Chris Hedges's Blog, page 254

Critical Thinking Couldn’t Be More Critical

Editor’s note: This article was initially published on Counterpunch. 

The dark times that haunt the current age are epitomized by the barbarians who echo the politics of a fascist past and have come to rule the United States, Hungary, Turkey, Poland, Brazil, the Philippines, and elsewhere.  The designers of a new breed of fascism increasingly dominate major political formations and other commanding political and economic institutions across the globe. Their nightmarish reign of misery, violence, and disposability is legitimated, in part, in their control of a diverse number of cultural apparatuses that produce a vast machinery of manufactured consent. This reactionary educational formation includes the mainstream broadcast media, digital platforms, the Internet and print culture, all of which participate in an ongoing spectacle of violence, the aestheticization of politics, the legitimation of opinions over facts, and an embrace of a culture of ignorance. Under the reign of this normalized architecture of neoliberal ideology, critical education is now regarded with disdain, words are reduced to data, and science is confused with pseudo-science.

Democratic institutions such as the independent media, schools, the legal system, certain financial institutions, and higher education are under siege worldwide. Some of the latest examples of this can be found in the United States with the resurgence of vigilantes and right-wing militia groups along the southern border and the intrusion of tech-based educational practices into schools producing curricula that some parents claim turn kids into zombies. Trump’s continued attack on higher education offers another highly visible example: His proposed 2020-budget request would enact a staggering $7.1 billion reduction in the Education Department as part of a policy to dismantle the department itself.

At the same time, the promise of democracy is receding as present-day fascists work to subvert language, values, courage, vision and a critical consciousness. Education has increasingly become a tool of domination as the entrepreneurs of hate deploy right-wing pedagogical apparatuses to attack workers, Black youth, refugees, immigrants and others they consider disposable. In the midst of a moment when an older social order is crumbling and a new one is struggling to define itself, there emerges a time of confusion, danger, and moments of great restlessness. We are once again at a historical juncture in which the structures of liberation and authoritarianism are vying over the future.

We have arrived at such a moment in which two worlds are pitted against each other and a history of the present is poised at a point when “possibilities are either realized or rejected but never disappear completely.”  Two worlds are colliding: First, as a number of scholars have observed, there is the harsh and crumbling world of neoliberal globalization and its mobilizing passions that fuel different strands of fascism across the globe, including the United States. Power is now enamored with amassing profits and capital and is increasingly addicted to a politics of white nationalism and racial cleansing.Second, there is the world of counter movements, which is growing especially among young people, with their search for a new politics that can rethink, reclaim and invent a new understanding of democratic socialism, untainted by capitalism.

It is hard to imagine a more urgent moment for making education central to politics. If we are going to develop a politics capable of awakening our critical, imaginative, and historical sensibilities, it is crucial for educators and others to develop a language of critique and possibility. Such a language is necessary to enable the conditions to forge a collective international resistance among educators, youth, artists, and other cultural workers in defense of public goods. Such a movement is important to resist and overcome the tyrannical fascist nightmares that have descended upon the United States, Brazil and a number of other countries in Europe plagued by the rise of neo-Nazi parties.  In an age of social isolation, information overflow, a culture of immediacy, consumer glut, and spectacularized violence, it is all the more crucial to take seriously the notion that a democracy cannot exist or be defended without informed and critically engaged citizens.

The pedagogical lesson here is that fascism begins with hateful words, the demonization of others considered disposable, and moves to an attack on ideas, the burning of books, the disappearance of intellectuals, and the emergence of the carceral state and the horrors of detention jails and camps. As a form of cultural politics, critical pedagogy provides the promise of a protected space within which to think against the grain of received opinion This is a space to question and challenge, to imagine the world from different standpoints and perspectives, to reflect upon ourselves in relation to others and, in so doing to understand what it means to “assume a sense of political and social responsibility.”

Education both in its symbolic and institutional forms has a central role to play in fighting the resurgence of fascist cultures, mythic historical narratives, and the emerging ideologies of white supremacy and white nationalism. Moreover, at a time when fascists across the globe are disseminating toxic racist and ultra-nationalist images of the past, it is essential to reclaim critical pedagogy as a form of historical consciousness and moral witnessing.  This is especially true at a time when historical and social amnesia have become a national pastime, particularly in the United States, matched only by the masculinization of the public sphere and the increasing normalization of a fascist politics that thrives on ignorance, fear, hatred, social cleansing, the suppression of dissent, and white supremacy. Education as a form of cultural work extends far beyond the classroom and its pedagogical influence, while often imperceptible, is crucial to challenging and resisting the rise of fascist pedagogical formations and their rehabilitation of fascist principles and ideas.

Cultural politics in the last 20 years has turned toxic as ruling elites increasingly gain control of commanding cultural apparatuses turning them into pedagogical disimagination machines that serve the forces of ethical tranquilization by producing and legitimating endless degrading and humiliating images of the poor, immigrants, Muslims, and others considered excess, wasted lives doomed to terminal exclusion. The capitalist dream machine is back with huge profits for the ultra-rich, hedge fund managers, and major players in the financial service industries. In these new landscapes of wealth, fraud, and social atomization, a brutal and fanatical capitalism promotes a winner-take-all ethos, a culture of cruelty and white nationalism, aggressively undermining the welfare state while pushing millions into hardship and misfortune.  The geographies of moral and political decadence have become the organizing standard of the dream worlds of consumption, privatization, surveillance, and deregulation. Within this increasingly fascist landscape, public spheres are replaced by zones of social abandonment and thrive on the energies of the walking dead and avatars of cruelty and misery.

The writer Pankaj Mishra is right in arguing that neoliberalism has created a society in whicth compassion is now viewed with disdain and empathy in a market driven society becomes synonymous with a pathology.  He writes:

The puzzle of our age is how [compassion as an] essential foundation of civic life went missing from our public conversation, invisibly replaced by the presumed rationality of individual self-interest, market mechanisms, and democratic institutions. It may be hard to remember this today, amid the continuous explosions of anger and vengefulness in public life, but the compassionate imagination was indispensable to the political movements that emerged in the nineteenth century to address the mass suffering caused by radical social and economic shifts. As the experiences of dislocation and exploitation intensified, a variety of socialists, democrats, and reformers upheld fellow feeling and solidarity, inciting the contempt of, among others, Friedrich Nietzsche, who claimed that the demand for social justice concealed the envy and resentment of the weak against their naturally aristocratic superiors. Our own deeply unequal and bitterly polarized societies, however, have fully validated Rousseau’s fear that people divided by extreme disparities would cease to feel compassion for another…. One result of mainstreaming a bleak survivalist ethic is that “most people, as they grow up now,” the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and the historian Barbara Taylor wrote in On Kindness, “secretly believe that kindness is a virtue of losers.”

Education within the last three decades has diminished rapidly in its capacities to educate young people and others to be critical and socially engaged agents. Under neoliberal regimes now flirting with white supremacy, the apostles of authoritarianism have deemed the utopian possibilities formerly associated with public education as too dangerous to go unchecked. Increasingly public schools — which could have such a radical potential to promote social equality and support democracy — are falling subject to the toxic forces of privatization and mindless standardized curricula, while teachers are subjected to intolerable labor conditions. Higher education now mimics a business culture run by a managerial army of bureaucrats, drunk on market values, who resemble the high priests of a deadening instrumental rationality. The commanding visions of democracy are in exile at all levels of education. The struggle, however, is far from over. The good news is that there is an increasing wave of strikes by teachers, public servants, and workers both in the United States and abroad who are resisting the cruel machinery of exploitation, racism, austerity, and disposability unleashed by neoliberalism in the past forty years.

Critical thought and the imaginings of a better world present a direct threat to neoliberal rationality in which the future must always replicate the present in an endless circle in which capital and the identities that it legitimates merge with each other into what might be called a dead zone of the imagination and pedagogies of repression. This dystopian impulse thrives on producing myriad forms of inequality and violence—encompassing both the symbolic and the structural—as part of a broader attempt to define education in purely instrumental, privatized, and anti-intellectual terms. What is clear is that neoliberal modes of education attempt to mold students in the market driven mantras of self-interest, harsh competition, unchecked individualism, and the ethos of consumerism. Young people are now told to invest in their careers, pack their resumes, and achieve success at any cost.  It is precisely this replacement of educated hope with an aggressive dystopian neoliberal project and cultural politics that now characterizes the current assault on public and higher education in various parts of the globe.   Under neoliberalism, the mantra of privatization, deregulation, and the destruction of the public good is matched by a toxic merging of inequality, greed, and an obsession with profit.

It is crucial for educators to remember that language is not simply an instrument of fear, violence, and intimidation, it is also a vehicle for critique, civic courage, resistance, and engaged and informed agency. We live at a time when the language of democracy has been pillaged, stripped of its promises and hopes. If fascism is to be defeated, there is a need to make education an organizing principle of politics and, in part, this can be done with a language that exposes and unravels falsehoods, systems of oppression, and corrupt relations of power while making clear that an alternative future is possible. Hannah Arendt was right in arguing that language is crucial in highlighting the often hidden “crystalized elements” that make fascism likely. Language can be a powerful tool in the search for truth and the condemnation of falsehoods and injustices. Moreover, it is through language that the history of fascism can be remembered and the lessons of the conditions that created the plague of genocide can provide the recognition that fascism does not reside solely in the past and that its traces are always dormant, even in the strongest democracies. Paul Gilroy argues correctly that it is crucial in the current historical moment to re-engage with fascism in order to restore it to its proper place in addressing the dark times, which threaten to push democracies across the globe into governments that mimic the fascist politics of the past.

I approach the concept of fascism with trepidation not just because it links together so many different historical and local phenomena. It has been engulfed by the way it has functioned as a term of general abuse and corrupted by the way it has been used to express a sense of evil that is frustratingly abstract but that remains hostage to fashionable contemporary fascination with obscenity, criminality, aggression, and horror. To re-” engage with the idea of generic fascism is, I hope, to work toward redeeming the term from its trivialization and restoring it to a proper place in discussions of the moral and political limits of what is acceptable….I think that pursuing a generic definition of fascism is not only possible and desirable but imperative…. It is essential, as living memory of the fascist period fades, to be able to identify these new groups and their influence on the volatile lives of postindustrial polities. Just maintaining a discussion about fascism as an ongoing heuristic project has additional value in a post-cold war setting from which the West has disappeared and where a reborn Europe must confront its past.

Gilroy’s insight provides one more reason for educators to make the political more pedagogical and the pedagogical more political. The latter is crucial in order to recognize that pedagogy is always a struggle over agency, identities, desire, and values while also acknowledging that it has a crucial role to play in addressing important social issues and defending public and higher education as democratic public spheres. Making the political pedagogical in this instance suggests producing modes of knowledge and social practices that not only affirm oppositional cultural work and pedagogical practices but also offer opportunities to mobilize instances of collective outrage coupled with direct mass action, against a ruthless casino capitalism and an emerging fascist politics. Such mobilization must oppose the glaring material inequities and the growing cynical belief that democracy and capitalism are synonymous. At the very least, critical pedagogy proposes that education is a form of political intervention in the world and that it is capable of creating the possibilities for individual and social transformation.

Ignorance now rules America. Not the simple, if somewhat innocent ignorance that comes from an absence of knowledge, but a malicious ignorance forged in the arrogance of refusing to think hard about an issue, to engage language in the pursuit of justice.  As is well known, President Trump’s ignorance is on display daily. Not only is he a serial liar but his ignorance also serves as a tool of power to prevent power from being held accountable. In addition, it also functions as a way to rewrite the relationship between the demands of critical citizens and the demands of social and civic responsibility.   Under such circumstances, thinking becomes dangerous and becomes the object of organized disgust for any vestige of the truth. However, there is more at stake here than the production of a toxic form of illiteracy and the shrinking of political horizons. What we are witnessing is a closing of the political coupled with explicit expressions of cruelty and “widely sanctioned ruthlessness.”    Moreover, the very conditions that enable people to make informed decisions are under siege as schools are defunded, media becomes more corporatized, oppositional journalists are killed, and reality TV becomes the model for mass entertainment. Under such circumstances, there is a full-scale attack on thoughtful reasoning, empathy, collective resistance, and the compassionate imagination. In some ways, the dictatorship of ignorance resembles what the writer John Berger calls“ethicide”: and Joshua Sperling defines as “The blunting of the senses; the hollowing out of language; the erasure of connection with the past, the dead, place, the land, the soil; possibly, too, the erasure even of certain emotions, whether pity, compassion, consoling, mourning or hoping.”

Given the current crisis of politics, agency, history, and memory educators need a new political and pedagogical language for addressing the changing contexts and issues facing a world in which capital draws upon an unprecedented convergence of resources–financial, cultural, political, economic, scientific, military, and technological–to exercise powerful and diverse forms of direct and indirect control. If educators and others are to counter global capitalism’s increased ability to separate the traditional sphere of politics from the now transnational reach of power, it is crucial to develop educational approaches that reject a collapse of the distinction between market liberties and civil liberties, a market economy and a market society, and capitalism and democracy. Resistance does not begin with reforming capitalism but abolishing it. The move under neoliberal capitalism towards fascism echoes Max Horkheimer’s dictum of 1939 that “Whoever is not prepared to talk about capitalism should also remain silent about fascism.”

After decades of the neoliberal nightmare both in the United Stats and abroad, the mobilizing passions of fascism have been unleashed unlike anything we have seen since the 1930s. The ruling elite and managers of extreme capitalism have used the crises of economic inequality and immigration and its “manifestly brutal and exploitative arrangements” to sow social divisions and resurrect the discourse of racial cleansing and white supremacy.   In doing so, they have tapped into the growing collective suffering and anxieties of millions  in order to redirect their anger  and despair through a culture of fear and discourse of dehumanization; they have also turned critical ideas to ashes by disseminating a toxic mix of  racialized categories, ignorance, and a militarized spirit of white nationalism.

In this instance, neoliberalism and fascism conjoin and advance in a comfortable and mutually compatible project and movement that connects the exploitative values and cruel austerity policies of casino capitalism” with fascist ideals. These ideals include: the veneration of war, anti-intellectualism; dehumanization; a populist celebration of ultra-nationalism and racial purity; the suppression of freedom and dissent; a culture of lies; a politics of hierarchy, the spectacularization of emotion over reason, the weaponization of language; a discourse of decline, and state violence in heterogeneous forms. Fascism is never entirely interred in the past and the conditions that produce its central assumptions are with us once again, ushering in a period of modern barbarity that appears to be reaching towards homicidal extremes, especially in the United States.

The deep grammar of violence now shapes all aspects of cultural production and becomes visceral in its ongoing generation of domestic terrorism, mass shootings, the mass incarceration of people of colour, and the war on undocumented immigrants. Not only has it become more gratuitous, random, and in some cases trivialised through the monotony of repetition, it also serves as the official doctrine of the Trump administration in shaping its domestic and security policies.  Trump’s violence has become both promiscuous in its reach and emboldening in its nod to right-wing extremist groups. The mix of white nationalism and expansion of policies that benefit the rich, big corporations and the financial elite are increasingly legitimated and normalised in a new forms of public pedagogy that amount to a legitimation of what I have called neoliberal fascism.

Under such circumstances, critical pedagogy becomes a political and moral practice in the fight to revive civic literacy, civic culture, and a notion of shared citizenship. Politics losses its emancipatory possibilities if it cannot provide the educational conditions for enabling students and others to think against the grain and realize themselves as informed, critical, and engaged citizens. There is no radical politics without a pedagogy capable of awakening consciousness, challenging common sense, and creating modes of analysis in which people discover a moment of recognition that enables them to rethink the conditions that shape their lives.

As a matter of political and social responsibility, educators should do more than create the conditions for critical thinking and nourishing a sense of hope for their students. They also need to responsibly assume the role of civic educators within broader social contexts and be willing to share their ideas with other educators and the wider public by making use of new media technologies and traditional modes of communicating. Communicating to a variety of public audiences suggests using opportunities for writing, public talks, and media interviews offered by the radio, Internet, alternative magazines, and teaching young people and adults in alternative schools to name only a few. Capitalizing on their role as public intellectuals, educators can address the challenge of combining scholarship and commitment by using a vocabulary that is neither dull nor obtuse, while seeking to speak to a broader audience. More importantly, as teachers organize to assert the importance of their role and that of education in a democracy, they can forge new alliances and connections to develop social movements that include and expand beyond working with unions and traditional political formations.

Education operates as a crucial site of power in the modern world. If teachers are truly concerned about safeguarding education, they will have to take seriously how pedagogy functions on local and global levels. Critical pedagogy has an important role to play in both understanding and challenging how power, knowledge, and values are deployed, affirmed, and resisted within and outside of traditional discourses and cultural spheres.  In a local context, critical pedagogy becomes an important theoretical tool for understanding the institutional conditions that place constraints on the production of knowledge, learning, academic labor, social relations, and democracy itself.  Critical pedagogy also provides a discourse for engaging and challenging the construction of social hierarchies, identities, and ideologies as they traverse local and national borders. In addition, pedagogy as a form of production and critique offers a discourse of possibility—a way of providing students with the opportunity to link understanding to commitment, and social transformation to seeking the greatest possible justice.

This suggests that one of the most serious challenges facing teachers, artists, journalists, writers, and other cultural workers is the task of developing a discourse of both critique and possibility.  This means developing discourses and pedagogical practices that connect a critical reading the word with reading the world, and doing so in ways that enhance the creative capacities of young people and provide the conditions for them to become critical agents. In taking up this project, educators and others should attempt to create the conditions that give students the opportunity to become critical and engaged citizens who have the knowledge and courage to struggle in order to make desolation and cynicism unconvincing and hope practical. Hope in this instance is educational, removed from the fantasy of an idealism that is unaware of the constraints facing the dream of a radical democratic society. Educated hope is not a call to overlook the difficult conditions that shape both schools and the larger social order nor is it a blueprint removed from specific contexts and struggles. On the contrary, it is the precondition for providing those languages and values that point the way to imagining a future that does not replicate the nightmares of the present.

Educated hope provides the basis for dignifying the labor of teachers; it offers up critical knowledge linked to democratic social change, affirms shared responsibilities, and encourages teachers and students to recognize ambivalence and uncertainty as fundamental dimensions of learning.  Such hope offers the possibility of thinking beyond the given. As difficult as this task may seem to educators, if not to a larger public, it is a struggle worth waging.

In an age of poisonous capitalism and an emerging fascist politics, educators, students, and other concerned citizens face the challenge of providing a language that embraces a militant utopianism while constantly being attentive to those forces that seek to turn such hope into a new slogan or to punish and dismiss those who dare to look beyond the horizon of the given. Fascism breeds cynicism and is the enemy of a militant and social hope. Hope must be tempered by the complex reality of the times and viewed as a project and condition for providing a sense of collective agency, opposition, political imagination, and engaged participation. Without hope, even in the most dire times, there is no possibility for resistance, dissent, and struggle. Agency is the condition of struggle, and hope is the condition of agency. Hope expands the space of the possible and becomes a way of recognizing and naming the incomplete nature of the present.

Hope is the affective and intellectual precondition for individual and social struggle. Hope, not despair, is the precondition that encourages critique on the part of intellectuals in and outside of the academy who use the resources of theory to address pressing social problems. Hope is also at the root of the civic courage that translates critique into political practice. Hope as the desire for a future that offers more than the present becomes most acute when one’s life can no longer be taken for granted. Only by holding on to both critique and hope in such contexts will resistance make concrete the possibility for transforming politics into an ethical space and a public act. And a better future than the one we now expect to unfold will require nothing less than confronting the flow of everyday experience and the weight of social suffering with the force of individual and collective resistance and the unending project of democratic social transformation. At the same time, in order for resistance to take on the challenges posed by the rise of a fascist politics, it will have to develop an awakening of desire.  This form of educated desire is rooted in the dream of a collective consciousness and imagination fueled by the struggle for new forms of community that affirm the value of the social,  economic equality,  the social contract, and  democratic values and social relations.

The current fight against a nascent fascism across the globe is not only a struggle over economic structures or the commanding heights of corporate power. It is also a struggle over visions, ideas, consciousness, and the power to shift the culture itself.  It is also as Hannah Arendt points out a struggle against “a widespread fear of judging.” Without the ability to judge, it becomes impossible to recover words that have meaning, imagine alternative worlds and a future that does not mimic the dark times in which we live, and create a language that changes how we think about ourselves and our relationship to others.  Any struggle for a radical democratic socialist order will not take place if “the lessons from our dark past [cannot] be learned and transformed into constructive resolutions” and solutions for struggling for and creating a post-capitalist society.

In the end, there is no democracy without informed citizens and no justice without a language critical of injustice. Democracy begins to fail and political life becomes impoverished in the absence of those vital public spheres such as public and higher education in which civic values, public scholarship, and social engagement allow for a more imaginative grasp of a future that takes seriously the demands of justice, equity, and civic courage.  Democracy should be a way of thinking about education, one that thrives on connecting pedagogy to the practice of freedom, learning to ethics, and agency to the imperatives of social responsibility and the public good. Neoliberal capitalism strips hope of its utopian possibilities and thrives on the notion that we live in an era of foreclosed hope, and that any attempt to think otherwise will result in a nightmare.  Yet, the fact remains that without hope there is no agency and without collective agents, there is no hope of resistance. In the age of nascent fascism, it is not enough to connect education with the defense of reason, informed judgment, and critical agency; it must also be aligned with the power and potential of collective resistance. We live in dangerous times. Consequently, there is an urgent need for more individuals, institutions and social movements to come together in the belief that the current regimes of tyranny can be resisted, that alternative futures are possible and that acting on these beliefs through collective resistance will make radical change happen.

Notes.

I want to thank Dr. Rania Filippakou for her insightful editorial comments.

Peter Thompson, “The Frankfurt School, Part 5: Walter Benjamin, Fascism and the Future,” The Guardian(April 21, 2013). Online: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2013/apr/22/frankfurt-school-walter-benjamin-fascism-future

See, especially, Stuart Hall, Chapter 1: “The Neoliberal Revolution,” The Neoliberal Crisis, ed. Edited by Jonathan Rutherford and Sally Davison,[London: Lawrence Wishart 2012]. Online:  http://wh.agh.edu.pl/other/materialy/678_2015_04_21_22_04_51_The_Neoliberal_Crisis_Book.pdf; David Harvey: A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, (Princeton University Press, 2008). Wendy Brown, “Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, (New York: Zone Books, 2015).Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality(St. Martin’s Press, 2017); George Monbiot, Out of the Wreckage (Verso Press, 2017); Henry A. Giroux, American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism (City Lights 2018).

Charles Derber, Welcome to the Revolution: Universalizing Resistance For Social Justice and Democracy in Perilous Times(New York: Routledge, 2017). Heinrich Geiselberger, ed, The Great Regression (London: Polity, 2017).

Jon Nixon, “Hannah Arendt: Thinking Versus Evil,” Times Higher Education,(February 26, 2015). Online at: https://www.timeshighereducation.co.u...

See, for example, Jane Mayer, “The Making of the Fox News White House,” The New Yorker(March 4, 2019). Online: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/11/the-making-of-the-fox-news-white-house

Pankaj Mishra, “A Gandhian Stand Against the Culture of Cruelty,” The New York Review of Books,[May 22, 2018]. Online: http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/05/...

 Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Trade Publishers, New Edition, 2001).

Paul Gilroy, “Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line“, Chapter 4 -‘Hitler in Khakis: Icons, Propaganda, and Aesthetic Politics,’ (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 144-145, 146

Pankaj Mishra, “A Gandhian Stand Against the Culture of Cruelty,” The New York Review of Books,[May 22, 2018]. Online: http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/05/...

Joshua Sperling cited in Lisa Appignanesi, “Berger’s Ways of Being,” The New York Review of Books(May 9, 2019). Online: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019...

Cited in Roger Griffin, “Staging the Nation’s Rebirth: The Politics and Aesthetics of Performance in the Context of Fascist Studies,” in Gunter Berghaus, ed. Fascism and Theater: Comparative Studies on the Aesthetics and politics of Performance in Europe, 1925-1945.(Providence: Gerghahn Books, 1996). Online: https://www.libraryofsocialscience.com/ideologies/resources/griffin-staging-the-nations/

Paul Gilroy, Against Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 139.

Paul Gilroy, Against Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 139.

Paul Gilroy, Against Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 139.

Chiara Bottici in Cihan Aksan and Jon Bailes, eds. “One Question Fascism (Part One),” Is Fascism making a comeback?”  State of Nature Blog, [December 3, 2017]. Online: http://stateofnatureblog.com/one-question-fascism-part-one/

Henry A. Giroux, “The Nightmare of Neoliberal Fascism,” Truthout (June 10, 2018). Online: https://truthout.org/articles/henry-a-giroux-the-nightmare-of-neoliberal-fascism/

Hannah Arendt, “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” in Jerome Kohn, ed., Responsibility and Judgement, [NY: Schocken Books, 2003]. Online: https://grattoncourses.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/responsibility-under-a-dictatorship-arendt.pdf

Nicola Bertoldi, “Are we living through a new ‘Weimar era’?: Constructive resolutions for our future,” OpenDemocracy (January 3, 2018). Online: https://us1.campaign-archive.com/?e=d77f123300&u=9c663f765f28cdb71116aa9ac&id=367a142d39

Henry A. Giroux, The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Review of Books, 2019).

Public Safety, Civil Rights Groups Battle Over Face ID Tech

SAN FRANCISCO — San Francisco is on track to become the first U.S. city to ban the use of facial recognition by police and other city agencies, reflecting a growing backlash against a technology that’s creeping into airports, motor vehicle departments, stores, stadiums and home security cameras.

Government agencies around the U.S. have used the technology for more than a decade to scan databases for suspects and prevent identity fraud.

But recent advances in artificial intelligence have created more sophisticated computer vision tools, making it easier for police to pinpoint a missing child or protester in a moving crowd or for retailers to analyze shoppers’ facial expressions as they peruse store shelves.

Efforts to restrict its use are getting pushback from law enforcement groups and the tech industry, though it’s far from a united front. Microsoft, while opposed to an outright ban, has urged lawmakers to set limits on the technology, warning that leaving it unchecked could enable an oppressive dystopia reminiscent of George Orwell’s novel “1984.”

“Face recognition is one of those technologies that people get how creepy it is,” said Alvaro Bedoya, who directs Georgetown University’s Center on Privacy and Technology. “It’s not like cookies on a browser. There’s something about this technology that really sets the hairs on the back of people’s heads up.”

Without regulations barring law enforcement from accessing driver’s license databases, people who have never been arrested could be part of virtual police line-ups without their knowledge, skeptics of the technology say.

They worry people will one day not be able to go to a park, store or school without being identified and tracked.

Already, a handful of big box stores across the U.S. are trying out cameras with facial recognition that can guess their customers’ age, gender or mood as they walk by, with the goal of showing them targeted, real-time ads on in-store video screens.

If San Francisco adopts a ban, other cities, states or even Congress could follow, with lawmakers from both parties looking to curtail government surveillance and others hoping to restrict how businesses analyze the faces, emotions and gaits of an unsuspecting public.

The California Legislature is considering a proposal prohibiting the use of facial ID technology on body cameras. A bipartisan bill in the U.S. Senate would exempt police applications but set limits on businesses analyzing people’s faces without their consent.

Legislation similar to San Francisco’s is pending in Oakland, Calif., and on Thursday another proposed ban was introduced in Somerville, Mass.

Bedoya said a ban in San Francisco, the “most technologically advanced city in our country,” would send a warning to other police departments thinking of trying out the imperfect technology. But Daniel Castro, vice president of the industry-backed Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, said the ordinance is too extreme to serve as a model.

“It might find success in San Francisco, but I will be surprised if it finds success in a lot of other cities,” he said.

San Francisco is home to tech innovators such as Uber, Airbnb and Twitter, but the city’s relationship with the industry is testy. Some supervisors in City Hall are calling for a tax on stock-based compensation in response to a wave of San Francisco companies going public, including Lyft and Pinterest.

At the same time, San Francisco is big on protecting immigrants, civil liberties and privacy. In November, nearly 60% of voters approved a proposition to strengthen data privacy guidelines.

The city’s proposed face-recognition ban is part of broader legislation aimed at regulating the use of surveillance by city departments. The legislation applies only to San Francisco government and would not affect companies or people who want to use the technology. It also would not affect the use of facial recognition at San Francisco International Airport, where security is mostly overseen by federal agencies.

The Board of Supervisors is scheduled to vote on the bill Tuesday.

San Francisco police say they stopped testing face recognition in 2017. Spokesman David Stevenson said in a statement the department looks forward to “developing legislation that addresses the privacy concerns of technology while balancing the public safety concerns of our growing, international city.”

Supervisor Aaron Peskin acknowledges his legislation, called the “Stop Secret Surveillance Ordinance,” isn’t very tech-friendly. But public oversight is critical given the potential for abuse, he said.

The technology often misfires. Studies have shown error rates in facial-analysis systems built by Amazon, IBM and Microsoft were far higher for darker-skinned women than lighter-skinned men.

Even if facial recognition were perfectly accurate, its use would pose a severe threat to civil rights, especially in a city with a rich history of protest and expression, said Matt Cagle, attorney at the ACLU of Northern California.

“If facial recognition were added to body cameras or public-facing surveillance feeds, it would threaten the ability of people to go to a protest or hang out in Dolores Park without having their identity tracked by the city,” he said, referring to a popular park in San Francisco’s Mission District.

Local critics of San Francisco’s legislation, however, worry about hampering police investigations in a city with a high number of vehicle break-ins and several high-profile annual parades. They want to make sure police can keep using merchants and residents’ video surveillance in investigations without bureaucratic hassles.

Joel Engardio, vice president of grassroots group Stop Crime SF, wants the city to be flexible.

“Our point of view is, rather than a blanket ban forever, why not a moratorium so we’re not using problematic technology, but we open the door for when technology improves?” he said.

Such a moratorium is under consideration in the Massachusetts Legislature, where it has the backing of Republican and Democratic senators.

Often, a government’s facial recognition efforts happen in secret or go unnoticed. In Massachusetts, the motor vehicle registry has used the technology since 2006 to prevent driver’s license fraud, and some police agencies have used it as a tool for detectives.

“It is technology we use,” said Massachusetts State Police Lt. Tom Ryan, adding that “we tend not to get too involved in publicizing” that fact. Ryan and the agency declined to answer further questions about how it’s used.

Massachusetts Sen. Cynthia Creem, a Democrat and sponsor of the moratorium bill, said she worries about a lack of standards protecting the public from inaccurate or biased facial recognition technology. Until better guidelines exist, she said, “it shouldn’t be used” by government.

The California Highway Patrol does not use face recognition technology, spokeswoman Fran Clader said.

California Department of Motor Vehicles spokesman Marty Greenstein says facial recognition technology “is specifically not allowed on DMV photos.” State Justice Department spokeswoman Jennifer Molina said her agency does not use face ID technology, and policy states “DOJ and requesters shall not maintain DMV images for the purpose of creating a database” unless authorized.

Legislators also sought a face recognition moratorium this year in Washington, the home state of Microsoft and Amazon, but it was gutted following industry and police opposition. Microsoft instead backed a lighter-touch proposal as part of a broader data privacy bill, but deliberations stalled before lawmakers adjourned late last month.

___

O’Brien reported from Providence, Rhode Island.

Over a Million Americans Have HIV, CDC Reports

HIV/AIDS is on the rise in America again in 2019.

According to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, almost 1.1 million Americans ages 13 and over have HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

A decade ago, the spread of HIV/AIDS was declining in America and internationally. In 2009, the World Health Organization reported that cases had declined 17% over the previous eight years.

Now, according to a May article in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM): “The United States has been unable to reduce the number of new HIV infections below a startling 38,000 to 40,000 per year.”

Advances in the development of antiretroviral drugs, the NEJM reports, “has transformed HIV infection from a ‘death sentence’ to a chronic and manageable condition”—at least for people with access to those drugs. The authors also point to successful prevention methods, including needle exchanges for intravenous drug users, and pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), a method where people at high risk for HIV take two antiretroviral drugs daily to lower their risk.

Progress slowed in 2013. Since then, according to the CDC, approximately 39,000 per year have been infected. As the NEJM explains,

HIV affects the most vulnerable among us. More than two thirds of new infections occur among people who are economically disenfranchised or ethnic, racial, or sexual minorities. In 2017, of new infections reported in U.S. men, 56% were in black and Latino men who have sex with men, a group that represents less than 1% of the U.S. population. HIV prevalence is much higher among transgender women than among the general population, and women of color bear most of the burden of HIV among U.S. women.

Making the situation worse, the article continues, is a lack of access to treatment. For example, “less than 20% of Americans who could benefit from PrEP have received it.”

In his Feb. 5 State of the Union address to Congress, President Trump called for an end to the AIDS epidemic in America. He announced two goals to do so: 1) to get every American with the disease onto three antiretroviral drugs and 2) to get those at a high risk for AIDS on PrEP.

The CDC agrees that these approaches are effective. Linda Searing of The Washington Post explains that “people who start [antiretroviral] treatment early and take it regularly as prescribed can reduce, and possibly eliminate, their chances of transmitting HIV to others and generally can live long, healthy lives.”

Two problems: Will Trump’s promise move beyond this one speech, and will recent treatments, which can cost up to $39,000 per year, according to Kaiser Health News, benefit anyone who doesn’t currently have access to them?

As The New York Times reported in March, “reaching those goals will take a huge amount of money — far more than the $291 million Mr. Trump requested in his 2020 budget proposal. Moreover, it will require courageous political leadership, not just from the White House, but from every statehouse and city hall in the nation.”

Meanwhile, In 2017, almost 16,000 people died from AIDS. Read the full CDC report here.

Burgeoning Numbers of Cubans Trying to Enter U.S. via Mexico

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico — Burgeoning numbers of Cubans are trying to get into the U.S. by way of the Mexican border, creating a big backlog of people waiting on the Mexican side for months for their chance to apply for asylum.

The surge over the past several months has been propelled in part by loosened travel restrictions in Central America and deteriorating living conditions in Cuba.

As a result, about 4,500 asylum seekers, the vast majority of them Cuban, have descended on Ciudad Juarez, across from El Paso, Texas — an influx that has raised tensions with some locals.

“It’s a bottleneck with an opening that is getting smaller,” said Enrique Valenzuela, an official of Mexico’s Chihuahua state, which manages Juarez’s waiting list. “People keep coming.”

For decades during the Cold War and beyond, Cubans tried to reach the U.S. by air, land and sea, many of them crossing the 90 miles to Florida in dangerously rickety boats and rafts.

In January 2017, though, the U.S. ended its “wet-foot, dry-foot” policy of almost automatically admitting any Cuban who managed to reach American soil. For many Cubans, their best option is going to the U.S.-Mexican border and claiming asylum.

For many years, Cubans entering through the southern border generally flew to South America and tried to come into the U.S. at Laredo, Texas. But now many are using a relatively new and shorter route: They fly to Panama or Nicaragua, pay smugglers to help them reach the U.S. border, and seek to come across at El Paso.

In the seven-month period from October through April, 4,737 Cubans without legal status entered the U.S. at crossings in Customs and Border Protection’s El Paso field office, compared with 394 in the previous 12 months. Along the entire U.S.-Mexico border, 10,910 Cubans came through official crossings between October and April, versus 7,079 in the previous 12 months.

Migrants applying for asylum are often released into the U.S. while their cases make their way through immigration courts, which can take years. But for Cubans, it’s easier to settle in the United States than for others.

Communist Cuba refuses to fully cooperate with the U.S. on deportations, meaning that if the migrants lose their asylum cases, Cuba generally doesn’t take them back. The U.S. then has little choice but to let them stay.

For Cubans and others, one of the biggest obstacles is simply getting an opportunity to apply for asylum. Over the last year, the Trump administration has sharply limited the number of asylum claims it processes at land crossings, forcing people to wait their turn in Mexico.

At the current processing rate, the wait in Juarez is now up to five months, compared with only a few days as recently as February.

Panama became known in recent years as a relatively easy source of visas for Cubans who could make a convincing case that they only wanted to shop and return to sell goods in Cuba. Panama has a free trade zone where Cubans splurge on everything from shampoo to air conditioners and electric motorbikes.

Also, in October, Panama began issuing $20 tourist cards to Cuban business people and certain others, replacing a longer, more difficult process that often ended in rejection.

In January, Nicaragua made it faster and easier for Cubans to obtain a visa in Havana by eliminating the requirement that applications be approved in Nicaragua’s capital.

Meanwhile, a drop in Venezuelan aid and the U.S. hardening of the trade embargo against Cuba have created food shortages and a sense of crisis on the island. Young people in particular are lining up outside any embassy that will grant them a visa.

Friends told Yaneisi Hernandez of Havana that Juarez was safer than other Texas crossings, that it had a strong network of charitable groups and, most important, that the wait to claim asylum in the U.S. was comparatively short. After flying to Nicaragua and paying a smuggler to reach the U.S. border by bus, taxi, on foot and on horseback, she was disappointed to find 3,500 names ahead of hers.

“I can’t even think about working here because I might get deported,” said Hernandez, 39, after spending her first night in Juarez sleeping with other Cubans on a patch of grass outside the government office where asylum seekers are assigned numbers while they wait.

Cubans arriving in Juarez last month said they paid smugglers about $2,000 to reach the U.S. border, plus $150 to $400 in the southern Mexico border city of Tapachula for a lawyer to obtain a court order allowing them to travel legally through Mexico. They waited about three weeks in Tapachula for legal permission to stay in Mexico.

The surge of Cubans has been so big that Juarez restaurants have added Cuban favorites like roast suckling pig and black beans with rice to their menus.

Unlike Central Americans, many of whom are fleeing are extreme poverty and arrive with little more than the shirts on their backs, many Cubans can afford a cheap hotel or rented room if migrant shelters don’t have space, aided by relatives in the U.S. They buy cellphones for their short time in Mexico, which they use to check a Facebook group that gives twice-daily updates on the waiting list. Cuban men can be distinguished by their spotless sneakers, track suits and aviator sunglasses.

Some Juarez residents are wary.

Casa del Migrante, which houses up to 1,000 people in its shelter, banned Cubans earlier this year because they didn’t mix well with Central Americans and didn’t follow the rules, said manager Blanca Rivera.

“They didn’t like our food,” she said. “You have to make exceptions for them. They want rice, meat sandwiches, they want pizza. … That attitude is not welcome in migrant shelters.”

Some Cubans are also souring on Juarez.

About 10 Cubans pursuing asylum gathered near a phone charging bank one Friday night at the El Paso airport to wait for a 6 a.m. flight to Miami. After flying to Panama and reaching Juarez in early February, Arnoldo Garcia, a Havana electrician, said he waited only two days to claim asylum in El Paso.

After about two months in U.S. detention, Garcia, 47, was released with an appointment slip for immigration officials in Miami. He said he wouldn’t recommend Juarez to anyone contemplating the journey.

“There are too many people,” he said. “It’s become a lot more complicated.”

___

Weissenstein reported from Havana, Cuba.

Facts Don’t Care About Ben Shapiro’s Feelings

Last week, Ben Shapiro, the conservative commentator whom The New York Times once dubbed “the cool kid’s philosopher,” went on the BBC to promote his new book, “The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great.” There, he faced off against Andrew Neil, a ruddy, prehistoric Scottish Tory and former Rupert Murdoch protégé. The segment quickly went viral.

Neil isn’t a cagey interviewer or a particularly incisive one, but whereas the American conservative tendency is toward mawkish, self-pitying grievance, the British conservative mode tends to relentlessly condescending hostility. American popular media has no such characters; some of its conservative figures—a Tucker Carlson, say—can be hectoring, but they lack the fetish for cringing awkwardness that the British seem to love so much, and in any case, they are professionally committed to providing a friendly forum for the Ben Shapiros of the world.

Neil asked a few broadly challenging, although not especially pointed, questions. He did not ask his subject to explain the irony of his book’s hyperbolic title: Shapiro has at least twice disavowed the very notion of a “right side of history,” which he called “the most morally idiotic phrase of modern times.”

He did ask if an abortion ban like the one recently passed in Georgia takes us back to “the dark ages?” He asked: What are Judeo-Christian values? Shapiro grew increasingly flustered, accused the chuckling, famously conservative host of liberal bias, and eventually stormed out of the interview. Poor Ben forgot the core advice of Rule #2 (“Hit First”) of Ben Shapiro’s own “How to Debate Leftists and Destroy Them: 11 Rules for Winning the Argument”: “You have to know your opponent. You have to know what he’s going to say, what his favorite tactics are, and what his default positions will be. You need to learn your opposition inside-out.”

The liberal internet lit up in gleeful schadenfreude. “Andrew Neil DESTROYS Ben Shapiro.” Would that it were so. As always in these hopped-up internet-era contretemps, everyone emerges entirely unscathed and goes right back to doing exactly what they were doing before. Andrew Neil will continue to perform a curmudgeon’s insulting incredulity, and Ben Shapiro will continue to misunderstand the common conventions of pronoun usage for an audience of angry and frustrated young men.

Ben Shapiro began his career as a conservative wunderkind, and he still plays the child prodigy, trading on his boyish looks even as he edges into a weary middle age. Though he is an author in the sense that Ann Coulter is an author, hastily patching together compendia of liberal outrages and Democratic skullduggeries, he’s probably best recognized as a YouTube sensation and campus speaker. During these screeds, he makes a series of banally un-PC remarks—affirmative action is bad; transgender people are mentally ill—before jumping into sprawling debates with college students, whom he destroys with logic and reason. Videos of these encounters swiftly find their way online, where they are breathlessly promoted under the phrase: Ben Shapiro DESTROYS Liberal Snowflakes. It’s become a meme.

In the wake of Shapiro’s embarrassing performance, I went back through a few hours of those reputation-making campus colloquies. They were not what I had been led to believe. For every teary purple-haired progressive who breaks down in the face of Shapiro’s deliberate callousness, there are dozens and dozens of kids who get to the mic, ask a question, listen to Shapiro filibuster, and sit back down.

Watching these videos in their entirety is an intensely dull experience. The famous instances of Shapiro’s incisive wit are mostly non sequiturs. Saying you cannot magically change your sex because you cannot magically change your age, to dissect just one, is a little like saying you cannot change your marital status because you remain the same height or come out as bi because of an old sports injury. (Besides, age may be the single dumbest example of an immutable lifelong condition. A choice? Perhaps not. But you are literally never the same age.)

Shapiro’s most famous dictum is: Facts don’t care about your feelings. It is meant to be a grand epistemological pronouncement, the equivalent of Ayn Rand chiseling A is A on the cornerstone of Objectivism. But Rand—for all her flaws as a person and a thinker—had a genuine belief in her own messianism and this gave her axioms the rhetorical force of prophecy. She was an atheist, but she had faith, if only in herself.

Shapiro, by contrast, evinces no such moral grandeur, despite his personal religiosity and public appeals to the divine provenance of truth and morality. “Facts don’t care about your feelings” is lazy pathetic fallacy, and it is far less a moral principle than a convenient excuse, the sort of thing a grouchy father tells his teenage daughter when he’s done something careless and stupid and made her cry. It is the material form of the platonic ideal of a non-apology: I’m sorry if you’re upset.

Ben Shapiro is a tragic figure. Maybe I think so only out of a sense that there but for the grace of God go I. I see a lot of myself in him: a too-smart, too-precocious kid who tried too soon to be friends with adults, because he could not connect to his adolescent peers. But an adolescent can’t really be friends with his teachers and his parents’ friends—the gulfs of age, experience, of sex and love and parenthood, are too great. And there is a powerful temptation to let these disconnections curdle into a bidirectional contempt. You go away to college, but even there, you resent your peers because you secretly desire the messy, contradictory freedoms of a process of self-discovery, which you actively deny to yourself. You resent your new teachers when they ask you to question many of the things you’ve learned, because you believe you discovered all your knowledge by yourself.

In this fashion, Shapiro has disproven his own dictum. He has chosen his own age, and he has chosen to be very old. The child prodigy has fixed himself for life in an angry second childhood, a senescence marked by growing anger at all the accumulated changes in the world. A part of him still apprehends all the extraordinary potential for a life of discovery and change, but sorrow and regret seem like frailty, so he is stuck being angry and mean. That is why he’s so popular among a certain kind of conservative. All the external targets of their vicious scorn are projections of a seething internal anger at the opportunities for happiness and surprise that they deny themselves because they mistake them for weakness.

He should take his own advice. History doesn’t care. You can stand athwart it, yelling Stop, until your throat bleeds, but it will just flow on around you and past you with total indifference, and then what will you be? Just another old man telling a roomful of teenagers to toughen up. That isn’t iconoclastic, and it isn’t brave. It’s boring.

House GOP Focusing on Women, Minorities for 2020 Challengers

WASHINGTON — Top Republicans are hunting district-by-district for just the right candidates — women and minorities in many cases — to help them recapture the House six months after a political tidal wave swept Democrats into control of the most diverse majority in history.

Among the recruits are a Republican woman in the Oklahoma state Senate and a black political novice from Houston with Iraq combat experience and three Ivy League degrees on his resume. They are part of the GOP drive to gain at least 18 seats in the 2020 elections to win the majority — historically a tall order for the party out of power in presidential election years.

Finding women and minority candidates is an imperative for an overwhelmingly white GOP openly embarrassed that just 13 of its 197 House members are women. By contrast, 89 of the 235 House Democrats are women and nearly 90 are black or Hispanic.

But Republicans want challengers with other qualities too, following a 2018 election that saw the GOP lose 31 districts that President Donald Trump had won just two years earlier, many in moderate suburbs.

Desirable attributes include an ability to woo moderate GOP voters who’ve turned against Trump, whose name will be atop the ballot. In some districts they want political outsiders without voting records to attack, in others it’s political veterans with a proven ability to win votes. Enticing personal stories and an aptitude for raising money also help.

“You will see a party that’s reflective of the entire nation. That would mean from gender to race to others, but it will also show that we can compete in every single district,” said House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif.

GOP leaders like potential challengers including Young Kim, who wants a rematch against the freshman Democrat who badly outspent her but only narrowly defeated her last year in increasingly diverse Orange County, California; Karen Handel, elected to the House in an expensive 2017 special election, only to lose re-election last November by 3,000 votes; and Tom Kean Jr., who’s seeking a House seat in western New Jersey and hopes the popularity of his father, moderate former Gov. Tom Kean, will outweigh the state’s antipathy to Trump.

McCarthy says he’s met with over 30 contenders, of whom nearly 6 in 10 are women and nearly half are minorities. Rep. Susan Brooks, R-Ind., recruitment chief for the National Republican Congressional Committee, the House GOP’s campaign arm, says more than 130 women have contacted the committee about running. One group called Winning for Women and another, E-PAC, formed by Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., are also seeking female GOP candidates.

So far, Republicans haven’t matched Democrats’ ability to attract women candidates. According to data collected by The Associated Press through noon last Monday, just 38 of 172 declared Republican House challengers were women, around 1 in 5. That compared to 84 of 222 declared House Democratic challengers, nearly 2 in 5.

Democrats scoff that GOP efforts will flop because Americans care less about candidates’ attributes than about issues like buttressing health care and wages.

“You can have all the interesting stories in the world, you can have an interesting background,” said Rep. A. Donald McEachin, D-Va., a candidate recruiter for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, House Democrats’ political organ. He said if Republicans ignore people’s problems “and as long as you’ve got Donald Trump wrapped around your neck, we don’t have a whole lot to worry about.”

Democrats are already compiling GOP recruits’ weaknesses, including past statements, underwhelming fundraising starts and districts’ changing demographics. And there are no guarantees that Republican recruits will survive GOP primaries and be nominated.

Still, leaders are finding contenders like Wesley Hunt, a black West Point graduate and former Army Apache helicopter pilot who fought in Iraq and has three Cornell University master’s degrees. He would oppose freshman Rep. Lizzie Fletcher in Houston’s suburbs.

“As an African-American conservative man who grew up in a conservative suburban home, my values just align very well with the suburbs of Houston,” said Hunt, 37. He traveled to Washington last week so McCarthy could introduce him to potential donors in his first run for public office.

“You’re a West Point graduate, you served your nation. That’s going to give somebody an advantage over somebody that’s been in the legislature,” McCarthy said.

In other areas, Republicans hope women like Oklahoma GOP state Sen. Stephanie Bice would oust female Democrats like freshman Rep. Kendra Horn. Horn squeaked past a male GOP incumbent last November in a district around Oklahoma City that Trump carried in 2016 by 40,000 votes.

Bice, 45, said she’s spoken to McCarthy and other Republican leaders and was traveling to Washington last week for further meetings. “I get the impression that they’re really interested,” she said.

In one district encompassing Staten Island and part of Brooklyn, GOP leaders are touting Nicole Malliotakis, a state assemblywoman and New York City’s only elected Republican. She’s half Cuban and half Greek, lost a 2017 mayoral race but did well in that district and has reported raising $300,000 — a decent start in a race that could cost nearly 20 times that amount.

Republican leaders expect Sara Hart Weir, 37, to seek a House district that includes Kansas City, Kansas. Weir until recently was president of the National Down Syndrome Society, which gives her fundraising experience and familiarity with health issues. She says she’s met McCarthy and nearly every GOP congresswoman and would challenge freshman Democratic Rep. Sharice Davids, one of Congress’ first Native American women.

“I don’t see why they wouldn’t want somebody with my background, my results and my leadership to raise their hand and step forward,” Weir said.

Escalating U.S.-China Trade War Sends Stocks Plunging

NEW YORK — U.S. stocks moved sharply lower Monday on Wall Street and extended the market’s slide into a second week as investors seek shelter from an escalating trade war between the U.S. and China.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 index each fell more than 2% as investors sold trade-sensitive shares. Chipmakers led the big declines in technology while heavy equipment makers Deere and Caterpillar drove losses in the industrial sector.

The world’s largest economies had seemed on track to resolve the ongoing trade dispute that has raised prices for consumers and pinched corporate profit margins. Investor confidence that the two sides were close to a resolution had helped push the market to its best yearly start in decades.

Those hopes are now being dashed and replaced by concerns that the trade war could crimp what is otherwise a mostly healthy economy. Analysts have warned that failed trade talks and the deterioration in relations will put a dent in the U.S. and China’s economic prospects.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average dove 612 points, or 2.4%, to 25,332 as of 12:15 p.m. Eastern Time. Boeing and Apple fell the most in the Dow. Both companies get a significant amount of revenue from China and stand to lose heavily if the trade war drags on.

The broader S&P 500 index fell 2.5%. The benchmark index is coming off its worst week since December, but is still up sharply for the year. The Nasdaq fell 3.3%, on track for its biggest daily loss of the year.

Technology stocks are bearing the heaviest losses. Apple fell 5.4% and Cisco fell 3.9%. Chipmakers and other technology companies have warned that uncertainty over the trade war’s outcome is prompting a slowdown in orders.

Bank stocks also fell sharply. Bank of America shed 4% and JPMorgan Chase fell 2.4%.

Safe-play holdings were the only winners as traders sought to reduce their exposure to risk. Utilities were the only sector to rise on the stock market, and prices for U.S. government bonds, which are considered ultra-safe investments, rose sharply, sending yields lower. The yield on the 10-year Treasury fell to 2.40% from 2.45% late Friday.

Overseas markets also fell. European indexes were down a bit more than 1%. In Asia, the Shanghai Composite index fell 1.2%. Japan’s Nikkei 225 index gave up 0.7% and South Korea’s Kospi fell 1.4%.

Trade talks between the U.S. and China concluded Friday with no agreement and with the U.S. increasing import tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese goods to 25% from 10%. Officials also said they were preparing to expand tariffs to cover another $300 billion of goods.

China on Monday announced tariff increases on $60 billion of US imports.

Analysts have said investors should prepare for a more volatile stock market while the trade dispute deepens. Many are still confident that both sides will eventually reach a deal.

“Since we see a trade accord being reached in the not-too-distant future, we don’t expect the market to endure more than a short-lived spate of indigestion,” said Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist at CFRA.

The deteriorating trade negotiations follow what has been a mostly calm period of trading where solid economic data and corporate earnings helped push the market steadily higher. The S&P 500 is still up 12.2% of the year with technology stocks blowing away rest of the market with 18.4% gains.

Investors have so far made it through the bulk of first quarter corporate earnings reports in decent shape. Earlier in the year they had expected earnings to severely contract, but results so far show less than a 1% drop in profit.

The escalating trade war threatens to spoil an expected earnings recovery in the second half, however.

“Investors are increasingly worried an anticipated second-half profit rebound may now evaporate as President (Donald) Trump’s threat to tariff the remaining $325 billion in Chinese imports would disproportionately target consumer products like iPhones, thereby posing a greater threat to the consumption-driven US economy,” said Alec Young, managing director of global markets research at FTSE Russell.

Elsewhere in the market, generic drug developers are sinking after many of them were accused of artificially inflating and manipulating prices. The lawsuit from attorneys general in more than 40 states alleges that for many years the makers of generic drugs worked together to fix prices.

Teva, which was specifically mentioned, fell 16.1%. Mylan fell 9.4%

Ride-sharing company Uber fell another 10.1% on its first full day of trading following its rocky debut on the stock market Friday. The stock had priced at $45 at its initial public offering but is now trading just below $38.

Gold mining companies were some of the few stocks making gains amid the broad market slump. Newmont Goldcorp rose 1.9%.

Louisiana’s Million-Dollar Charter School Scam

This story was produced by FOX8 WVUE, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune and WWNO New Orleans Public Radio as part of Reveal’s Local Labs initiative, which supports lasting investigative reporting collaborations in communities across the United States.

Since 2007, Carlie Care Kids has run a child care out of a couple of nondescript converted townhouses in Terrytown, Louisiana. Now it’s gearing up for a big switch: This fall it will become an elementary school for up to 39 kindergarteners and first graders.

It will be done with the help of taxpayers. The school even advertises itself to parents as “free kindergarten.” Yet, like they do for dozens other private schools in Louisiana, state education officials asked Carlie Care to do very little to become eligible to take students paying with public vouchers.

Its owners basically had to fill a 16-page document with straightforward questions, many satisfied with yes/no answers. By contrast, when Arise Academy in New Orleans recently applied to become a charter school, it had to prepare a 174-page packet with questions about financial soundness, curriculum and teacher’s qualifications that demanded encyclopedic answers.

The discrepancy is by design. While public schools must meet rigorous standards and charters must face serious state scrutiny before being approved, the dozens of private schools in the Louisiana Scholarship Program faced barely a review from education officials in order to get public money, according to an investigation by NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune, WVUE Fox 8 News, WWNO and Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.

Voucher-program schools and charters both offer the same promise: They give parents a publicly funded education, outside of the traditional public school system.

The lack of scrutiny for private voucher schools is one of the reasons for problems with the scholarship program, according to Andre Perry, a Brookings Institution fellow who holds a doctorate in education policy and leadership and formerly led the University of New Orleans Charter School Network.

“This is shameful,” Perry said when presented with the voucher application. “If you’re not vetting schools on the front end, then you’re really not trying to establish quality on the back end.”

John White, the state’s education superintendent, declined multiple requests for an interview about the voucher program.

Ann Duplessis, a former state senator from New Orleans who was one of the architects of the voucher program, said questions about a private school’s curriculum and teaching methods should be part of the application process. She also said voucher schools that fail to perform academically can be sanctioned by the state.

Gov. Bobby Jindal expanded the Louisiana Scholarship Program in 2012 with the promise of providing great education to low-income students. The $40 million-a-year program allows parents to remove their children from struggling and middling public schools and instead use a public subsidy to enroll in a participating private school.

The news organizations’ investigation found that the program has failed to live up to its billing.

For the 2017-18 school year, there were around 6,900 voucher students enrolled in 122 private and parochial schools across the state, with the heaviest concentration – 36 percent – in New Orleans. The investigation by the news organizations found that year two-thirds of all voucher students attended school with a D or F grade.

Not a single school in the voucher program received an A or B grade in the 2017-18 school year, according to the analysis. Three received a C. Of the remaining schools, 19 got a D and 15 got an F, based on the Louisiana Department of Education rating system. The scores are based only on testing of voucher students – student who are not on vouchers are not tested.

For some of the schools, the vouchers have become a lifeline, supporting most of their enrollment. In 2017-18, a total 12 private and parochial schools had voucher student enrollments of 85 percent or more. Many other schools had at least 50 percent voucher student enrollments.

In filling out the forms, Carlie Care Kids merely did what voucher program officials asked them to do. In a statement Thursday, owner and director Monique Rouege said the school is one of the most successful and highest-rated childhood centers in Louisiana.

“After extensive research, we have decided to expand our services by offering a Kindergarten program in the Fall of 2019 as a way to ensure school readiness for our students. We believe that beginning the primary school process in a smaller, more intimate setting is a better way to transition children as opposed to thrusting them in larger, overcrowded settings,” Rouege’s statement said.

Voucher officials demands little of schools like Carlie Care.

The form, for example, asks: “What standards for student learning did the school use to design its curriculum?” Carlie Care’s answer took all of two sentences: “Currently, Carlie Care Kids uses Frog Street Curriculum & Programs for our pre-school children. For the 2019-2020 school year, when we implement our kindergarten and 1st grade programs, we will use Common Core Standards for those grades.”

That pales in comparison to the scrutiny charter schools face before they can take students, a close examination that accountability advocates have championed as a way to shield kids from bad operators.

The charter process demands detailed information on the educational program and curriculum of the applying school – data that in the case of Arise Academy required 40 pages. The voucher application asks so little in that topic that it took Carlie Care less than one page to respond.

Those wanting to run a charter school must provide in-depth details on instruction methods, philosophy and a vision for the future of the school. It must explain in detail professional development strategies, financial plans and accountability goals. Biographies for school leaders must dig deep into their qualifications.

Carlie Care Kids’ documentation for the voucher program, which state officials said was approved by the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education in January, did not include such detailed information.

State education leaders must tour would-be charter schools before approving them. But the law that created the voucher program and state policies for it, do not require site visits for voucher program participation.

How is your child’s voucher school performing?

Many schools don’t have letter grades because Louisiana only reports test scores for schools with at least 10 scholarship students per grade level. But most students in the program are concentrated in schools that did report. We calculated letter grades based on each school’s SCI score, which the Louisiana Department of Education says is comparable to the scores used to calculate public school letter grades.

Since Jindal expanded the program in 2012, every private or parochial school that has sought state permission to take vouchers has gotten it, according to the education department. Even the state’s own documents explaining the process to would be participants say schools do not apply for the voucher program; they notify the education department of their intent to participate.

Orleans Parish School Board member Woody Koppel said charter schools take a proactive approach to accountability. For voucher schools, it’s more reactionary, he said.

“We should hold (voucher) schools to the same standards,” Koppel said.

Perry says the discrepancy between the process for charters and voucher schools is one of the major flaws with the program. He said private schools seeking to accept voucher students should face the same scrutiny as charter schools, the expansion of which were also part of the sweeping overhaul of primary and secondary education put in place seven years ago.

Perry spent 13 years in New Orleans as education leader and is the father of two children who attended private schools in the city. A David M. Rubenstein Fellow in the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings, his research focuses primarily on race and structural inequality, education and economic inclusion. He founded the College of Urban Education at Davenport University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and was an associate professor of educational leadership at the University of New Orleans, serving as CEO of the Capital One-University of New Orleans Charter Network.

Having participated in completing charter applications for two schools in New Orleans, Perry said it can take up to a year to prepare the documentation. He compared it to writing a book.

“You have to demonstrate financial fitness, educational fitness. You have to show the capacity to teach, to hire people … all of those things,” Perry said. “You go through the rigors because kids are worth it.”

Of the voucher schools, he added: “If they’re not going through that same type of application process and it’s not made public, we’re really putting students at risk.”

Is Facebook Betting Big on Brexit?

Facebook has chosen London as the center to expand the operations of its WhatsApp messaging service, as the company seeks to establish new methods of monetizing its operations, especially as existing revenue sources increasingly come under political and regulatory attack. The timing of the announcement is as interesting as the choice of venue. Perhaps Facebook is taking a view on the likely outcome of the longstanding Brexit divorce between the UK and European Union, as well as pointing to the kind of economy to which Britain will evolve once the separation is finalized. If the latter points to a country that may become known as a “European Singapore,” effectively embracing a widespread form of regulatory arbitrage, what does that mean for other sectors, notably financial services?

Since the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, Facebook has been under sustained attack. That the company has not yet encountered a direct legislative/regulatory threat to its overall business model stems largely from the fact that there has been no overriding consensus as to how best to deal with it. Certainly, in hearings with the Facebook CEO last year, Congress displayed complete cluelessness in terms of understanding the main business, let alone having any concept of constructing adequate regulation for the company.

As viscerally appealing as “break it up” might be, how does Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes’ proposal to break up Facebook into smaller entities help deal with the company’s abuse of private data, given Hughes’ point that Mark Zuckerberg alone “can decide how to configure Facebook’s algorithms to determine what people see in their News Feeds, what privacy settings they can use and even which messages get delivered”? And do early 20th-century regulatory structures truly address the issues raised by a 21st-century business unlike anything ever contemplated by John Sherman and his fellow trust-busters? Hughes himself concedes that “[c]ompetition alone wouldn’t necessarily spur privacy protection” because even if Facebook were broken up and consumers had the option of moving to alternative platforms, the underlying problem of potential privacy abuse remains.

Equally interesting is to probe Facebook’s decision to expand its UK operations for WhatsApp at a time when the flow of business is going in the opposite direction as Brexit has gone from idle concept to a realistic probability. Of particular interest from Facebook’s perspective is the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, a law specifically designed to prevent the unauthorized dissemination and sale of individuals’ private data. The legislation “requires a higher standard of consent for using some types of data, and broadens the rights individuals have for accessing and transferring their data.”

How “Brexit-y” will the United Kingdom become if and when the divorce from the EU is finalized? Certainly, a significant proportion of the governing Conservative Party in Britain is viscerally opposed to the establishment of a permanent Customs Union with the EU, as it would effectively lock the UK into the EU’s regulatory ambit (in order to comply with the rules governing the Customs Union), without giving the UK any inputs into rule formulation. “A rule-taker, not a rule-maker” is the common criticism leveled against this form of “soft Brexit.” Many leading Brexiters, notably perpetual Conservative Party leadership aspirant, Boris Johnson, argue that Britain should aim to become “the Singapore of Europe,” a low tax regime, shorn of many of the so-called “burdensome regulations” that allegedly characterize the sclerotic EU, goes the argument.

However much Mark Zuckerberg appears to have become a born-again privacy advocate, it would certainly be convenient from his company’s perspective if one byproduct of Facebook’s expansion into the UK was to help aspects of its growing business empire avoid being subject to onerous fines in the event of non-compliance with the EU’s newly promulgated privacy laws. Those fines could be quite significant, as Facebook itself already recognizes: “up to 4% of global annual revenue for certain violations.”

Facebook innocently states that the rationale for the selection of London is that the city “attracts a multicultural workforce from many of the countries where the app is widely used, such as India.” But if the EU’s efforts to devise a robust regulatory response to the abuse of privacy data are effectively circumvented by expansion into a post-Brexit UK (which in turn becomes an economy with a much lower regulatory threshold), how convenient that would be for the company.

The issue certainly extends well beyond Facebook and privacy concerns. There are already ample signs that the UK’s huge financial services industry is securing carve outs from the general provisions of any future EU-UK trade deal. UK financial services companies have already secured continued access to European markets after Brexit, the rationale being that the financial companies will be governed by provisions featuring “regulatory equivalence,” a happily vague term giving ample scope for regulatory discretion. This ambiguity stands in stark contrast to the hard line that the EU is embracing when it comes to enforcing the existing rules of its trading club in regard to other facets of the Brexit negotiations. That big finance has been able to secure these carve outs is a testament to its ongoing power to ride roughshod over any serious attempts to regulate it, which is sadly ironic, considering the extent of its socially polluting activities (which became vividly clear post-2008).

So a seemingly innocuous expansion announcement might actually tell us much more, in terms of both signaling Facebook’s future plans, and also the future of the UK itself in a post-Brexit world. It is indeed ironic for a once great imperial power that the highest aspiration for many of its leading political figures today seems to be to replicate a small city-state, embracing the lowest common regulatory denominator as a potential future growth strategy, all the while ignoring all of the attendant risks in the process.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

The Earth Just Eclipsed a Terrifying Threshold

This piece originally appeared on Informed Comment.

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration measures atmospheric carbon dioxide at its Moana Loa observatory. You can see that on May 11 we were just about at 415 parts per million of CO2. A couple of days this week, we’ve gone over 415. When I say that, you should run screaming like a tsunami is coming over the horizon with mayhem on its mind. 415 is bigger than a million tsunamis. We put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere when we drive gasoline autos or burn coal or natural gas for heating.

May 11: 414.75 ppm

May 10: 414.26 ppm

May 09: 414.23 ppm

May 08: 414.50 ppm

May 07: 414.24 ppm

Last Updated: May 12, 2019

(The chart above shows that we have, scarily, added about 100 ppm only since 1960. This process is speeding up, folks.)

We Americans are spewing 6 billion metric tons of the stuff into the atmosphere every year. An active volcano like Mt. Etna is putting out 5.8 million tons of CO2 every year. So we Americans are like 1,000 active, erupting volcanoes, all day, every day, every year, year after year.

In contrast, there are only about 19 active volcanoes putting out significant emissions in the whole world as we speak. They’d need to increase by a factor of 50 just to match American output, and China puts more CO2 out there than we do.

The last time the earth saw 415 parts per million of CO2 was the Pliocene era between 3 and 5 million years ago.

We cannot see the full effects of 415 yet. The oceans are very deep and very cold, and it will take thousands of years for them fully to absorb the extra heat being trapped on earth by carbon dioxide and methane.

But that’s the big bang and will take a while. We are already seeing significant climate emergencies, and the effects of the CO2 have been visible since at least the beginning of the 20th century. The American southwest has seen a century of unusual dryness, and the monsoons in India have been wetter and more destructive, over the past century. These trends will increase dramatically in coming years.

In the Pliocene, it was much hotter.

In the Pliocene, oceans were much higher, maybe 90 feet higher.

That is our fate, folks. That is what 415ppm produces. It is only a matter of time, and some of the sea level rise will come quickly.

Amsterdam, New Orleans, Lisbon, Miami– the list of cities that will be submerged is enormous.

The extra heat trapped here on earth by CO2 is melting all the earth’s surface ice, so that the water runs into the oceans and raises their level.

It will be a lot hotter. Some 3-6 degrees F. hotter. That’s an average for the whole surface of the world. Any particular place could be 15 degrees hotter. Try that out in Tucson, AZ. Some places will become uninhabitable. It can’t be stopped now.

What can be stopped is its getting any worse. But that would require moving with blinding speed to wind and solar power and electric cars.