction). See also (for a good laugh): Letter from former Jeopardy! contestants regarding offensive terminology and gesture.]

Rubén Blades

Rubén Blades, a Salsa Legend, Swings in a Different Direction: Jazz (NYT)

Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America

Get big fast was an early Amazon motto. The slogan sounds like a fratty refrain tossed around at the gym. Jeff Bezos had it printed on T-shirts. More than twenty-five years after leaving his position as a Wall Street hedge-fund executive to found Amazon, Bezos’s size anxiety is long gone. (At least as it pertains to his company; the CEO’s Washington, DC, house has eleven bedrooms and twenty-five bathrooms, a bedroom-to-bathroom ratio that raises both architectural and scatological questions.) Bezos is now worth $180 billion. Amazon, were it a country, would have a larger GDP than Australia.

Such numbers are nonsensically large—there’s no way to make them stick. But in 2017, Bezos demonstrated what they mean. That was the year the company conducted a nationwide sweepstakes to choose a location for its second headquarters, or HQ2, as it was called. Seattle was already a company town: Amazon had more than 40,000 employees there, and as much of the city’s office space as the next forty largest employers combined. It was time to take over a new city.

Local and state governments raced to undercut each other. It wasn’t only tax credits that in some locations amounted to over $1 billion; the subsidies offered to Amazon were a display of abject creativity. Bezos is a Trekkie, so Chicago had Star Trek star William Shatner narrate the city’s pitch video. Tucson, Arizona, sent a giant saguaro cactus to Amazon headquarters. Sly James, Kansas City’s mayor at the time, bought and reviewed one thousand Amazon products, giving every item five stars. But the locations Bezos selected—New York City and Northern Virginia—were always going to win. Together, the chosen bids gave the company over $3 billion in tax incentives and grants.

The spectacle was about more than financial benefits; the company sought to flex its power over elected officials. Amazon had engaged in these displays before, such as when it threatened to move jobs out of Seattle after the city council passed a law that would’ve taxed large employers for each employee earning over $150,000 to fund homelessness-outreach services. Indeed, New York had its winning status revoked after a coalition of working-class organizations, left-leaning politicians, and pissed-off residents made too much noise about the downsides of hosting HQ2. The point is to beg on one’s knees; ingratitude is disqualifying.

But the contest was also about Amazon’s life-blood: data. The company learned exactly what each location was willing to give up. It received a precise picture of the strengths, weaknesses, and points of resistance in each corner of the nation. How many NDAs would Alabama officials sign? What did Boston’s elected officials think the region’s future looks like? How many young people in Columbus were entering the workforce each year? How low would Orlando go? The HQ2 affair was a national demonstration of fealty to a private corporation by publicly elected officials. Sure, everyone already knew Amazon was powerful, but this was different: a corporate entity told politicians to jump, and they asked “How high?” How did this happen?

Alec MacGillis’s Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America goes a long way toward answering that question. MacGillis, a reporter for ProPublica, investigates the country left in Amazon’s wake, crisscrossing the United States from what he calls the winning cities to those regions on the losing side. His contention is that corporate concentration creates geographic bifurcation. Places like Boston, New York, Washington, DC, the Bay Area, and Seattle win the lottery, attracting an influx of well-heeled residents. Capital divests from other areas—midsize cities in the Midwest, much of the Rust Belt—leaving them hollowed out. Low-wage jobs and drug addictions replace union benefits. But the division is internal to the winning regions too. Poor residents within the lucky cities suffer. Desperation reigns, expectations are lowered, and elected officials become increasingly willing to give Amazon anything in exchange for the promise of jobs.

Using the tech giant as a focal point allows MacGillis to show that this state of affairs was a choice, not an inevitability. It’s not that “good jobs left”; the transformation of work was engineered. Fulfillment meticulously documents how that process plays out, with the fate of millions haggled over by a handful of people in tucked-away conference rooms.

When Amazon wanted to build two new warehouses in 2015, it reached out to JobsOhio, a private nonprofit created by then-governor John Kasich to oversee negotiations over tax incentives with companies. “Every month,” writes MacGillis, “a board called the Ohio Tax Credit Authority approved the incentives negotiated by Jobs-Ohio.” On July 27, 2015, it was Amazon’s turn to meet with the tax board. The company promised two thousand full-time jobs. In exchange, it wanted a fifteen-year tax credit worth $17 million in addition to a $1.5 million cash grant from the state liquor-monopoly profits controlled by JobsOhio. The result? “The board approved the credit 4-0.”

Surveying Amazon’s operations in the state, MacGillis writes that “the company had, in a sense, segmented its workforce into classes and spread them across the map: there were its engineering and software-developer towns, there were the data-center towns, and there were the warehouse towns.” Amazon chose the Columbus area as its location for Amazon Web Services US East, and picked three towns north of the city for its centers. Hilliard, Dublin, and New Albany were “the right sort of exurban communities to target: wealthy enough to support good schools for employees’ kids, but also sufficiently insecure in their civic infrastructure and identity to be easy marks.” The company secured its standard extractions: a fifteen-year exemption from property taxes—worth around $5 million for each data center—accelerated building permits, and waived fees. It required the community to sign NDAs before negotiations could even begin. Dublin threw in sixty-eight acres of farmland for free, and a guarantee that the company did not have to contract with union labor.

The warehouses, by contrast, are south and east of the city, areas poorer than those in the north. The sites in Obetz and Etna are near I-270 and “close enough to the struggling towns of southern and eastern Ohio to be in plausible reach of a long commute for those desperate enough to undertake it.” Amazon’s warehouses come with the standard suite of exemptions—even though ambulances and fire trucks are often called to the locations, which one investigation showed have twice the rate of serious injuries as other warehouses, the company does its best to avoid paying taxes for emergency services.

Tax avoidance is foundational to the company’s empire. MacGillis enumerates a long, damning list of the company’s schemes:

There was the initial decision to settle in Seattle to avoid assessing sales tax in big states such as California. There was the decision to hold off as long as possible on opening warehouses in many large states to avoid the sales taxes there. Amazon employees scattered around the country often carried misleading business cards, so that the company couldn’t be accused of operating in a given state and thus forced to pay taxes there. In 2010, the company went so far as to close its only warehouse in Texas and drop plans for additional ones when state officials pushed Amazon to pay nearly $270 million in back sales taxes there, forcing the state to waive the back taxes. By 2017, the company had even created a secret internal goal of securing $1 billion per year in local tax subsidies.

This is predictable behavior for a company run by a man whose focus has always been on getting as rich as possible. But the government’s support for this cause testifies to its class character. A capitalist state takes its cues from executives. When a region has mostly low-paying work and little in the way of a social-welfare net, it’ll beg employers for jobs with a higher wage (even if that wage is below the industry average, as is true of Amazon’s warehouses). There is no neutrality, only officials groveling at Bezos’s feet, deferring to his fake-business-card-carrying minions. Working-class immiseration is the direct result.

by Alex Press, Bookforum |  Read more:

Image: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Unauthorized Bread

The way Salima found out that Boulangism had gone bankrupt: her toaster wouldn’t accept her bread. She held the slice in front of it and waited for the screen to show her a thumbs-up emoji, but instead, it showed her the head-scratching face and made a soft brrt. She waved the bread again. Brrt.

“Come on.” Brrt.

She turned the toaster off and on. Then she unplugged it, counted to ten, and plugged it in. Then she menued through the screens until she found RESET TO FACTORY DEFAULT, waited three minutes, and punched her Wi-Fi password in again.

Brrt.

Long before she got to that point, she’d grown certain that it was a lost cause. But these were the steps that you took when the electronics stopped working, so you could call the 800 number and say, “I’ve turned it off and on, I’ve unplugged it, I’ve reset it to factory defaults and…”

There was a touchscreen option on the toaster to call support, but that wasn’t working, so she used the fridge to look up the number and call it. It rang seventeen times and disconnected. She heaved a sigh. Another one bites the dust.

The toaster wasn’t the first appliance to go (that honor went to the dishwasher, which stopped being able to validate third-party dishes the week before when Disher went under), but it was the last straw. She could wash dishes in the sink but how the hell was she supposed to make toast—over a candle?

Just to be sure, she asked the fridge for headlines about Boulangism, and there it was, their cloud had burst in the night. Socials crawling with people furious about their daily bread. She prodded a headline and learned that Boulangism had been a ghost ship for at least six months because that’s how long security researchers had been contacting the company to tell it that all its user data—passwords, log-ins, ordering and billing details—had been hanging out there on the public internet with no password or encryption. There were ransom notes in the database, records inserted by hackers demanding cryptocurrency payouts in exchange for keeping the dirty secret of Boulangism’s shitty data handling. No one had even seen them.

Boulangism’s share price had declined by 98 percent over the past year. There might not even be a Boulangism anymore. When Salima had pictured Boulangism, she’d imagined the French bakery that was on the toaster’s idle-screen, dusted with flour, woodblock tables with serried ranks of crusty loaves. She’d pictured a rickety staircase leading up from the bakery to a suite of cramped offices overlooking a cobbled road. She’d pictured gas lamps.

The article had a street-view shot of Boulangism’s headquarters, a four-story office block in Pune, near Mumbai, walled in with an unattended guard booth at the street entrance.

The Boulangism cloud had burst and that meant that there was no one answering Salima’s toaster when it asked if the bread she was about to toast had come from an authorized Boulangism baker, which it had. In the absence of a reply, the paranoid little gadget would assume that Salima was in that class of nefarious fraudsters who bought a discounted Boulangism toaster and then tried to renege on her end of the bargain by inserting unauthorized bread, which had consequences ranging from kitchen fires to suboptimal toast (Boulangism was able to adjust its toasting routine in realtime to adjust for relative kitchen humidity and the age of the bread, and of course it would refuse to toast bread that had become unsalvageably stale), to say nothing of the loss of profits for the company and its shareholders. Without those profits, there’d be no surplus capital to divert to R&D, creating the continuous improvement that meant that hardly a day went by without Salima and millions of other Boulangism stakeholders (never just “customers”) waking up with exciting new firmware for their beloved toasters.

And what of the Boulangism baker-partners? They’d done the right thing, signing up for a Boulangism license, subjecting their process to inspections and quality assurance that meant that their bread had exactly the right composition to toast perfectly in Boulangism’s precision-engineered appliances, with crumb and porosity in perfect balance to absorb butter and other spreads. These valued partners deserved to have their commitment to excellence honored, not cast aside by bargain-hunting cheaters who wanted to recklessly toast any old bread.

Salima knew these arguments, even before her stupid toaster played her the video explaining them, which it did after three unsuccessful bread-authorization attempts, playing without a pause or mute button as a combination of punishment and reeducation campaign.

She tried to search her fridge for “boulangism hacks” and “boulangism unlock codes” but appliances stuck together. KitchenAid’s network filters gobbled up her queries and spat back snarky “no results” screens even though Salima knew perfectly well that there was a whole underground economy devoted to unauthorized bread.

She had to leave for work in half an hour, and she hadn’t even showered yet, but goddamnit, first the dishwasher and now the toaster. She found her laptop, used when she’d gotten it, now barely functional. Its battery was long dead and she had to unplug her toothbrush to free up a charger cable, but after she had booted it and let it run its dozens of software updates, she was able to run the darknet browser she still had kicking around and do some judicious googling.

She was forty-five minutes late to work that day, but she had toast for breakfast. Goddamnit.

The dishwasher was next. Once Salima had found the right forum, it would have been crazy not to unlock the thing. After all, she had to use it and now it was effectively bricked. She wasn’t the only one who had the Disher/Boulangism double whammy, either. Some poor suckers also had the poor fortune to own one of the constellation of devices made by HP-NewsCorp—fridges, toothbrushes, even sex toys—all of which had gone down thanks to a failure of the company’s cloud provider, Tata. While this failure was unrelated to the Disher/Boulangism doubleheader, it was pretty unfortunate timing, everyone agreed.

The twin collapse of Disher and Boulangism did have a shared cause, Salima discovered. Both companies were publicly traded and both had seen more than 20 percent of their shares acquired by Summerstream Funds Management, the largest hedge fund on earth, with $184 billion under management. Summerstream was an “activist shareholder” and it was very big on stock buybacks. Once it had a seat on each company’s board—both occupied by Galt Baumgardner, a junior partner at the firm, but from a very good Kansas family—they both hired the same expert consultant from Deloitte to examine the company’s accounts and recommend a buyback program that would see the shareholders getting their due return from the firms, without gouging so deep into the companies’ operating capital as to endanger them.

It was all mathematically provable, of course. The companies could easily afford to divert billions from their balance sheets to the shareholders. Once this was determined, it was the board’s fiduciary duty to vote in favor of it (which was handy, since they all owned fat wads of company shares) and a few billion dollars later, the companies were lean, mean, and battle ready, and didn’t even miss all that money.

Oops.

Summerstream issued a press release (often quoted in the forums Salima was now obsessively haunting) blaming the whole thing on “volatility” and “alpha” and calling it “unfortunate” and “disappointing.” They were confident that both companies would restructure in bankruptcy, perhaps after a quick sale to a competitor, and everyone could start toasting bread and washing dishes within a month or two.

by Cory Doctorow, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Tor Books

Daisugi, the 600-Year-Old Japanese Technique of Growing Perfectly Straight Trees Out of Other Trees

We’ve all admired the elegance of Japan’s traditional styles of architecture. Their development required the kind of dedicated craftsmanship that takes generations to cultivate — but also, more practically speaking, no small amount of wood. By the 15th century, Japan already faced a shortage of seedlings, as well as land on which to properly cultivate the trees in the first place. Necessity being the mother of invention, this led to the creation of an ingenious solution: daisugi, the growing of additional trees, in effect, out of existing trees — creating, in other words, a kind of giant bonsai.

“Written as 台杉 and literally meaning platform cedar, the technique resulted in a tree that resembled an open palm with multiple trees growing out if it, perfectly vertical,” writes Spoon and Tamago’s Johnny Waldman. “Done right, the technique can prevent deforestation and result in perfectly round and straight timber known as taruki, which are used in the roofs of Japanese teahouses.”

by Colin Marshall, Open Culture |  Read more:

Image: Wrath of Gnon

[ed. Not unique to Japan. Also called coppicing or pollarding elswhere.]

Biden’s Workmanlike Love Song to the Middle Class

The setting was only mildly traditional for a first presidential address to a joint session of Congress: 200 listeners in the House chamber instead of the usual 1,600. The galleries were empty, and the First Lady was seated on the House floor. The ceremonial entrance of the president, which is often a long time-consuming procession with handshakes and hugs, was a brisk walk to the podium with a few fist bumps. There was certainly nothing traditional about the two women standing behind the president, as vice-president and Speaker of the House.

But the structure of Joe Biden’s speech did follow the formula of many past addresses to Congress, and by Biden standards, it was well-delivered. He stuck mostly to his prepared remarks, adding a few flourishes. Here were some highlights:

Some bragging

Biden immediately said that “America is on the move again … choosing hope over fear, truth over lies, and light over darkness.” That was as close as he came to a blunt reference to the presidency he ended on January 20.

He kept the bragging tightly limited to the administration accomplishments on ending the COVID-19 pandemic and addressing the associated micro- and macroeconomic needs. It was basically a retroactive sales pitch for the American Rescue Plan. There were a few hortatory lines about vaccinations, including the quote from the Arizona nurse saying: “Every shot is like giving a dose of hope.”

The big pitch for his jobs and families plans

Very quickly, Biden got into the agenda he expects Congress to tackle in the weeks and months ahead, and which will likely be moved by the Democrats-only budget reconciliation process (though an infrastructure deal with Republicans remains possible).

What was most unmistakeable about this entire presentation was its relentless framing as practical and patriotic relief for low-to-middle-class Americans. He posited “Buy American” as a central principle of his economic policy, regularly came back to economic challenges from China, and delivered what were certainly poll-verified descriptions of the beneficiaries of his proposals:

Independent experts estimate the American Jobs Plan will add millions of jobs and trillions of dollars in economic growth for years to come.

These are good-paying jobs that can’t be outsourced.

Nearly 90% of the infrastructure jobs created in the American Jobs Plan do not require a college degree.

75% do not require an associate’s degree.

The American Jobs Plan is a blue-collar blueprint to build America.

This was a well-crafted pitch aimed right at the heart of the GOP’s white working-class constituency. But there was plenty for Democrats, too: an emphasis on the economic plight of women, and plenty of numbers about the beneficiaries of his plans:

[T]he American Families Plan puts money directly into the pockets of millions of families.

In March we expanded a tax credit for every child in a family.

Up to a $3,000 Child Tax Credit for children over 6 — and $3,600 for children under 6.

With two parents, two kids, that’s up to $7,200 in your pocket to help take care of your family.

This will help more than 65 million children and help cut child poverty in half this year.

And it was probably the most explicitly pro-union speech a president has given in many decades: “Wall Street didn’t build this country. The middle class built this country. And unions build the middle class.” He gave the PRO Act, which Republicans and their business constituencies bitterly oppose, a nice shout-out, and added a reference to the IBEW in touting his plans for electrical charging stations on highways.

The economic populist thematics were just as notable in the “broccoli” part of the American Families Plan as in the “dessert.” The tax plan will be criticized by Republicans as “class warfare,” because it really and proudly is: “It’s time for corporate America and the wealthiest one percent of Americans to pay their fair share.”

There was a lot of partisanship implied, but almost never expressed. He said something positive about Republican infrastructure proposals, and nothing negative about the Republican obstruction that is the obsessive focus of his and his party’s legislative strategy. It was as though the 45th president had been just a bad nightmare.

The less popular things

In the tradition of such addresses, Biden eventually covered the waterfront of issues. But the placement of topics very clearly reflect public opinion, and likely Biden’s priorities:

Two issues on which he made a rare reference to the GOP were gun safety and immigration, where he quite accurately called out Republicans for obstructing legislation popular with voters from both parties. But while scoring some points, you didn’t get the sense he thinks anything will change, with the possible exception of relief for Dreamers, which many Republicans in theory support. Given the timing of the speech, so soon after the Derek Chauvin trial, it was unsurprising that a pitch for police reform sounded a bit more optimistic, and Biden was careful to identify with the conviction of so many Black Americans that the verdict in that trial was just a starting point.

His quick shout-out to transgender Americans was wonderful. But his very slight attention to voting rights was troubling, given its importance not just to Democratic constituencies but to the electoral prospects of his party.

From the point of view of traditional presidential addresses, the foreign-policy sections were unusual. His main reference to national defense was to call an end to the Afghanistan War far overdue. Other foreign-policy subtopics were climate change and trade, with the latter subject bringing forth some additional warnings toward China. And then there was this amazing sentence: “The investments I’ve proposed tonight also advance a foreign policy that benefits the middle class.” Here as elsewhere Biden never strayed far from a love song to the middle class that probably had focus groups nodding approvingly.

by Ed Kilgore, Intelligencer |  Read more:

Image: via

Baby Blues

Baby blues and tiny sailfish. Here and here.

Finding Good in Bad Girls

From Donna Summer to Dante, everybody loves a "bad girl". She is a social construct that runs the cultural gamut from classical to cartoonish and back again, wearing only high heels and a smirk. She is literary artifice and historical fact combined; she is both retrograde and modern, a product of the patriarchy and yet empowered; she is every man's worst nightmare and his best daydream too. No plot is complete without her, no soap opera or great tragedy doesn't boast a brace. We are a society obsessed with bad girls, and we always have been.

But what's the allure of this mythical creature? There's no specific definition – it's a catch-all phrase which scoops up sulky teens and hard-faced ballbusters alike – but we all have a vision of what it means to be a bad girl. It goes something along the lines of Bettie Page in an Eighties power suit, teamed with Wonder Woman boots and wielding a bazooka – that is to say, a hybridised version of any given cliché of female independence. So far, so foggy.

The bad girl, and all her attendant archetypal baggage, has however become less of a personage and more a mental motif in the latterday power struggle between men and women. American psychiatrist Carole Lieberman has recently published a self-help book, entitled Bad Girls: Why Men Love Them & How Good Girls Can Learn Their Secrets, which argues that a bad girl mentality is something we could all use to our advantage – even if we're undeniably good girls.

"Kate Middleton is the quintessential example of a good girl who used bad girl strategies to win the heart of her prince," she explains. "When she was rated two out of ten by the boys in her class, she did a total makeover to make herself more appealing. Later, she strutted down the runway of her college fashion show in 'the dress' that got Prince William to stop thinking of her merely as a friend, and to fall head over heels for her."

A case of "ask not what you can do for yourself, but what a bad girl can do for you", perhaps. "I am not trying to turn good girls into bad girls," clarifies Lieberman, whose penchant for flowers, hearts and all things pink marks her clearly as one of the former. "I am trying to help good girls discover the secrets that bad girls use to win men's hearts."

Surely this is a regressive game to play in an age where men and women have assumed supposed parity; doesn't this speaks to the outmoded necessity of women using their wiles to get ahead, rather than their brains? Nowadays, we don't need these sorts of strategies.

But a brief look at the history of the bad girl reveals it to be a term applied to any women who has ever taken control of her own life. Cleopatra, for instance, or Middleton's predecessor Anne Boleyn – two women who got to the top using the only weapon in their arsenal, their sexuality.

"Anne Boleyn is remembered by her contemporaries as someone with the beast in view," says Nicola Shulman, author of Graven with Diamonds: the Many Lives of Thomas Wyatt. "She grew up in the French court and had wonderful French manners – she could write poetry, sing, dance and she was witty. And she clearly had phenomenal brains. She wasn't just worked from behind by her family. Anne Boleyn was the engine of her own destiny."

Shulman quotes contemporary evidence that Boleyn set out to become notorious and get noticed by persuading Wyatt, one of the era's most glamorous courtiers, to fall in love with her. "If the cool person is in love with you, you get the attention," continues Shulman. Boleyn also played the court's rumour mill of gossip and mischevious ditties like a pro and acted a part – she had to do so, in order to keep the King's attention for seven years. "In one poem, Wyatt refers to a new girlfriend and an old one with a system of opposites: one a simple, country girl; the other rather contrived." Boleyn created a persona for herself in order to win the throne, Shulman suggests.

Almost 500 years later, the contemporary assumption is not so different with Kate Middleton. There are those who suggest she has been trained by her mother from an early age, schooled correctly and sent to the same university as Prince William to "catch" the future king. There is no proof in any of it, needless to say, but it goes to show the consensus that women who end up with the man of their dreams cannot possibly have managed it without some sort of strategy. 

by Harriet Walker, Independent |  Read more:

Image: credit lost

[ed. Repost. For some reason, this is one of my most popular posts to date.]

Prince: Director's Cut

Prince’s searing solo turn during an ensemble performance of the Beatles’ While My Guitar Gently Weeps, which culminated with him literally making his own electric guitar – a Tele-style H.S. Anderson Mad Cat – disappear, has become cemented as a legendary moment in rock history.

The mesmeric performance, which saw Prince join Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty and Steve Winwood, came together to honor George Harrison's posthumous induction into the Rock and Hall of Fame at the 2004 ceremony. Also along for the ride were Harrison’s son, Dhani, and several members of Petty’s band, the Heartbreakers.

Now, a new edit of While My Guitar Gently Weeps has surfaced on YouTube, with, thankfully, even more Prince closeups. The new cut comes courtesy of Joel Gallen, who directed and produced the original Hall of Fame broadcast.

“17 years after this stunning performance by Prince, I finally had the chance to go in and re-edit it slightly – since there were several shots that were bothering me,” Gallen writes in the accompanying caption.

“I got rid of all the dissolves and made them all cuts, and added lots more close ups of Prince during his solo. I think it's better now. Let me know what you think. Joel.

by Richard Bienstock, Guitar World |  Read more:

[ed. Prince was indisputably one of rock's greatest electric guitarists, and so much more. For some background on this performance see: here (The Observer), and here (NYT).]

via:

Gordon Onslow Ford, The Birth Of Venus, 1947

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Lexmark’s Toxic Printer-Ink

“Every pirate wants to be an admiral.” That is a truism of industrial policy: the scrappy upstarts that push the rules to achieve success then turn into law-and-order types who insist that anyone who does unto them as they did unto others is a lawless cur in need of whipping.

This is true all over, but there’s an especial deliciousness to see it applied to printers and printer ink, always a trailblazer in extractive, deceptive and monopolistic practices of breathtaking, shameless sleaze.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Pierre Beyssac, a director of Internet Europe, recounts his campaigns in the Printer Wars, which start when he ordered a non-wifi-enabled Lexmark printer but got shipped the wifi version.

https://twitter.com/pbeyssac/status/1386988213923983362

He didn’t mind…except that the two models use different models of ink-cartridge, and he’d preordered €450 worth of cartridges, which were nonreturnable by the time he discovered the error.

The cartridges are identical; all that stops them from working is that they’re DRM-locked, with software that refuses to run if you put it in a different model printer (this lets Lexmark charge more for an identical product if they think some customers are price-insensitive).

But there’s an answer - a Chinese vendor sells a €15 conversion kit that bypasses the DRM (this is probably illegal in the EU under Article 6 of 2001’s EUCD). Beyssac was able to salvage his €450 ink investment.

But the adventure prompted him to investigate further. He discovered that Lexmark uses DRM to “regionalize” cartridges (similar to DVD regions): a cart bought in region 1 won’t work in a printer bought in region 2.

Hilariously, Lexmark claims that this is because each cartridge is specially tuned for each region’s “humidity.” By way of rebuttal, Beyssac points out that all of Russia shares a region with all of Africa (!).

Now all of this would be idiotic enough if it were any old printer monopolist, but because this is Lexmark, it is especially delicious,.

Lexmark, after all, fought one of the most important battles of the Printer Wars - and lost. Lexmark vs Static Controls was brought by Lexmark when it was a division of the early tech monopolist IBM.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/felony-contempt-business-model-lexmarks-anti-competitive-legacy

Lexmark sold toner cartridges filled with the cheap and abundant element carbon, and it wanted to charge vintage Champagne prices for it. To that end, Lexmark ran a 55-byte program in a “security chip” that flipped an “I am full” bit to “I am empty” when the toner ran out.

Lexmark’s competitor Static Controls reverse-engineered this trivial program so you could refill a cartridge and flip it back to “I am full” so the printer would recognize it. In 2002 Lexmark sued, under Sec 1201 of the recently passed Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

DMCA 1201 made it a felony to traffick in a device that “bypassed an access control for a copyrighted work.” The judge asked Lexmark which copyrighted work was in its printer cartridges (it wasn’t the carbon powder!). Lexmark said it was the 55-bytle program.

The judge handed Lexmark its own ass, ruling that while software could be copyrighted, a 55-byte I-am-full/empty program didn’t rise to the level of copyrightability - it wasn’t even a haiku.

Lexmark lost, and today, Lexmark is…*a division of Static Controls.*

That’s right, the company that’s using all this bullshit DRM to prevent people from using their printers the way they want to is the company that did the exact same thing to IBM, won its court case, and then merged with the company whose racket it had destroyed.

Every pirate *seriously* wants to be an admiral.

But here’s the thing. Lexmark/Static turned on the fact that 55-byte programs (all that fit affordably in a primitive 2002 chip) wasn’t a copyrighted work. The cartridges Lexmark sells now have thousands of lines of code.

There’s whole OSes in there. These *are* copyrightable. As is the OS in every embedded system we buy, from car engine parts to smart speakers to pacemakers. That means that companies can use DMCA 1201 to prevent rivals from unlocking lawful features in their products.

They can use it to block independent repair and independent security audits. They can make it illegal to use any product you own in ways that disadvantages their shareholders, even if that’s what’s good for you.

Despite the “C” in DMCA standing for “copyright,” this isn’t copyright protection, it’s felony contempt of business model - a legally enforceable obligation to arrange your life to benefit multinational corporations’ shareholders.

And worse, this law has been spread around the world thanks to the US Trade Rep: it’s in 2001’s EUCD and Canada’s 2012 Copyright Modernization Act. Last summer, Mexico passed an even more extreme version as part of the USMCA.

If you think this shit is odious when it’s in your printer, you’re going to hate it when it’s in your toothbrush, wristwatch, car engine and toaster.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

In 2016, EFF brought a lawsuit to overturn DMCA 1201 on behalf of Bunnie Huang and Matt Green. It has been working its way through the courts ever since.

https://www.eff.org/cases/green-v-us-department-justice

by Cory Doctorow, Read more:

Image: uncredited

How To Destroy Surveillance Capitalism

Belief in conspiracy is a raging fire that has done real damage and poses real danger to our planet and species, from epidemics kicked off by vaccine denial to genocides kicked off by racist conspiracies to planetary meltdown caused by denial-inspired climate inaction. Our world is on fire, and so we have to put the fires out — to figure out how to help people see the truth of the world through the conspiracies they’ve been confused by.

But firefighting is reactive. We need fire prevention. We need to strike at the traumatic material conditions that make people vulnerable to the contagion of conspiracy. Here, too, tech has a role to play.

There’s no shortage of proposals to address this. From the EU’s Terrorist Content Regulation, which requires platforms to police and remove “extremist” content, to the U.S. proposals to force tech companies to spy on their users and hold them liable for their users’ bad speech, there’s a lot of energy to force tech companies to solve the problems they created.

There’s a critical piece missing from the debate, though. All these solutions assume that tech companies are a fixture, that their dominance over the internet is a permanent fact. Proposals to replace Big Tech with a more diffused, pluralistic internet are nowhere to be found. Worse: The “solutions” on the table today require Big Tech to stay big because only the very largest companies can afford to implement the systems these laws demand.

Figuring out what we want our tech to look like is crucial if we’re going to get out of this mess. Today, we’re at a crossroads where we’re trying to figure out if we want to fix the Big Tech companies that dominate our internet or if we want to fix the internet itself by unshackling it from Big Tech’s stranglehold. We can’t do both, so we have to choose.

I want us to choose wisely. Taming Big Tech is integral to fixing the internet, and for that, we need digital rights activism.

Digital rights activism, a quarter-century on (...)

Tech exceptionalism, then and now (...)

Don't believe the hype (...)

What is persuasion? (...)

1. Segmenting
2. Deception
3. Domination
4. Bypassing our rational faculties

If data is the new oil, then surveillance capitalism’s engine has a leak (...)

What is Facebook? (...)

Monopoly and the right to the future tense (...)

Search order and the right to the future tense (...)

Monopolists can afford sleeping pills for watchdogs (...)

Privacy and monopoly (...)

Ronald Reagan, pioneer of tech monopolism (...)

Steering with the windshield wipers (...)

Surveillance still matters (...)

Dignity and sanctuary (...)

Afflicting the afflicted (...)

Any data you collect and retain will eventually leak (...)

Critical tech exceptionalism is still tech exceptionalism (...)

How monopolies, not mind control, drive surveillance capitalism: The Snapchat story (...)

A monopoly over your friends (...)

Fake news is an epistemological crisis (...)

Tech is different (...)

Ownership of facts (...)

Persuasion works… slowly (...)

Paying won’t help (...)

An “ecology” moment for trustbusting (...)

Make Big Tech small again (...)

20 GOTO 10 (...)

The surveillance capitalism hypothesis — that Big Tech’s products really work as well as they say they do and that’s why everything is so screwed up — is way too easy on surveillance and even easier on capitalism. Companies spy because they believe their own BS, and companies spy because governments let them, and companies spy because any advantage from spying is so short-lived and minor that they have to do more and more of it just to stay in place.

As to why things are so screwed up? Capitalism. Specifically, the monopolism that creates inequality and the inequality that creates monopolism. It’s a form of capitalism that rewards sociopaths who destroy the real economy to inflate the bottom line, and they get away with it for the same reason companies get away with spying: because our governments are in thrall to both the ideology that says monopolies are actually just fine and in thrall to the ideology that says that in a monopolistic world, you’d better not piss off the monopolists.

Surveillance doesn’t make capitalism rogue. Capitalism’s unchecked rule begets surveillance. Surveillance isn’t bad because it lets people manipulate us. It’s bad because it crushes our ability to be our authentic selves — and because it lets the rich and powerful figure out who might be thinking of building guillotines and what dirt they can use to discredit those embryonic guillotine-builders before they can even get to the lumberyard.

Up and through

With all the problems of Big Tech, it’s tempting to imagine solving the problem by returning to a world without tech at all. Resist that temptation.

The only way out of our Big Tech problem is up and through. If our future is not reliant upon high tech, it will be because civilization has fallen. Big Tech wired together a planetary, species-wide nervous system that, with the proper reforms and course corrections, is capable of seeing us through the existential challenge of our species and planet. Now it’s up to us to seize the means of computation, putting that electronic nervous system under democratic, accountable control.

I am, secretly, despite what I have said earlier, a tech exceptionalist. Not in the sense of thinking that tech should be given a free pass to monopolize because it has “economies of scale” or some other nebulous feature. I’m a tech exceptionalist because I believe that getting tech right matters and that getting it wrong will be an unmitigated catastrophe — and doing it right can give us the power to work together to save our civilization, our species, and our planet.

by Cory Doctorow, OneZero |  Read more:

Image: Shira Inbar

[ed. Comprehensive analysis of one of the biggest threats we face going forward (and no one better than Mr. Doctorow to exlain it). If this is too much to take in one sitting, keep coming back and dropping in to whatever chapter interests you. You'll learn more than you can imagine.]

Break Up the Ivy League Cartel

The nature of power in America flows through the Ivy Leagues and top universities. To take one example, academic economists use their academic credentials to launder fraudulent arguments about consolidation. But the gatekeeping power of elite higher education goes far beyond that. These are the institutions that validate and structure the boundaries of knowledge.

Today I’m pleased to welcome a guest writer, Sam Haselby (@samhaselby), who thinks deeply about the history of the Ivy League, its role today, and its religious roots as a set of institutions designed around exclusion.

The Ivy League vs Democracy

One of the great puzzles of American society is the position of the Ivy Leagues. They are a bastion of privilege and power, and yet the campuses are rife with left-leaning professors who one might imagine seek to redistribute wealth. According to the Harvard Crimson, 77.6% of Harvard professors define themselves as left-leaning, and just 2.9% as conservative. What explains this dynamic? Former Harvard College Dean Harry Lewis said that it gets to the basic point of the school, which is to advance radical ideas. “It’s almost by definition anti-preservationist because we place such a high value on the creation of new knowledge,” he said.

A wildly different explanation is apparent from watching Netflix’s Varsity Blues: The College Admissions Scandal, the highly publicized fiasco in which wealthy parents used bribery to get their kids into top colleges. What I found most interesting about this episode wasn’t the actual corruption, but a different and more poignant feature of American meritocracy. Even in the midst of acts of bribery, many of the parents were beset with fear that their children might find out about the crooked machinations to win their admission to elite schools. They took desperate steps to shield the kids from facing real questions of “merit” or deservedness. And in fact, while most involved in meritocracy don’t use bribery, a tremendous amount of energy now goes into preserving similar basic fictions about the nature of elite private education and its role in the United States.

We most often hear about inequality in terms of super-rich corporations and individuals or families. But it is important that the same gulf, separating haves and have nots, has opened between U.S. colleges and universities. Since the pandemic began, 650,000 jobs have disappeared in American academic institutions. More than 75% of college faculty in the U.S. are contingent workers or non tenure-track. Meanwhile, as of 2020, the aggregate value of the endowments of the richest 20 U.S. schools rose to over $311 billion, all of which are subsidized by taxpayers through the tax-free treatment we offer nonprofit educational institutions. The common joke, that Harvard is a hedge fund with an educational arm, is not so far off.

According to the IMF, the value of these endowment funds is greater than the GDP of New Zealand, Finland, or Chile. In the last 5 years the U.S. has fallen in the UN’s Human Development Index, but its elite universities have risen in the world rankings and gotten richer. America’s richest colleges and universities, in effect, exist in a country of their own (though paid for in part with the public’s money).

This inequity reflects a restructuring of political power, towards an aristocracy. In historical perspective, we are seeing the collapse of the great post World War II democratization of post-secondary arts and sciences education alongside the appearance of a meritocracy alienated from the public and at odds with democracy. If anyone points out the role of elite education in the reproduction of inequality today, Americans tend to see it as flawed or compromised meritocracy rather than “true” meritocracy. But such responses are signs of a kind of Stockholm Syndrome. The “merit” of meritocracy has little to nothing to do with the abilities, or worth, or value of people as human beings and citizens.

Meritocracy and democracy are not the same thing. The goal of meritocracy is to produce, or reproduce, an elite. There is nothing necessarily democratic about that. The Puritans who founded the Ivy league schools were very good at building stable and exclusive institutions, for many reasons, including that the elite, for them, was the elect: those specially chosen to receive God’s grace, to be one of the sanctified and saved few among the masses of the damned. In the early United States, however, New Englanders quickly discovered, to their dismay, that being the elect did not mean much to many Americans and they would be hard pressed to win national elections. The Puritan schools are designed to serve the elect, not for democratic education. Thomas Jefferson feared and reviled the Puritan schools, and founded the University of Virginia to counter what he saw as their anti-democratic influence.

The Civil War and Reconstruction, first, and the Civil Rights Movement, second constitute the greatest achievements in modern American democracy. Both also were high marks of public education. In the former, radical Republicans who had seized control of the government created America’s great land grant universities, while the Civil Rights Movement unfolded after a generation of Cold War investment in high quality public university education. The United States has spent a generation moving away from this kind of democratic education toward a gilded meritocracy. America’s elite private schools are now one of the last strongholds of the drunken post-Cold War triumphalism that hoarded wealth and privilege to private institutions at the expense of public and democratic ones.

There is no way that I know of to have truly democratic elections without widely available and high-quality public education. But as everyone knows, the consolidation of wealth by elite, mostly private, schools has gone hand-in-hand with damaging political campaigns that have weakened even the country’s greatest public universities, such the University of Wisconsin- Madison and the University of California-Berkeley, for example.

In 1940, the acceptance rate at Harvard was eighty-five percent. In 1970, it was twenty percent. This year, for the class of 2025, it was 3.4 percent. On the surface, a far more selective Ivy League seems to support the notion of meritocracy as something approximating what Jefferson characterized as the purpose of (unrealized plans for) free public schooling in 18th century Virginia: “the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually.” In practice though American meritocracy has become skewed to elite reproduction. The economist Raj Chetty has found that nearly 40 of the country’s elite colleges and universities, including five in the Ivy League, accept more students from families in the top 1% of income earners than from the bottom 60%. Computer scientist Alison Morgan recently released a study examining 7,218 professors in PhD granting departments in the United States across the arts and sciences. She found that the faculty come from families almost 34% richer than average and are twenty-five times more likely than average to have a parent with a PhD. Faculty at prestigious universities are fifty times more likely than average person to have a parent with a PhD. American meritocracy has become a complex, inefficient, and rigged system conferring a series of “merits” on ambitious children of highly educated and prosperous families.

In the mid 20th century, when Harvard accepted 80% of its applicants, its graduates voted Republican. Today Ivy league acceptance rates are in the single digits and its graduates, as well as 70% of people with graduate degrees, vote Democratic. This is why Thomas Piketty refers to the U.S.’s (as well as the UK and France’s) “Brahmin left.” Yes, the Brahmin left - sometimes lumped in with the conservative punching bag ‘woke capital’ - is a favorite target of right-wing propaganda, so Democrats might assume that this reservoir of elite expertise is good for democracy and progressive ideas. (...)

There are some countervailing signs. Three hundred Princeton faculty signed an anti-racism letter that called on the university to increase the university’s financial support for the people of Trenton, New Jersey. Columbia, Cornell, and NYU are all building new science research centers in New York City. These will offer the institutions fresh opportunities to be decent neighbors and good citizens. But reform will not solely come from within the Ivy League, or within higher education itself. Philanthropic organizations are still giving big grants to America’s richest universities, recirculating resources among the richest institutions always while chanting social justice keywords. The change has to come from politics, from a broader debate about the point of higher education.

That debate is happening. Politicians in Massachusetts sometimes float taxing Harvard’s endowment fund, and in fact, last year, as a result of Trump’s inclusion of a minor ‘endowment tax’ in his otherwise reactionary 2017 tax cut, the top schools had to actually pay a modicum of taxes. More importantly, last week, Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal and Senator Bernie Sanders introduced legislation that would go a long way to restoring democratic education in the U.S, rescuing it from the regime of our gilded meritocracy and its Brahmin byways. Jayapal and Sanders’ proposal would make public college and university tuition free for families making under $125,000. It would transform American life and help the public universities, colleges, and community colleges that have for decades been starved and battered. I hope Joe Biden recognizes the impact restoring these non-Ivy League institutions could have. He has certainly reoriented the Democrats in other ways. It was not meritocrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama who abandoned decades of austerity economics that threw elite education into the center of the oligarchy economy. It was Joe Biden, a University of Delaware and Syracuse Law School graduate.

by Sam Haselby, BIG via Matt Stollar | Read more:
Image: uncredited

The Chauvin Trial’s Jury Wasn’t Like Other Juries

The jury convicted the former Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin on the weight of the evidence before it: video footage, expert testimony, and eyewitness accounts.

But even with all that evidence, convictions don’t happen on their own. Twelve people, selected by lot from the public, must come to a unanimous decision. That jury—who it comprised, how those people saw the world—was of enormous consequence. This wasn’t just any jury, and the difference that made should invite a major reckoning with how juries—the deciding bodies of the country’s judicial system—are selected in America.

I have been studying juries for many years. I have written about juries in historic trials such as those for the Camden 28, the Central Park Five, and Angela Davis. But starting late last year, one took over my work: the Chauvin trial. Great interest in it led the Hennepin County clerk to make public the initial questionnaire sent to jurors, and District Judge Peter Cahill decided to allow television cameras in the courtroom, a first for the state of Minnesota. From voir dire—the interview between the judge, attorneys, and each potential juror before a jury is selected—to the attorneys’ opening and closing statements to the testimony of more than 40 witnesses during the trial, everything was viewable via live-stream. What I saw was a jury-selection process that substantially departed from the country’s norms, resulting in a racially mixed jury, a number of whose members criticized American law enforcement for systematically discriminating against Black people.

All the jurors interviewed during voir dire were familiar with the case, and some had seen the video of George Floyd’s death. To varying degrees, they all understood the weight of the case and the intense media scrutiny it would undoubtedly receive, yet many were eager to serve. When interviewed by the defense counsel, Juror 27, who identifies as Black and an immigrant and who ultimately ended up on the jury, said that he had spoken with his wife about the killing shortly after it happened. “We talked about how it could have been me,” he said. Juror 91 put it simply when she said, “I’m Black and my life matters.” That these people held these views and still served on the jury shows a path toward greater democratic representation in America’s courtrooms.

There were many reasons to think things would not go this way—that Chauvin would be tried by a mostly white or all-white jury, and that people with systemic critiques of how criminal justice works in America would be struck from the jury pool. For one, Hennepin County, where the killing took place and where the trial was held, is nearly three-quarters white. For another, studies have found that Black jurors are less likely to be called for jury duty and less likely to be selected to serve. And finally, there was the complication of having the trial during the coronavirus pandemic, which has disproportionately affected Black and brown communities. According to the former Minneapolis public defender Mary Moriarty, during the pandemic, juries have been even whiter, on average, than before the pandemic.

Yet ultimately the jury seated in the Chauvin case included four Black people, two people who identify as mixed race, and six white people. (The jury comprised 14 people, including two alternates who were both white.) Much of the credit goes to Judge Cahill, who conducted the jury-selection process. Cahill set a tone of honesty and inclusivity during jury selection, emphasizing that he would consider the totality of a juror’s answers and not focus on individual statements when determining whether a juror was qualified to serve. He expected jurors to have strong feelings about Floyd’s death, but what was most important to him was a juror’s willingness to take on the responsibilities of legal judgment, including a commitment to the conventions of a fair trial.

Evidence of his approach was apparent from the start. The selection process began in December when an in-depth questionnaire was mailed to more than 300 prospective jurors. It contained detailed questions about Black Lives Matter, Blue Lives Matter, and impressions of the police. Given how Floyd’s killing galvanized the Black Lives Matter movement, both sides in the trial had an interest in learning how jurors understood the protests and the concurrent civil unrest, including instances of looting and the destruction of property.

But stating views sympathetic to Black Lives Matter did not result in jurors getting removed from the jury pool. During voir dire, a majority of the 12 seated jurors said they “somewhat agreed” or “strongly agreed” with the statement on the questionnaire that “Blacks and whites don’t receive equal justice in this country,” implying that they believe that racial discrimination in the legal system goes beyond isolated incidents and a few bad actors. The same majority also had favorable opinions of Black Lives Matter and disagreed with a statement that the media exaggerate claims of racial discrimination.

It’s difficult to overstate how significant a departure from the norm this is. In many similar cases, a potential juror’s mere intimation of a belief in systemic injustice makes judges and attorneys nervous—especially when the juror is a person of color. (...)

But in the Chauvin trial, the attorneys and the judge did not treat critiques of racial bias in the legal system as something that would inherently bias a juror. This was clear once voir dire began. In one instance, a potential juror—a Black man—spoke about the sadness and outrage he felt at seeing the cellphone video that had circulated around the world: “It’s another Black man being murdered at police hands,” he said. Judge Cahill said that he believed this was an “honest opinion,” “widely held,” and not necessarily an obstacle to being an impartial juror. This may seem like a small thing, but to say that jurors can hold systemic critiques and still be fair inverts the old paradigm, which saw an absence of such critiques as a harbinger of neutrality—which of course is its own kind of bias. (...)

In voir dire, potential jurors can be rejected either by the judge—which is called dismissal for cause—or by the attorneys via peremptory strike. As is clear, Judge Cahill did not dismiss jurors who held systemic critiques of law enforcement. But what’s maybe even more surprising is that neither did the attorneys. The only limitation on the use of strikes is that a juror cannot be dismissed on the basis of race alone. In the Chauvin case, the defense was entitled to 18 peremptory strikes and the prosecution 10, but both sides had strikes remaining when all jurors, including the alternates, had been selected.

by Sonali Chakravarti, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Getty/The Atlantic

Arts and Architecture, Dean Monogenis

via:

An Open Letter to Green New Dealers

I write this as a friend who wants your movement to succeed. Your cause is just and, due to decades worth of political inaction (some of which, I’m sorry to say, I have to personally account for), the hour is late. As the U.N.’s sixth Global Environmental Outlook declared this month, “urgent action at an unprecedented scale” is necessary to address climate change and the degradation of critically important ecosystems. The 2019 Global Risks Report, published by the World Economic Forum (an international, nonprofit institute serving as a forum for top business, political, and academic elites from around the world), concludes that climate-related risks now account for three of the top five global risks by likelihood, and four of the top five by impact. While there is a wide distribution of possible outcomes from climate change, we are already incurring serious risks from existing greenhouse gas concentrations, and the most likely outcomes by 2100 (imperfectly and conservatively accounted for by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, otherwise known as the IPCC) are frightening. The worst-case scenarios — many of which are as likely to occur as the best-case scenarios — suggest that catastrophic tipping points might be crossed before we realize it, with the real possibility of severe and irreversible ecological, economic, and human damage if we fail to act. (...)

I worry, however, that despite all of the new energy you’ve unleashed on the political scene, you are setting your cause back, not moving it forward. Nothing about the seriousness of the threat we are facing changes the fact that politics is “the art of the possible,” not exhortation for the impossible. Given that serious action on climate will have to come out of the institutions we have — not those we might wish for — the strategies and tactics you are pursuing through the Green New Deal amount to political malpractice. Moreover, the policy initiatives you’re promoting are rightly difficult for political actors to swallow. As veteran Democratic operative Stuart Eizenstat warned this month, “Speaking from experience, by demanding the moon, their proposals will crash on the launching pad and lead to nowhere good.”

Wishing for Ponies

What makes your Green New Deal innovative is that it ties climate action to a host of extremely ambitious progressive initiatives that have little or nothing to do with climate change. The Green New Deal resolution (introduced in the House by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York’s 14th district and in the Senate by Ed Markey of Massachusetts) is literally 10-parts “New Deal” to 1-part “climate.” Beyond the climate-related goals it asks Congress to adopt, the resolution also calls for:

• “guaranteeing a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States,
• “strengthening and protecting the right of all workers to organize, unionize, and collectively bargain free of coercion, intimidation, and harassment,
• “strengthening and enforcing labor, workplace health and safety, antidiscrimination, and wage and hour standards across all employers, industries, and sectors,
• “ensuring a commercial environment where every businessperson is free from unfair competition and domination by domestic or international monopolies,
• “providing all people of the United States with high-quality health care,
• “providing all people of the United States with affordable, safe, and adequate housing,”
• “providing all people of the United States with economic security,
• “promot(ing) justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth (referred to in this resolution as ‘frontline and vulnerable communities’),
• “providing resources, training, and high-quality education, including higher education, to all people of the United States, with a focus on frontline and vulnerable communities,” all while
• “supporting family farming.”

Beyond that, the resolution tackles just about every non-climate-related concern on the environmental agenda, calling for new federal programs to:

• increase soil health,
• provide for a “sustainable food system that ensures universal access to healthy food,
• “restoring and protecting threatened, endangered, and fragile ecosystems through locally appropriate and science-based projects that enhance biodiversity,
• “cleaning up existing hazardous waste and abandoned sites, ensuring economic development and sustainability on those sites,” and
• “providing all people of the United States with clean water, clean air, healthy and affordable food, and access to nature.”

Republican demagoguery aside, it’s unclear what any of that would actually mean in terms of public policy. And that’s by design. Maybe “providing all people of the United States with high-quality health care” means a Bernie Sanders Medicare-for-All plan. But it could also mean fixes to the Affordable Care Act. Maybe “providing all people of the United States with economic security” means a $15 federal minimum wage and Universal Basic Income. Or perhaps it simply entails increases in existing welfare programs. The idea, I gather, is to establish where the Green New Deal is going and to politically commit Congress to the trip. The length of the journey (policy ambition) and detailed itinerary (policy design) is TBD based on the political give and take that is to come. This is a resolution after all, not a bill, and that’s typically what resolutions are designed to do.

These commitments, however, are so unqualified and open-ended that members don’t know what to make of them. That has provided Republicans with an opening to characterize the Green New Deal in the most lurid terms, which has naturally made Democrats deeply uncomfortable. When asked about the Green New Deal on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, for instance, Sen. Dick Durbin (IL) said “I’ve read it and I’ve reread it and I asked Ed Markey, what in the heck is this?” Speaker Nancy Pelosi has referred to it dismissively as “‘The Green Dream,’ or whatever they call it. Nobody knows what it is, but they’re for it, right?” (...)

Rule number one in politics is not to let your opponents define you or your ideas. The vague but suggestive Green New Deal resolution, however, was an open invitation for Republicans to do exactly that. The FAQ and background material coming out of the progressive community gave everyone to your right plenty of ammunition to define you as radicals bent on a sweeping, revolutionary enterprise. “I think the idea is you never let your message get too far out ahead of the substance, and we have definitely created a vacuum and left space for people to fill with what they think the Green New Deal is based on their assumptions and past experiences,” conceded Rhiana Gunn-Wright of New Consensus. “It’s certainly a danger, but it’s a danger worth taking by ensuring we get frontline voices in.”

That last line is really the key to understanding the politics animating, and the policies constituting, the Green New Deal. Allow me to try my hand at making the very best case for your strategy as I understand it.

by Jerry Taylor, Niskanen Center |  Read more:

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There’s an Art to Making Your Bed (NYT)

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