Chris Hedges's Blog, page 442

America Is Authoritarian by Design

So often, underlying structures and institutions of oppression escape serious scrutiny amid our country’s most high-profile political dramas. Take the recent conviction of Jason Van Dyke, the white Chicago police officer caught on tape four years ago firing 16 shots into 17-year-old Laquan McDonald.

From its soul-numbing kill tape to McDonald’s family shown and quoted repeatedly across local media, the trial’s coverage took on an almost theatrical tone. We heard from the victim’s family members, the officer’s wife, and the activists celebrating the verdict in the streets. Television cameras zoomed in on the sorry face of the sad killer, right up to the moment he was led out of court as a convicted murderer.

Largely left unsaid was how Van Dyke’s crime was merely a ripple—if an especially provocative one—in a deep sea of racial oppression engulfing Chicago and the nation as a whole.

Before the trial concluded, a veteran Chicago activist and radical commentator told me he’d heard that “Van Dyke will be thrown to the mob” as “a kind of token” to pacify the city’s black population and take the heat off a racist police state. Indeed, the danger of the McDonald-Van Dyke drama and its guilty verdict is that it will function as a safety valve, helping the city and nation’s entrenched racist patterns and institutions maintain their legitimacy, helping spread the illusion that the “system works.”

But it doesn’t work for millions of disproportionately poor black people. Ask the families of Milton Hall, Mike Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Rekia Boyd, Sandra Bland and the growing list of mostly young African-Americans unjustly killed by American police officers and prison and security guards—all on tape. Ask the hundreds of black Chicagoans who have been terrorized into signing forced confessions for crimes they didn’t commit. Ask the many thousands of black people serving long sentences in Illinois prisons after they were convicted for drug crimes—the type of crimes that whites commit more frequently and without remotely comparable rates of arrest and prosecution.

Ask the millions of black people living in American communities where jobs and doctors’ offices, green spaces and full-service grocery stores, decent public schools and mental-health facilities, public libraries, sit-down restaurants and countless other public and private resources are unavailable—and where police forces (see this 2017 Department of Justice investigation of the Chicago Police Department) function like an invading army of marauding terrorists, a grave threat even to children.

Look at the persistence of huge black-white disparities in income, wealth, poverty, joblessness, health, education, home-ownership, surveillance, arrest, sentencing, incarceration, criminal marking (the “new Jim Crow” of racially disparate felony branding), voter disenfranchisement and more across the U.S.

The repressive policing practices that Van Dyke took to a shocking level are all about keeping blacks savagely separate and unequal. He was tried and convicted only because his crime was caught on tape and exposed through the dedicated efforts of independent activist-journalists and street protesters.

Those activists who helped bring Van Dyke to justice know this all too well. A young Chicago black man interviewed by one television reporter downtown during the “celebration” march said he had “no sense of victory.” The city still feels to him like “a prison” where he’s constantly under the watchful eye of the police, especially when he steps outside of the inferior parts of town to which most black Chicagoans are residentially consigned.

It’s for not nothing that the post-verdict marchers tempered celebratory chants (“We Made History!” and “The People, United, Will Never be Defeated,” for example) with chants noting that it’s “the whole damn system” that must be taken down. Van Dyke may be headed for prison, but they are aware that the racial oppression that plagues “global Chicago” and the nation is still very much intact.

A second case in point is the passion play that unfolded last spring over creeping fascist Donald Trump’s vicious policy of separating migrant children from their parents as they cross the southern border. Cable news viewers saw highly emotional and personalized reporting on the trauma inflicted on Latinx families. Trump and the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency were portrayed in a most unfavorable light, eliciting liberal and progressive outrage along with activist action that led to the reunification of many of the families torn apart by the Trump administration’s cruelty.

Beyond these dramatic stories, media consumers heard the usual timeworn calls for “comprehensive immigration reform” and clear “paths to citizenship.” Notice, however, what escaped critical examination. As during its breathless coverage of the “unaccompanied minor” migration crisis in 2014, the corporate media this year has had little to say about the following ways in which the United States has helped make Mexico and Central America unlivable for many of its people:

Flooding these nations with cheap, subsidized U.S. agricultural exports, devastating campesino communities in the name of “free trade.”
Using so-called free trade agreements to force the privatization of government enterprises, the deregulation of corporations, the slashing of social budgets and the displacement of communities by foreign mining projects.
Intensifying drug gang violence and power by advancing the militarized “War on Drugs.”
Accelerating climate change, which has ravaged Central American coffee and corn production.
Funding and equipping authoritarian and violent, mass-murderous “Third World fascist” regimes (including a right-wing junta the Obama administration helped install in Honduras toward the beginning of 2009) and forces allied with U.S. and business interests in Central America.

Thanks to the media’s failure to provide any of this essential historical-hemispheric context, the great majority of Americans are unaware that the United States has a moral obligation to take in and otherwise assist Central American immigrants and refugees seeking to escape situations made hopeless by U.S. intervention and policy.

A third example is the recently completed and all-consuming melodrama over Trump’s successful elevation of the openly partisan and reactionary thug Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court. There was some early discussion of Kavanaugh’s role as a crafter of legal “justifications” for George W. Bush’s torture practices, his position on behalf of U.S. presidents’ immunity from prosecution (likely the reason Trump nominated him in the first place) and a past ruling of his indicating that he will tip the high court against Roe v. Wade. Soon, however, the confirmation spectacle was overshadowed by Kavanaugh’s horrific behavior as a late adolescent and young man, as well as his lies about his past as a serial drunk and alleged sex offender. The nation sat riveted as Kavanaugh faced off in a television showdown with a woman, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who had accused him of attempted rape.

It is disgusting almost beyond words that a likely sexual predator and obvious dissembler will render judgment on matters of solemn legal, political and societal relevance for a generation. But as troubling as Kavanaugh’s personal history and untruthfulness are, it’s been even more troubling to see them render important questions about abortion rights, presidential immunity from prosecution, and torture virtually meaningless.

Equally distressing has been our continuing failure to address the authoritarian absurdity of essential political and judicial institutions crafted by 18th-century slave owners and merchant capitalists for whom self-governance was the ultimate nightmare. Why in the name of anything remotely akin to democracy should Kavanaugh and his eight high court colleagues hold these powerful positions for life? That constitutionally ordained silliness is owed to the slave-owning Founders’ stern determination to “check and balance” popular rule.

How does a right-wing Republican majority in the U.S. Senate get to confirm a militantly anti-democratic, sexist and partisan hack to the highest court in the land when U.S. public opinion stands well to the left of both Kavanaugh and the GOP on countless policy issues, including union rights, affirmative action, environmental regulation, campaign finance, abortion, the need for viable third and fourth parties, gun control, same-sex marriage, taxation and more? This can happen in no small part because the ludicrously venerated U.S. Constitution assigns two U.S. senators to each U.S. state, regardless of differences in population.

Red Wyoming, home to more than 573,720 Americans, holds U.S. senatorial parity with blue California, where 39.5 million Americans reside. That’s one U.S. senator for every 19.5 million Californians versus one U.S. senator for every 287,000 Wyoming residents.

Just one of New York City’s five boroughs, Brooklyn, has 2.6 million people. If Brooklyn were a state and U.S. senators were apportioned there at the same populace-to-senator ratio as Wyoming, Brooklyn would have nine U.S. senators. (It’s unlikely that a single one of them would be a Republican.)

The following 13 states together have a combined population of roughly 34.4 million: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming. Together these 13 red states send 26 Republicans to the U.S. Senate. California, with 5 million more people than these 13 states combined, sends two Democrats to the upper chamber of Congress.

The predominantly Democratic and half-black District of Columbia is home to 693,972 people, more than all of Wyoming and just 46,000 fewer than that of Alaska. That it is denied a single U.S. senator and serious representation in the House of Representatives is preposterous.

This profoundly undemocratic apportionment system means that the Republican Senate majority answers to a disproportionately white, rural and reactionary section of the electorate. Due to “a growing population shift from the agricultural interior to crowded corridors along the coast,” journalist Daniel Lazare noted last year, it is mathematically possible now to “cobble together a Senate majority with states that account for just 17.6 percent of the popular vote.”

Other such anti-democratic traditions include, but are not limited to:

An Electoral College that “triples the clout of the eight smallest states and doubles that of the next six” (Lazare). This ridiculous system has ensured that two (2000 and 2016) of the last five presidential elections have gone to the popular vote loser.
Rampant gerrymandering that tilts state legislatures and the House of Representatives far to the right of the populace.
Strictly scheduled and time-staggered elections, combined with absurd propaganda telling Americans that they get real and significant policy “input” by selecting from a narrow spectrum of major-party contenders once every 730 or 1,460 days.
A Supreme-Court-mandated campaign finance system that, according to political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, all but guarantees government policy reflects the “wishes of those with money, not the wishes of the millions of ordinary citizens who turn out every two years to choose among the pre-approved, money-vetted candidates for federal office” (emphasis added).

The openly plutocratic domination of U.S. politics (explicitly validated in the Supreme Court’s 1976 Buckley v. Valeo and 2010 Citizens United decisions) is no small part of why the Democrats function as a dismal, corporate-centrism in the face of the Republicans’ horrifying drift toward an Amerikaner fascism.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party’s control of all three branches of federal government makes an abject mockery of the Founders’ claim to have pre-empted tyrannical government with a system of institutional “checks and balances.” What do “checks and balances” mean when the same party controls the executive, legislative and judicial institutions and the opposition offers a pale facsimile of the same? What is a “constitutional republic” whose high court has helped hand the keys of state power over to the holders of concentrated wealth?

Presiding over this failed state, of course, is Donald Trump—the perfect avatar for a corporate, financial and military oligarchy systematically pillaging the state. Without denying Trump’s myriad evils, we would do well to heed Chris Hedges’ eloquent reminder that the Insane Clown president is a symptom, not the cause, of societal problems that go far deeper than his own shallow life. From Hedges’ aptly titled new book, “America: The Farewell Tour”:

The destruction of democratic institutions, places where the citizen has agency and a voice, is far graver than the ascendancy to the White Hose of the demagogue Trump. A creeping corporate coup d’etat has destroyed our two-party system. It destroyed labor unions. It destroyed public education. It destroyed the judiciary. It destroyed the press. It destroyed academia. It destroyed consumer and environmental protection. It destroyed our industrial base. It destroyed communities and cities. And it destroyed the lives of tens of millions of Americans no longer able to find work that provides a living wage, cursed to live in chronic poverty or locked in cages in our monstrous system of mass incarceration.

This coup also destroyed the credibility of liberal democracy. Self-identified liberals such as Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama mouthed the words of liberal democratic values while making war on these values in the service of corporate power. The revolt we see rippling across the country is a revolt not only against the corporate system that has betrayed workers, but also, for many, liberal democracy itself. This is very dangerous. It will allow the radical right to cement into place an Americanized fascism.

Postscript:

Last Thursday, as Florida and Georgia emerged from the wreckage of Hurricane Michael, cable news buzzed over a strange soap opera unfolding in the Oval Office: Troubled pop star Kanye West had presented the president with a model “iPlane,” explaining, “This is what our president should be flying in.”

West delivered a strange 10-minute soliloquy that touched on his own bipolar disorder, the 13th Amendment, Adidas, Chicago, and Trump as a national father figure who embodied the “male energy” he had missed in his childhood. While dozens of media personnel arrayed around the president’s desk snapped pictures and took notes, West explained his decision to wear a red “Make America Great Again” baseball cap:

You know they tried to scare me to not wear this hat. My own friends. But this hat gives me a different power in a way. You know my dad and my mom separated, so I didn’t have a lot of male energy in my home. And also I’m married to a family that, you know, not a lot of male energy going on. It’s beautiful though … you know I love Hillary, I love everyone. Right. But the campaign, ‘I’m With Her’ just didn’t make me feel, as a guy, that didn’t get to see my dad all the time. … It was something about when I put this hat on, it made me feel like Superman. You made a Superman. That’s my favorite superhero and [you] made a Superman cape for me. … Also, as a guy that looks up to you, looks up to Ralph Lauren, looks up to American industry guys, nonpolitical, no bullshit … and just gets it done.

It was a sorry spectacle in which one narcissistic personality celebrated another as a straight-shooting “American industry guy” who “just gets it done,” even as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that we’re galloping toward the end of human civilization as we know it.

At the end of Kanye’s disturbing oration, Trump smiled broadly. “I’ll tell you what,” he said, “that was very impressive.”

As Far-Right Groups Incite Violence on Both Coasts, Officials Struggle to Respond

On the East and West coasts over the weekend, far-right demonstrators clashed with police and counterprotesters. These were the latest in a series of incidents that left local law enforcement officials unprepared to address the fallout.

In a highly publicized incident, nine members of the far-right group Proud Boys and three counterprotesters were arrested in a clash after a speech by Proud Boys leader Gavin McInnes at New York’s Metropolitan Republican Club.

During his speech, McInnes “waved a sword at anti-fascist protesters and celebrated the assassination of a socialist Japanese politician. … [McInnes was] dressed up as the Japanese assassin who killed the politician, complete with glasses that made his eyes into a racist caricature of a Japanese person’s eyes,” according to the Daily Beast.

The incident, writers Kelly Weill and Will Sommer observe, “highlights how the Proud Boys have managed to insinuate themselves with mainstream Republicans, even as they increasingly make the news for their violence.”

Weill and Sommer continue:

Representatives Mario Diaz-Balart and Devin Nunes have posed for pictures with Proud Boys on the campaign trail. Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson posed in a Fox green room with two Proud Boys and Republican operative Roger Stone earlier this year.

Stone has himself taken steps to be initiated into the Proud Boys and made headlines in March, when he used the Proud Boys as a security force at the Dorchester Conference, a Republican event in Oregon. By then, the Proud Boys were already notorious in Oregon for a series of bloody Portland brawls.

A number of members of the Proud Boys are also in Patriot Prayer, another far-right group involved in clashes with protesters in Oregon this week. Members came to downtown Portland for a rally Saturday on one day’s notice. Billed as a march for “law and order,” it quickly escalated into bloody fights. According to Oregon Live, members of the militia and anti-fascist protesters “used bear spray, bare fists and batons to thrash each other” before riot police waded into the violence.

The incident made national headlines, but it wasn’t the first time an extreme-right group incited violence in downtown Portland. In fact, during a similar rally in August, members of Patriot Prayer were stationed on top of a building with a cache of weapons, a fact that Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler admitted only Monday, over two months later.

Wheeler told a news conference that before the start of the August rally, “the Portland Police Bureau discovered individuals who positioned themselves on a rooftop parking structure in downtown Portland with a cache of firearms.” Those weapons included long guns. Splinter explains in its coverage of the incident that “the term ‘long gun’ typically refers to a rifle with a lengthy barrel for shooting at distance. It’s a blanket term that can also include shotguns.” However, writer Jack Crosbie observes, “it seems unlikely to me that it refers to a shotgun in this case.”

Wheeler held the news conference to introduce an emergency ordinance that, Crosbie writes, “will give the police greater authority to separate groups during a confrontation, if it’s voted through by the City Council this week.”

Wheeler emphasized he “will not allow continued, planned street violence between rival factions to take place in Portland,” adding, as Willamette Week reports, that he has asked his staff “to evaluate options to hold accountable those who recklessly drain our public safety resources by using our city as a venue for planned street violence.”

Saturday’s violence, and the delayed disclosure of the weapons cache at the August rally, is “raising questions about why Portland police and political leaders are allowing the violent dueling clashes to continue month in and month out,” Gordon R. Friedman writes in Oregon Live.

Asked by reporters why the weapons weren’t mentioned sooner, Portland Chief of Police Danielle Outlaw said, “Hindsight is always perfect.”

As these groups continue to work themselves into mainstream Republican circles, it will take more than an ordinance from a local government to fight back.

China Defends Extrajudicial Detention of Muslims in Internment Camps

BEIJING — China on Tuesday characterized its mass internment of Muslims as a push to bring into the “modern, civilized” world a destitute people who are easily led astray — a depiction that analysts said bore troubling colonial overtones.

The report is the ruling Communist Party’s latest effort to defend its extrajudicial detention of Central Asian Muslim minorities against mounting criticism.

China’s resistance to Western pressure over the camps highlights its growing confidence under President Xi Jinping, who has offered Beijing’s authoritarian system as a model for other countries.

About 1 million Uighurs, Kazakhs and other minorities have been arbitrarily detained in mass internment camps in China’s far west Xinjiang region, according to estimates by a U.N. panel. Former detainees say they were forced to disavow their Islamic beliefs in the camps, while children of detainees are being placed in dozens of orphanages across the region.

The report by the official Xinhua News Agency indicated that key to the party’s vision in Xinjiang is the assimilation of the indigenous Central Asian ethnic minorities into Han Chinese society — and in turn, a “modern” lifestyle.

Xinjiang Gov. Shohrat Zakir said the authorities were providing people with lessons on Mandarin, Chinese history and laws. Such training would steer them away from extremism and onto the path toward a “modern life” in which they would feel “confident about the future,” he said.

“It’s become a general trend for them to expect and pursue a modern, civilized life,” Zakir said, referring to the trainees. He said the measures are part of a broader policy to build a “foundation for completely solving the deeply-rooted problems” in the region.

China has long viewed the country’s ethnic minorities as backward, said James Leibold an expert on Chinese ethnic polices at Melbourne’s La Trobe University.

Leibold described Beijing’s perspective on minorities as: “They’re superstitious, they’re deviant, they’re potentially dangerous. The role of the party-state is to bring them into the light of civilization, to transform them.”

Despite growing alarm from the U.S. and the United Nations, China has maintained that Xinjiang’s vast dragnet of police surveillance is necessary for countering latent extremism and preserving stability.

The Turkic-speaking Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gurs) have long resented restrictions placed on their religious practices. They say they experience widespread discrimination in jobs and access to passports.

In the Xinhua report, Zakir said authorities provide free vocational training in skills geared toward manufacturing, food and service industries. Zakir said “trainees” are paid a basic income during the training, in which free food and accommodations are provided.

The report appeared aimed at disputing accounts provided by former detainees, who have said they were held in political indoctrination camps where they were forced to denounce Islam and profess loyalty to the party.

Ethnic Uighurs and Kazakhs have told The Associated Press that ostensibly innocuous acts such as praying regularly, viewing a foreign website or taking phone calls from relatives abroad could land one in a camp.

Zakir said the training centers were for people “who are influenced by terrorism and extremism, and those suspected of minor criminal offenses” who could be exempted from criminal punishment.

Zakir did not say whether such individuals were ever formally charged with any crime or provided a chance to defend themselves against the allegations. The report also did not say if attendance was mandatory, though former detainees have said they were forcibly held in centers policed by armed guards.

Maya Wang, senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch, said the system deprived detainees of basic legal protections such as access to lawyers.

The authorities’ attempts to justify the camps “illustrate what the ‘rule of law’ in China means — that the party bends it to its will and uses it as a weapon against perceived political enemies,” Wang said in an email.

Zakir did not say how many people were in such courses, but said some would be able to complete their courses this year.

Zakir seemed to try to counter reports of poor living conditions within the camps, saying that “trainees” were immersed in athletic and cultural activities. The centers’ cafeterias provide “nutritious, free diets,” and dormitories are fully equipped with TVs, air conditioning and showers, he said.

Omir Bekali, a Xinjiang-born Kazakh citizen, said he was kept in a cell with 40 people inside a heavily guarded facility.

Bekali said he was kept in a locked room with eight other internees. They shared beds and a wretched toilet. Baths were rare.

Before meals, they were told to chant “Thank the party! Thank the motherland!” During daily mandatory classes, they were told that their people were backward before being “liberated” by the party in the 1950s.

The idea that one’s beliefs can be transformed through indoctrination dates back to the Mao Zedong era, when self-criticisms and public humiliation were routinely employed to stir up ideological fervor.

The program’s philosophies can be traced even further back to the late imperial era, when Xinjiang’s “natives” were seen as requiring education in the Confucian way, according to Michael Clarke, a Xinjiang expert at Australian National University.

Amnesty International called the Xinhua report an insult to detainees and the families of people who have gone missing in the crackdown.

“No amount of spin can hide the fact that the Chinese authorities are undertaking a campaign of systematic repression,” the human rights group said.

The Other Enduring Legacy of Jim Crow in Charlottesville, Va.

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — High school seniors Zyahna Bryant and Trinity Hughes have been friends since they were 6 years old, raised by blue-collar families in this affluent college town. They played on the same T-ball and softball teams and were in the same church group.

But like many African-American children in Charlottesville, Trinity lived on the south side of town and went to a predominantly black neighborhood elementary school. Zyahna lived across the train tracks on the north side and was zoned to a mostly white school, near the University of Virginia campus, that boasts the city’s highest reading scores.

In elementary school, Zyahna was chosen for the district’s program for gifted students. Since then, she has completed more than a dozen Advanced Placement and college-level courses, maintained a nearly 4.0 average, and has been a student leader and a community activist. She has her eyes set on a prestigious university like UVA.

“I want to go somewhere where it shows how much hard work I’ve put in,” said Zyahna.

Trinity wasn’t selected for the gifted program. She tried to enroll in higher-level courses and was denied. She expects to graduate later this school year, but with a transcript that she says won’t make her competitive for selective four-year colleges.

“I know what I’m capable of and what I can do,” Trinity said, “but the counselors and teachers, they don’t really care about that.”

For every student like Zyahna in Charlottesville’s schools, there are scores like Trinity, caught in one of the widest educational disparities in the United States. Charlottesville’s racial inequities mirror college towns across the country, from Berkeley, California, to Evanston, Illinois. But they also match the wider world of education, which is grappling with racial gaps — in areas from gifted programs to school discipline — that can undercut the effort to equitably prepare students for college in a competitive economy.

The debate over the city’s statue of Robert E. Lee and the white supremacist march last year set Charlottesville apart and spurred it to confront its Confederate past. But the city hasn’t fully come to terms with another aspect of its Jim Crow legacy: a school system that segregates students from the time they start and steers them into separate and unequal tracks.

Charlottesville is “beautiful physically and aesthetically pleasing, but a very ugly-in-the-soul place,” said Nikuyah Walker, who became its first black female mayor during the self-recrimination that swept the city after last year’s white nationalist rallies. “No one has ever attempted to undo that and that affects whether our children can learn here.”

Today, white students make up 40 percent of Charlottesville’s enrollment, and African Americans about a third. But white children are about four times as likely to be in Charlottesville’s gifted program, while black students are more than four times as likely to be held back a grade and almost five times as likely to be suspended out of school, according to a ProPublica/New York Times examination of newly available district and federal data. (Look up your school, district, or state in ProPublica’s interactive database.)

Since 2005, the academic gulf between white and black students in Charlottesville has widened in nearly all subjects, including reading, writing, history and science. As of last year, half of all black students in Charlottesville could not read at grade level, compared with only a tenth of white students, according to state data. Black students in Charlottesville lag on average about three and a half grades behind their white peers in reading and math, compared with a national gap of about two grades.

Over the decades, school board members have often brushed aside findings of racial inequality in Charlottesville schools, including a 2004 audit — commissioned by the district’s first African-American superintendent — that blamed inadequate leadership and a history of racism for the persistent underachievement of its black students.

Officials in the 4,500-student district — which spends about $16,000 per pupil, one of the highest rates in the state — instead point to socioeconomic differences; the vast majority of Charlottesville’s black children qualify for free or reduced-price meals at school because of low family income. District leaders say they are tackling the achievement gap, with initiatives such as eliminating prerequisites for advanced classes. Besides, they say, test scores are only one measure of success.

“I’m not trying to make excuses” for the test scores of black students, said Rosa Atkins, the district’s superintendent for almost 13 years, “but that’s only one measure of where they are, and who they are, and their capabilities for success.”

About a third of the 25 districts with the widest achievement disparities between white and black students are in or near college towns, according to a review of data compiled by researchers at Stanford University. That may be because affluent families in university towns invest a large proportion of their resources in their children’s education, said Sean Reardon, a professor of education at Stanford. In such communities, “disparities in resources — between white and black students, for example — may be more consequential,” Reardon said.

Atkins said that it’s unfair to compare black students with white classmates who attended the best preschools and have traveled abroad. “The experiences that they bring into our school system are very different,” she said. “When we start saying that until you start performing like white children, you have a deficit, I think that in itself is discrimination.”

Still, socioeconomics don’t fully explain the gap. State exam data shows that, among Charlottesville children from low-income families, white students outperformed black students in all subjects over the last three years. The same pattern holds true for wealthier students.

And in the last year, even the city’s immigrant students who are learning English have outperformed black students on state exams in every subject.

Atkins said that what doesn’t show up in test scores is how far behind black children start and how they sometimes have to acquire two years’ worth of skills in just one year.

“I dare say that our black children are performing better than our white children” when their progress is considered, she said. “That tells me that our children have resilience, tenacity and ability far superior than what we’re giving them credit for.”

Among white parents, last year’s rallies have fostered franker discussions of racial inequality, said one of them, Guian McKee, a UVA associate professor. “There’s been a lot more openness to some of those challenging conversations,” he said.

At their predominantly black elementary school, McKee’s two children participated in the gifted program, which is about three-quarters white. Such disparities, at odds with Charlottesville’s reputation as a bastion of Southern progressivism, have long been a taboo topic, he said.

“For a lot of people, it’s really uncomfortable to see that even if you haven’t personally done anything wrong, you’re part of larger structures that contribute to producing poverty and inequality, including in educational outcomes,” McKee said.

Much like its Confederate past, Charlottesville’s history of school segregation weighs heavily on the present day. “I don’t think the hate groups selected our community by chance,” Atkins said.

Charlottesville greeted the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision with a firm no. In 1958, Gov. J. Lindsay Almond ordered the city to shut down two white-serving public schools rather than integrate.

Many white families opted for private schools, which were able to secure public funding through voucher-like tuition grants. Under pressure from the Supreme Court of Virginia, Charlottesville reopened its schools in 1959, allowing a dozen black students to attend its historically white schools.

But the city’s resistance to integration persisted. Instead of outright segregation, the white-led district established testing requirements solely for black students who tried to enroll in historically white schools. It also allowed white students who lived in attendance zones of historically black schools to transfer back to predominantly white schools. Black students who lived near mostly white schools were assigned to black schools.

After a federal appeals court invalidated the district’s attendance policies, the city relied more closely on residential zones to sort students.

In 1984, Charlottesville High School ignited after the student newspaper published derogatory remarks about black students. The high school was shut down for a day. “Seniors for White Supremacy” was painted in its parking lot.

Two years later, the board considered redrawing school zones to bolster racial and economic equity, but it worried about white flight. In the end, elementary school boundaries were largely left alone. The district pooled the city’s middle school students into two schools, one serving all fifth- and sixth-graders, and the other serving all seventh- and eighth-graders. The number of white students declined about 20 percent within a decade.

Other efforts to reshape attendance zones faced resistance. In 2003, a predominantly black group of families asked to send their children to Venable, one of the historically white schools that had closed rather than integrate. Venable, which Zyahna would later attend, has the highest reading proficiency of all elementary schools in the city.

The black families lived several blocks from Venable and had grown frustrated by their children’s long commutes to their zoned school. But when the board proposed reassigning the 20 children, white parents from Venable “freaked,” said Dede Smith, then a school board member.

“We will NOT accept redistricting when it is done, as in this situation, sloppily and hurriedly and in a way which negatively impacts the quality of education for all students involved,” read a letter from the Venable parent-teacher organization. It took a year for the board to rezone the children to Venable, according to Smith. Today, some black families are able to send their children there, but residents of a mostly black public housing complex nearby are not among them.

“We only put our toe in the water,” Smith said.

The following year, in 2004, the school board hired Scottie Griffin as superintendent. She tapped a respected education association to review inequities across the district. The report by five academics revealed a deeply fractured school system.

“While some members of the community might wish for an elongated period of time to ponder and debate changes, the children are in school only once and then they are gone,” the audit concluded. “No city can survive by only serving one half its constituents well. The future of such a legacy is dire.”

The auditors pushed for increasing black students’ access to high-level academic programs, including gifted and Advanced Placement courses.

Kathy Galvin, a parent who is now a City Council member, responded to the audit in an internal memo to the school board, urging the board to reject the racial bias findings, which she called “unnecessary and in fact harmful,” and implored members to focus on improving “our educational system for the benefit of all children.”

Today, Galvin largely stands by that position. “A ‘too narrow and racially biased’ focus on the schools does a disservice to the dedicated educators who have made a difference and risks misdiagnosing a complex problem, leading to ineffective solutions,” she said.

In 2005, within a year of her hiring, Griffin was pushed out. She did not respond to questions from the Times and ProPublica.

Atkins said she has incorporated some of the audit’s recommendations, such as data-driven decision-making and a reorganization of central office staff, into the district’s strategic plan.

One of the audit’s central focuses was the city’s gifted program, known as Quest. As white enrollment in the city’s schools contracted over the years, the program tripled in size, according to an analysis by a UVA researcher, largely benefitting the white families who remained.

To black families, segregation had returned by another name.

“Everyone wants the best for their kid, but this has been the thing that has helped drive the segregation engine,” said Lisa Woolfork, an associate professor at UVA and member of Black Lives Matter Charlottesville, whose children attend Charlottesville schools. “I have always been of the opinion that this type of internal segregation is the way to keep white people in the public schools. This is a way that white supremacy undergirds the public school system.”

In 1984, only 11 percent of Charlottesville’s white students qualified as gifted, according to federal data from the UVA analysis. By 2003, according to the audit, about a third of white students qualified, the same proportion as today. White students make up more than 70 percent of the district’s gifted students.

When students are selected for Quest, they are pulled out of their regular classrooms for enrichment sessions in academics and arts with a specialized teacher in a designated classroom.

“When people bring up Quest, we get angry,” Trinity said. “We all wish we had the opportunity to have that separate creative time. It drives a gap between students from elementary school on.”

For children who read below grade level, the city offers a supplemental program called Extending the Bridges of Literacy. But the literacy program takes place after school, and it is taught by any instructors who volunteer to extend their workday for extra pay, regardless of whether they have specialized intervention training.

Racial inequities persist into the high school’s Advanced Placement courses, which provide students with college credits. White students in Charlottesville are nearly six times as likely to be in AP courses as their black peers, according to recently released federal data.

“There is an incentive to segregate these kids,” Smith said. “I don’t think the schools see anything positive in an academic mixing pot because the white parents will leave.”

In the last two years, Charlottesville High administrators have introduced staff training on racial inequalities. Teachers have participated in professional development that included studying “equity-based teaching,” lessons in Charlottesville’s local black history and Civil War history, and workshops on implicit bias. The school’s principal also set up focus groups and surveyed high-performing black students about underrepresentation in advanced courses.

Atkins has introduced other initiatives aimed at reducing the achievement gap. Besides abolishing prerequisites for advanced courses, she created a “matrix” that families could follow to map out a sequence of coursework. She also has tried to remedy the underrepresentation of minorities and girls in science electives by giving every middle schooler an opportunity to take an engineering course.

The school district has also expanded what it calls “Honors-Option” courses, in which students can opt to meet requirements for regular or honors credit.

Jennifer Horne, an English teacher at Charlottesville High School, called her honors-option course “the most beautiful place in the building. You’ve got struggling readers and kids who are way smarter than me in the same room.” She said she is able to pose the “big questions,” which are usually reserved for advanced courses, and identify students with untapped potential.

With the help of a scholarship, Zyahna attended preschool to first grade at an elite private school. Her preparation helped her to pass an admission test for the gifted program after she entered Venable. As she got older, church members who worked in the schools advised her on the programs and classes she needed to stay on pace with her white peers.

Zyahna felt isolated in the sea of white faces. She became an activist, founding the Black Student Union, petitioning the City Council to remove the Lee statue and speaking out at school board meetings about the achievement gap. “It has caused me to become even more of an advocate for people of color, just for my blackness, because you enter into this whole sunken place when you get into honors and AP courses,” she said.

Zyahna likened her high school experience to shopping because students have to scout out the best deals. “You literally have to go ask for everything yourself, and not everyone has those skills or confidence.”

Trinity said she lost that confidence as teachers repeatedly rejected her requests to enroll in higher level courses. She tried to take Algebra II her junior year, an essential course for many colleges. Trinity had struggled early in a geometry course but had stayed after school, sought tutoring and earned a B. She figured that she could work just as hard in Algebra II.

Her geometry teacher wouldn’t allow it, Trinity said. The teacher declined to comment on individual students. School officials said that a student’s performance in geometry isn’t the only factor in a teacher’s recommendation for Algebra II.

Trinity’s mother, Valarie Walker, fought for Trinity to take higher level courses, but school personnel didn’t “want to listen to what the black kids have to say,” she said.

“I don’t think our voices were as strong as they needed to be,” she said. “They kept saying, ‘This would be better.’ I think we gave up fighting.”

In Charlottesville’s schools, the mantra is graduate by any means necessary. Bring up anything else — test scores, suspension rates — and Atkins counters, “We prefer to focus on the long-term goals, and the long-term goal is graduation.”

About 88 percent of black students graduate, just under the state average for African Americans, and up from 66 percent a decade ago. They trail their white peers by about 8 percentage points. The district’s graduation rate, 92.6 percent, is at its highest since the segregation era, said Atkins.

But all diplomas are not equal. About three decades ago, Virginia established a two-tier diploma track, in which districts award “standard” or “advanced” diplomas based on a student’s coursework. It’s one of at least 14 states with this kind of approach. Three years ago, the state superintendent of public instruction proposed moving to a single-diploma system but backed off when parents complained.

The advanced diploma requires students to complete an additional credit in mathematics, science and history and mandates students to take at least three years of a foreign language; for the standard diploma, learning a language is not compulsory. Starting as early as middle school, honors and accelerated courses put some students on a path to advanced high school credits. In Charlottesville, about three-quarters of white students graduate with an advanced diploma, compared with a quarter of their black peers.

The type of diploma that students receive overwhelmingly dictates whether they enroll in two- or four-year colleges, or move on to higher education at all. In Virginia, only a tenth of students with standard diplomas enroll in a four-year college, a recent study found.

Atkins acknowledged that some minority students may be discouraged from taking higher-level courses that could qualify them for better colleges and said the district will remind parents to bring these rebuffs to her attention. Mayor Walker, whose son is a sophomore at Charlottesville High, said some attitudes haven’t changed: “There have been a lot of people who just don’t believe in the potential of our kids.”

Since middle school, Trinity’s goal has been to attend James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. She has gained enough credits for an advanced diploma. But last month she learned that she would need a math class higher than Algebra II to gain admission.

A university representative recommended she go to community college, and possibly transfer to James Madison. Michael Walsh, dean of admissions at James Madison, said 99 percent of students it accepts have gone beyond Algebra II.

She was crushed: “It made me realize I really haven’t been prepared like the rest of the students to be ‘college ready.’”

Zyahna’s achievements make her a prime candidate for an elite university. So she was taken aback when, as she was beginning her search, her principal encouraged her to explore community college. The principal says the context was a broad discussion with black student leaders about community college as an affordable option.

That’s not how Zyahna heard it.

“No matter how high your scores are or how many hours you put into your work, you are still black,” she said. “There’s a whole system you’re up against. Every small victory just cuts a hole into that system reminding you how fragile it is. But it’s still there.”

Insects Are Vanishing at an Alarming Rate, New Study Finds

When a scientist who studies the essential role insects play in the health of the ecosystem calls a new study on the dramatic decline of bug populations around the world “one of the most disturbing articles” he’s ever read, it’s time for the world to pay attention.

The article in question is a report published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) showing that in addition to annihilating hundreds of mammal species, the human-caused climate crisis has also sparked a global “bugpocalypse” that will only continue to accelerate in the absence of systemic action to curb planetary warming.

“This study in PNAS is a real wake-up call—a clarion call—that the phenomenon could be much, much bigger, and across many more ecosystems,” David Wagner, an invertebrate conservation expert at the University of Connecticut, said in response to the new report. “This is one of the most disturbing articles I have ever read.”

Authored by Bradford Lister of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Andres Garcia of National Autonomous University of Mexico, the study found that “[a]rthropods, invertebrates including insects that have external skeletons, are declining at an alarming rate.”

“We compared arthropod biomass in Puerto Rico’s Luquillo rainforest with data taken during the 1970s and found that biomass had fallen 10 to 60 times,” the researchers write. “Our analyses revealed synchronous declines in the lizards, frogs, and birds that eat arthropods. Over the past 30 years, forest temperatures have risen 2.0 °C, and our study indicates that climate warming is the driving force behind the collapse of the forest’s food web. If supported by further research, the impact of climate change on tropical ecosystems may be much greater than currently anticipated.”

As the climate crisis intensifies, Lister and Garcia continued, “the frequency and intensity of hurricanes in Puerto Rico are expected to increase, along with the severity of droughts and an additional 2.6–7 °C temperature increase by 2099, conditions that collectively may exceed the resilience of the rainforest ecosystem.”

A truly scary new study finds that insect populations in protected Puerto Rican rainforests have fallen as much as 60-fold. https://t.co/NXMIKMCD3p

— Bill McKibben (@billmckibben) October 15, 2018

“Holy crap,” Wagner of the University of Connecticut told the Washington Post when he learned of the 60-fold drop of bug populations in Puerto Rico’s Luquillo rainforest. “If anything, I think their results and caveats are understated. The gravity of their findings and ramifications for other animals, especially vertebrates, is hyperalarming.”

The latest disturbing evidence of the destruction the climate crisis is inflicting across the globe comes just a week after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that the world must cut carbon emissions in half by 2030 in order to avert global catastrophe as soon as 2040.

“Unfortunately, we have deaf ears in Washington,” concluded Louisiana State University entomologist Timothy Schowalter, who has studied the Luquillo rainforest for decades.

America Has Stood by Saudi Arabia Through Countless Crises

LONDON — The kingdom of Saudi Arabia has enjoyed the ultimate protected status from the United States throughout its short history.

Riyadh has had a special relationship with the U.S., from President Franklin D. Roosevelt meeting Saudi Arabia’s first King Abdul Aziz on Valentine’s Day in 1945 to the kingdom becoming America’s main Mideast ally following the downfall of Iran’s shah in 1979.

Israel, Jordan and Egypt — sworn enemies who later signed peace deals — as well enjoy such a special status with the U.S. But none are the world’s top supplier of crude oil, able to swing the global energy market.

With Secretary of State Mike Pompeo hastily dispatched on a damage-limitation mission to Riyadh, behind-the-scenes efforts are in full flow to preserve the Saudi-U.S. relationship in the wake of the disappearance and alleged killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Some initial comments from President Donald Trump suggested a strong desire to get to the bottom of the globally followed case as furor gained in intensity, with “severe punishment” threatened for any egregious act.

On Monday a new tale began to emerge: Trump floated the idea without publicly presenting any evidence that “rogue killers” were behind the possible assassination.

Realpolitik kicked in and the new arc of the story sounded distinctly written, directed and produced by the ultraconservative Saudi hierarchy, where no decision of any weight is made without the authority of the ruling Al Saud family.

Khashoggi, a contributor to the Washington Post, is well known and thought of in the halls of power — a face respected in many quarters to put to an alleged crime. That alone may have propelled the outrage surrounding his disappearance.

What binds Washington and Riyadh with such fervency and kinship, and why have previous perceived Saudi outrages not caused such seismic ripples?

IRAN, THE GULF AND BEYOND

From the moment Ayatollah Khomeini’s plane circled above Tehran in February 1979, heralding the return from Paris of the exiled cleric who founded the Islamic Republic, new regional lines were drawn in the sand.

Khomeini cast America as the “Great Satan,” the U.S. Embassy hostage crisis and a failed rescue followed, effectively torpedoing President Jimmy Carter’s hopes for re-election. Iraq, led by Saddam Hussein with Saudi money funding the effort, then launched a ruinous war with Iran that spanned most of the decade.

Saudi Arabia was the first among American’s Persian Gulf friends in times of trouble. When Saddam invaded Kuwait and the royal family fled to Saudi Arabia until the U.S. invaded and removed Iraqi forces, Saudi Arabia played host to American forces on its bases. This infuriated many in the Arab world given the Saudi monarchy’s custodianship of Islam’s two holiest sites in Mecca and Medina.

Ties were especially close between King Fahd and his successor King Abdullah with President George W. Bush. That’s even after Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida launched the Sept. 11 attacks, in part over America’s military presence in the kingdom. Saudi support for the 2003 Iraq War was less fulsome publicly, but logistical support remained undimmed.

Saudi Arabia, along with Israel, was most opposed to the thaw in relations between Tehran and Washington that led to the nuclear deal. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, now at the center of the Khashoggi crisis, alleged by some to be its guiding bloody hand, spoke loudest, calling Iran’s ayatollah a modern-day Hitler. Candidate Trump had railed against one of former President Barack Obama’s signature geopolitical successes, and the nuclear accord was duly ripped up by President Trump.

The U.S. also stood by Saudi Arabia in the war it is prosecuting with Gulf allies against neighboring Yemen. With civilians bombarded and killed and famine spreading, questions have resurfaced about what some detractors of the young crown prince have termed a reckless and bloody adventure.

OIL TO SELL AND WEAPONS TO BUY

When Saudi state media lashed out as Trump’s stance took a briefly harsher tone, a state-linked satellite news channel suggested the kingdom could use its oil production as a weapon.

Benchmark Brent crude is trading at around $80 a barrel, and Trump has criticized OPEC and Saudi Arabia over rising prices. Higher oil prices mean higher gas prices for Americans who vote. Critical mid-term elections are only three weeks away.

America has long been a major importer of Saudi oil and things haven’t always been roses. In 1973, OPEC, with Saudi Arabia a key member, imposed an embargo lasting five months against Washington in and around the 1973 Middle East War as a punishment for Washington’s backing of Israel. The world economy, already in recession, reeled. Key stakeholders want to avoid such an oil crisis ever recurring.

The Saudis are keen buyers of American weapons, using them in the Yemen War. The Trump administration says a proposed $110 billion deal would bolster the U.S. economy by creating tens of thousands of jobs and they do not want to risk that contract. But with Khashoggi feared dead, some want that transaction revisited. Congress could step in and try to obstruct the sale.

9/11 AND THE SAUDI ATTACKERS

Fifteen of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers were Saudi citizens. Much has been said of the Bush administration’s decision to apportion no blame to the kingdom. The uncomfortable truth that Wahhabism, the ultraconservative Islamic doctrine Saudi Arabia follows, has been linked to extremists at home and overseas has been carefully navigated by Washington and Riyadh.

ACCOUNTABILITY FOR HAJJ STAMPEDE

An Associated Press count in 2015 found that 2, 411 Muslim pilgrims died at Mina in the deadliest crush in the history of the annual pilgrimage. This was three times the number of deaths acknowledged by the kingdom. There has been neither a public investigation, nor accountability.

Saudi Arabia rebuffed criticism from Iran and efforts by other countries to join a probe into the deaths. And while King Salman did order an investigation into the tragedy almost immediately, few details have been made public since. The matter has since long drifted from public discourse. Something the Saudis will perhaps hope follows after the Khashoggi storm passes.

Koreas Agree to Break Ground on Inter-Korean Railroad

SEOUL, South Korea — North and South Korea continued their push for peace Monday with high-level talks that resulted in a host of agreements, including a plan by the rivals for a groundbreaking ceremony this year on an ambitious project to connect their railways and roads.

The agreements come amid unease in Washington over the speed of inter-Korean engagement. Many outsiders believe that U.S.-led efforts to rid North Korea of its nuclear-tipped missiles are lagging significantly behind the Koreas’ efforts to move past decades of bitter rivalry.

There was also controversy over a decision by South Korea’s Unification Ministry to block a North Korean defector-turned-reporter from covering the talks at the border village of Panmunjom over concerns of angering North Korea. This drew a fierce reaction from other journalists, who accused the ministry of infringing media freedoms and discriminating against North Korea-born citizens.

A series of weapons tests by North Korea last year, and an exchange of insults and threats between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, had many on the Korean Peninsula fearing war. But there has since been a surprising peace initiative, with three inter-Korean summits and a June meeting in Singapore between Trump and Kim. The U.S. and North Korea are working on plans for a second such summit.

Still, there is widespread skepticism that North Korea will disarm. And, despite the fanfare for the proposed railway and road projects, the Koreas cannot move much further along without the lifting of international sanctions against North Korea, which isn’t likely to come before it takes firmer steps toward relinquishing its nuclear weapons and missiles.

South Korea’s Unification Ministry, which handles affairs with the North, said in a statement that the government will share details from Monday’s meeting with the United States and other nations and will closely coordinate with them to avoid any friction over sanctions.

The ministry said the rivals agreed Monday to hold general-level military talks soon to discuss reducing border tensions and setting up a joint military committee that’s meant to maintain communication and avoid crises and accidental clashes.

The Koreas also agreed to use their newly opened liaison office in the North Korean border town of Kaesong to host talks between sports officials in late October to discuss plans to send combined teams to the 2020 Summer Olympics and to make a push to co-host the 2032 Summer Games.

And the two countries will hold Red Cross talks at North Korea’s Diamond Mountain resort in November to set up video-conference meetings between aging relatives separated by the 1950-53 Korean War and potentially expand face-to-face reunions between them.

Monday’s talks were aimed at finding ways to carry out peace agreements announced after a summit last month between South Korean President Moon Jae-in and Kim in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang.

South Korean Unification Minister Cho Myoung-gyon said it was meaningful that the Koreas are getting faster in reaching agreements as their diplomacy gains traction. His North Korean counterpart, Ri Son Gwon, who heads an agency dealing with inter-Korean affairs, said “no group and no force will be able to prevent the path toward peace, prosperity and our nation’s unification.”

At the most recent summit between Moon and Kim, the two leaders committed to reviving economic cooperation when possible, voicing optimism that international sanctions could end and allow such activity.

They also announced measures to reduce conventional military threats, such as creating buffer zones along their land and sea boundaries and a no-fly zone above the border, removing 11 front-line guard posts by December, and demining sections of the Demilitarized Zone.

Moon has described inter-Korean engagement as crucial to resolving the nuclear standoff and is eager to restart joint economic projects held back by sanctions if the larger nuclear negotiations between the United States and North Korea begin yielding results.

However, South Korea’s enthusiasm for engagement with its rival appears to have created discomfort with the United States, a key ally.

Moon’s government last week walked back a proposal to lift some of its unilateral sanctions against North Korea following Trump’s blunt retort that Seoul could “do nothing” without Washington’s approval.

South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha also said U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo expressed displeasure about the Koreas’ military agreements. Kang was not specific, but her comments fueled speculation that Washington wasn’t fully on board before Seoul signed the agreements.

Trump has encouraged U.S. allies to maintain sanctions on North Korea until it denuclearizes to maintain a campaign of pressure against Kim’s government.

There also was criticism in South Korea on Monday of efforts by Moon’s government to keep North Korea happy.

Unification Minister Cho said his call to exclude North Korea-born Kim Myeong-sung from a pool of reporters covering the meeting was an “inevitable policy decision” to improve the chance for successful talks.

He said the ministry would work harder to assure that North Korea-born defectors can report on North Korea issues without restrictions. But he didn’t offer a straightforward answer when asked whether he would make the same decision in the future.

Unification Ministry spokesman Baik Tae-hyun earlier said North Korea did not demand that Kim be excluded from covering the meeting. Kim is a reporter for the conservative Chosun Ilbo, South Korea’s biggest newspaper, which has been largely critical of Moon’s policies. The South Korean press corps covering the ministry issued a statement denouncing it for a “grave infringement of media freedoms.”

Microsoft Co-Founder Paul Allen Dies at 65

SEATTLE—Paul G. Allen, who co-founded Microsoft with his childhood friend Bill Gates before becoming a billionaire philanthropist who invested in conservation, space travel and professional sports, died Monday. He was 65.

His death was announced by his company, Vulcan Inc.

Earlier this month Allen announced that the non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma that he was treated for in 2009 had returned and he planned to fight it aggressively.

“While most knew Paul Allen as a technologist and philanthropist, for us he was a much-loved brother and uncle, and an exceptional friend,” said his sister, Jody Allen, in a statement.

Allen, who was an avid sports fan, owned the Portland Trail Blazers and the Seattle Seahawks.

Allen and Gates met while attending a private school in north Seattle. The two friends would later drop out of college to pursue the future they envisioned: A world with a computer in every home.

Gates so strongly believed it that he left Harvard University in his junior year to devote himself full-time to his and Allen’s startup, originally called Micro-Soft. Allen spent two years at Washington State University before dropping out as well.

They founded the company in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and their first product was a computer language for the Altair hobby-kit personal computer, giving hobbyists a basic way to program and operate the machine.

After Gates and Allen found some success selling their programming language, MS-Basic, the Seattle natives moved their business in 1979 to Bellevue, Washington, not far from its eventual home in Redmond.

Microsoft’s big break came in 1980, when IBM Corp. decided to move into personal computers and asked Microsoft to provide the operating system.

Gates and company didn’t invent the operating system. To meet IBM’s needs, they spent $50,000 to buy one known as QDOS from another programmer, Tim Paterson. Eventually the product, refined by Microsoft — and renamed DOS, for Disk Operating System — became the core of IBM PCs and their clones, catapulting Microsoft into its dominant position in the PC industry.

The first versions of two classic Microsoft products, Microsoft Word and the Windows operating system, were released in 1983. By 1991, Microsoft’s operating systems were used by 93 percent of the world’s personal computers.

The Windows operating system is now used on most of the world’s desktop computers, and Word is the cornerstone of the company’s prevalent Office products.

Microsoft was thrust onto the throne of technology and soon Gates and Allen became billionaires.

With his sister Jody Allen in 1986, he founded Vulcan, the investment firm that oversees his business and philanthropic efforts. He founded the Allen Institute for Brain Science and the aerospace firm Stratolaunch, which has built a colossal airplane designed to launch satellites into orbit. He has also backed research into nuclear-fusion power.

Allen later joined the list of America’s wealthiest people who pledged to give away the bulk of their fortunes to charity. In 2010, he publicly pledged to give away the majority of his fortune, saying he believed “those fortunate to achieve great wealth should put it to work for the good of humanity.”

When he released his 2011 memoir, “Idea Man,” he allowed “60 Minutes” inside his home on Lake Washington, across the water from Seattle, revealing collections that ranged from the guitar Jimi Hendrix played at Woodstock to vintage war planes and a 300-foot yacht with its own submarine.

Allen served as Microsoft’s executive vice president of research and new product development until 1983, when he resigned after being diagnosed with cancer.

“To be 30 years old and have that kind of shock — to face your mortality — really makes you feel like you should do some of the things that you haven’t done yet,” Allen said in a 2000 book, “Inside Out: Microsoft in Our Own Words,” published to celebrate 25 years of Microsoft.

His influence is firmly imprinted on the cultural landscape of Seattle and the Pacific Northwest, from the bright metallic Museum of Pop Culture designed by architect Frank Gehry to the computer science center at the University of Washington that bears his name.

In 1988 at the age of 35, he bought the Portland Trail Blazers professional basketball team. He told The Associated Press that “for a true fan of the game, this is a dream come true.”

He also was a part owner of the Seattle Sounders FC, a major league soccer team, and bought the Seattle Seahawks. Allen could sometimes be seen at games or chatting in the locker room with players.

Fearing Wildfires, California Utilities Cut Power to Thousands

SAN FRANCISCO—Concerned about downed power lines sparking wildfires, two major California utilities for the first time cut power to some customers amid high winds — and another power provider was considering similar action.

Pacific Gas & Electric began cutting power Sunday night to tens of thousands of customers in Northern California after the National Weather Service warned of extreme fire danger across the state due to high winds, low humidity and dry vegetation.

San Diego Gas & Electric followed suit Monday, turning off power to about 360 customers in foothill areas near Cleveland National Forest, where multiple blazes have scorched large swaths of land in recent years.

Pacific Gas & Electric previously announced its plan to shut off power preemptively after authorities blamed its power lines for sparking some of California’s most destructive wildfires.

The utility expects to pay billions of dollars in wildfire damages and has sought ways to limit its liability through the courts and Legislature.

PG&E said about 87,000 customers had their power halted and more could be left in the dark depending on the weather. Some 60,000 customers remained without power. Schools in those affected areas canceled classes.

PG&E said it expected to restore power Monday night to most customers — though some residents won’t get electricity back until Tuesday.

“We know how much our customers rely on electric service, and we have made the decision to turn off power as a last resort given the extreme fire danger conditions these communities are experiencing,” PG&E spokesman Pat Hogan said.

PG&E said it began notifying affected customers on Saturday about possible outages. However, many said Monday they had received little or no notice.

Stewart Munnerlyn was scrambling to find generators to save $8,000 worth of ice cream at his creamery shop in Pine Grove, about 55 miles (89 kilometers) east of Sacramento. Munnerlyn said he is in Virginia visiting a sick relative and received three text messages Sunday night from PG&E saying it might cut power, but he didn’t know it actually happened until a friend called him.

“They knew what they were going to do obviously,” Munnerlyn said. “We weren’t given enough notice to properly prepare.”

PG&E spokeswoman Melissa Subottin said power was also cut to hospitals and other medical providers that are required to have backup power sources. PG&E officials visited 4,400 medical customers in the affected areas to personally warn them of the outages, she said.

The weather service predicted winds gusting to 55 mph (89 kph) in the Sierra foothills east of Sacramento. High winds were also expected in the state’s wine country north of San Francisco.

Southern California Edison said it was considering shutting off power to an undetermined number of customers. Strong wind gusts swept across the region with the arrival of the first fall Santa Ana winds — hot, sustained gusts that blow from the desert to the ocean.

A motorist in the Orange County city of Tustin was killed when a eucalyptus tree fell on her car in an apartment complex. The victim was 34. No further details were released.

Southern California Edison spokesman David Song said about 32,000 of its 5 million customers were experiencing power outages, but no shutdowns had been ordered by the utility. Song said Edison was investigating the cause of those outages.

___

Associated Press writers Jocelyn Gecker in San Francisco and Christopher Weber and John Antczak in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

Robert Reich: The Economy Is in Much Worse Shape Than It Looks

I keep hearing that although Donald Trump is a scoundrel or worse, at least he’s presiding over a great economy.

As White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow recently put it, “The single biggest story this year is an economic boom that is durable and lasting.”

Really? Look closely at the living standards of most Americans, and you get a very different picture.

Yes, the stock market has boomed since Trump became president. But it’s looking increasingly wobbly as Trump’s trade wars take a toll.

Over 80 percent of the stock market is owned by the richest 10 percent of Americans anyway, so most Americans never got much out of Trump’s market boom to begin with.

The trade wars are about to take a toll on ordinary workers. Trump’s steel tariffs have cost Ford $1 billion so far, for example, forcing the automaker to plan mass layoffs.

What about economic growth? Data from the Commerce Department shows the economy at full speed, 4.2 percent growth for the second quarter.

But very little of that growth is trickling down to average Americans. Adjusted for inflation, hourly wages aren’t much higher now than they were forty years ago.

Trump slashed taxes on the wealthy and promised everyone else a $4,000 wage boost. But the boost never happened. That’s a big reason why Republicans aren’t campaigning on their tax cut, which is just about their only legislative accomplishment.

Trump and congressional Republicans refuse to raise the minimum wage, stuck at $7.25 an hour. Trump’s Labor Department is also repealing a rule that increased the number of workers entitled to time-and-a-half for overtime.

Yes, unemployment is down to 3.7 percent. But jobs are less secure than ever. Contract workers – who aren’t eligible for family or medical leave, unemployment insurance, the minimum wage, or worker’s compensation – are now doing one out of every five jobs in America.

Trump’s Labor Department has invited more companies to reclassify employees as contract workers. Its new rule undoes the California Supreme Court’s recent decision requiring that most workers be presumed employees unless proven otherwise. (Given California’s size, that decision had nationwide effect.)

Meanwhile, housing costs are skyrocketing, with Americans now paying a third or more of their paychecks in rent or mortgages.

Trump’s response? Drastic cuts in low-income housing. His Secretary of Housing and Urban Development also wants to triple the rent paid by poor households in subsidized housing.

Healthcare costs continues to rise faster than inflation. Trump’s response? Undermine the Affordable Care Act. Over the past two years, some 4 million people have lost healthcare coverage, according to a survey by the Commonwealth Fund.

Pharmaceutical costs are also out of control. Trump’s response? Allow the biggest pharmacist, CVS, to merge with the one of the biggest health insurers, Aetna – creating a behemoth with the power to raise prices even further.

The cost of college continues to soar. Trump’s response? Make it easier for for-profit colleges to defraud students. His Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, is eliminating regulations that had required for-profit colleges to prove they provide gainful employment to the students they enroll.

Commuting to and from work is becoming harder, as roads and bridges become more congested, and subways and trains older and less reliable. Trump’s response? Nothing. Although he promised to spend $1.5 trillion to repair America’s crumbling infrastructure, his $1.5 trillion tax cut for big corporations and the wealthy used up the money.

Climate change is undermining the standard of living of ordinary Americans, as more are hit with floods, mudslides, tornados, draughts, and wildfires. Even those who have so far avoided direct hits will be paying more for insurance – or having a harder time getting it. People living on flood plains, or in trailers, or without home insurance, are paying the highest price.

Trump’s response? Allow more carbon into the atmosphere and make climate change even worse.

Too often, discussions about “the economy” focus on overall statistics about growth, the stock market, and unemployment.

But most Americans don’t live in that economy. They live in a personal economy that has more to do with wages, job security, commutes to and from work, and the costs of housing, healthcare, drugs, education, and home insurance.

These are the things that hit closest home. They comprise the typical American’s standard of living.

Instead of an “economic boom,” most Americans are experiencing declines in all these dimensions of their lives.

Trump isn’t solely responsible. Some of these trends predated his presidency. But he hasn’t done anything to reverse them.

If anything, he’s made them far worse.