Lily Salter's Blog, page 210

How neo-Nazis recruit: Highlights from the Daily Stormer style guide

The Daily Stormer (Credit: Screengrab)

While the average person likely hasn’t heard of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, the site is a go-to source for many established and emerging white supremacists. And though its rhetoric appears preposterous and offensive to most Americans, behind the scenes the site’s operators have a well-organized, carefully-packaged machine to recruit new members. Huffington Post reporter Ashley Feinberg uncovered a leaked copy of the website’s style guide, which exposes The Daily Stormer’s recruitment tactics. While an incredibly disturbing read, the leaked style guide also provides insight into how white supremacists turn average people to their cause.

First, the style guide explicitly encourages the use of racial slurs. “Generally, when using racial slurs, it should come across as half-joking — like a racist joke that everyone laughs at because it’s true,” the guide says.

It also specifically encourages the use of oppressive and derogatory terms for women, and says that when writing about women, the writer should “blame Jew feminism for their behavior.”

The appalling instructions don’t stop there. The style guide goes on to explain that The Daily Stormer isn’t a “movement site,” but an “outreach site” — in other words, a recruitment vehicle for white supremacy.

“The goal is to continually repeat the same points, over and over and over and over again. The reader is at first drawn in by curiosity or the naughty humor, and is slowly awakened to reality by repeatedly reading the same points. We are able to keep these points fresh by applying them to current events,” the guide says.

In the same section, it asks writers to read Hitler’s doctrine of war propaganda, chapter six of “Mein Kampf,” in which Hitler offers insight into the use of propaganda by the Nazi Party. Propaganda was a powerful weapon for the Nazis to establish and grow their movement in Germany. The Nazi Party famously used newspapers and films to push their propaganda.

All of this should be done in what the style guide refers to as a “lulz” manner. “The tone of the site should be light. Most people are not comfortable with material that comes across as vitriolic, raging, nonironic hatred. The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not. There should also be a conscious awareness of mocking stereotypes of hateful racists,” it says.

You can read the full document via the Huffington Post here.

How Republican missteps turned Alabama blue

Doug Jones defeated his republican challenger Roy Moore to claim Alabama's U.S. Senate seat that was vacated by attorney general Jeff Sessions (Credit: Getty/Justin Sullivan)

If there was one Republican in Alabama the Democrat Doug Jones could beat, Roy Moore was that Republican.

And in a Tuesday night nail-biter, Jones did just that, edging Moore by a mere 1.5 percentage points in a state that hasn’t elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate since 1992.

So while the Democrats are celebrating a victory in the special election, perhaps it makes sense to ask: How did Republicans manage to lose this seat?

How we got here

Let’s take a moment simply to marvel at the bizarre and cumulatively improbable series of events that ever led us to a “Senator Jones.”

You could say it began in 2014. That’s when Dianne Bentley, wife of 50 years to Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley, a 71-year-old Baptist deacon, began to suspect her husband was having an affair with a member of his staff decades his junior. Dianne planted a recording device in the governor’s office and captured some intimate phone dialogue. The governor attempted to use state resources to cover up his affair. Dianne leaked her tape to the press and the controversy exploded.

Meanwhile, another scandal was brewing. Alabama Chief Justice and conservative firebrand, Roy Moore, was suspended from active service as a result of an ethics investigation stemming from orders he gave to the state’s 67 probate judges to disregard the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision legalizing same-sex marriage. This was, incredibly, the second time in his career that he had been removed from the bench for defying a federal court order.

Back in gubernatorial purgatory, pressure had mounted upon Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange to investigate Bentley. Strange, though, was in no hurry to do this. You see, while the Bentley scandal was unfolding, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. Trump selected Alabama’s junior U.S. senator, Jeff Sessions, to become his attorney general, thereby creating a vacancy in the Senate.

In this vacancy, Gov. Bentley reportedly saw an opportunity to avoid prosecution. He could appoint Strange to Sessions’ vacated seat, then appoint a new – presumably more sympathetic – state attorney general to replace Strange, and avoid prosecution. Allegedly to facilitate this scheme, Strange sent a letter to the Alabama House of Representatives urging them to slow down on articles of impeachment. In February 2017, Bentley appointed Strange to Sessions’ vacant seat. The public screamed foul at the apparent corrupt bargain.

After nearly a year of ceaseless controversy, Bentley entered into a deal to plead guilty to two misdemeanors, resign the governorship and avoid a more aggressive prosecution. Alabama Lt. Gov. Kay Ivey assumed the office of governor and swiftly moved up the date of Strange’s election by more than a year. Seizing upon this opportunity, the suspended Roy Moore resigned the chief justiceship and announced his opposition to Strange. The race pitted President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on the side of Strange with Trump’s former campaign director Steve Bannon supporting Moore. Roy Moore trounced Strange by nearly 10 percentage points on his way to the general election.

But at least one more shoe needed to drop. Approximately one month before the election, the Washington Post published bombshell accusations that Moore had serially preyed upon teenagers as young as 14 when he was in his 30s. A flurry of accusations followed, with a total of nine women accusing Moore of some sort kind of sexual misconduct. Before they knew it, Republicans found themselves in a neck-and-neck race with Jones, a former federal district attorney most famous for successfully prosecuting a Klansman who bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church.

A steep hill for any Democrat

Previously, I have argued that in a statewide race, “perceivably any Republican is preferable to perceivably any Democrat.” In an ordinary race, Jones would have been a severe underdog. His base, African-American voters, the young, urban, and the well-educated constitute only about 35 percent of the state’s electorate. Nevertheless, this was not an ordinary race.

Alabama’s Republican Party is predominantly composed of upper-middle class individuals and white evangelicals. Generally, they vote as an homogeneous group. But Roy Moore, like George Wallace before him, has been a perennially divisive figure. He vocally supports an agenda of Christian supremacy such as bringing back state-led school prayers, outlawing homosexuality and barring Muslims from serving in Congress.

Moore’s extremism makes wealthier and better-educated Republicans in Alabama’s cities and suburbs uneasy, but he remains the darling of the hinterland. Rural voters have largely disbelieved Moore’s accusers. They characterize these accusations as contrived attacks upon a man they deeply affiliate with, ginned up by enemies who care more about tipping the outcome of an election than in reporting matters of fact.

Moore’s unique unpopularity meant that, even before the scandal, Jones had a fighting chance. In Moore’s last election in 2012, he only narrowly beat Democrat Bob Vance for the chief justiceship — earning 52 percent of the vote compared to the 61 percent Mitt Romney earned the same day. Moore performed similarly yesterday compared to 2012 — even improving his performance in rural, overwhelmingly white counties. But his losses in more populous areas ultimately outweighed his strongholds.

Jones, like most Democrats, ran up the score in the cities and in the Black Belt — a swath of southern counties where a majority of voters are African-American. Moore did his best in the Wiregrass — counties near the Florida border — and in rural north Alabama. But when you compare Moore’s share of the vote with Donald Trump’s from last November, Moore’s numbers are worse in every single county.

Moore especially underperformed around the suburbs. In Shelby and Tuscaloosa Counties, located south and west of Birmingham, Moore’s share of the vote was about 16 percentage points below what Trump earned last year. In more highly educated counties, such as Madison – home to a NASA research center — Moore also performed poorly compared to Trump.

Future of Alabama and Republican politics

Both the Alabama and national Republican Parties have some soul-searching to do. Roy Moore’s failed Senate bid demonstrates fundamental weaknesses for a political party with a narrow, and narrowing, base of power.

Right about now, Republicans are nervously eyeing their suburban base of support. In the 1970s and ‘80s, the Republican Party carved out one of the most durable coalitions in American political history using suburban voters as a springboard to public office. Last year’s presidential election and this year’s special elections demonstrate that Republicans are healthy in the hinterland, but Democrats are making important headway into the suburbs. As the Republican Party becomes the Party of Trump and Moore, the party that looks the other way on alleged sexual assault and pedophilia, a study from the Pew Research Center shows young, educated and wealthy voters leaving the party in droves.

The Alabama Republican Party has less to fear than their national counterpart, but if candidates like Moore continue to win Republican primaries, that may change. Trump won Alabama by nearly 30 percentage points, and Roy Moore is a unique candidate. But even in highly conservative Alabama, Republicans have a demographic problem on their hands.

Young Republicans, in particular, are not aligned with many Republican values — especially not Moore’s. Presently, there is an effort to remove the Alabama Young Republicans from the state Republican Steering Committee for rescinding their endorsement of Moore. This generational rift will only worsen if the divide between the grassroots and the mainstream wings of the party cannot be mended.

Democrats may use this opportunity to begin digging themselves out from rubble that is their state party. They should begin with disaffected, young, better-educated and suburban voters.

David Hughes, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Auburn University at Montgomery

The Fempire strikes back

Ann Jones (Credit: Irene Young)

First, for the record, let me tell you my story about another of those perversely creepy Hollywood predators, a sort of cut-rate Harvey Weinstein: the screenwriter and film director James Toback. As I read now of women he preyed upon year after year, I feel the rage that’s bubbled in the back of my brain for decades reaching the boiling point. I should be elated that Toback has been exposed again as the loathsome predator he’s been for half a century. But I’m stuck on the fact of elapsed time, all these decades that male predators roamed at large, efficiently sidelining and silencing women.

Toback could have been picked up by New York’s Finest when he hit on me in or around 1972.  But I didn’t call the cops, knowing it would come to nothing.  Nor did I tell our mutual employer, the City College of the City University of New York. I had no doubt about which one of us our male bosses would believe. I had already been labeled an agitator for campaigning to add a program in women’s studies to the curriculum. Besides, to any normal person, the story of what happened would sound too inconsequential to seem anything but ridiculous: not a crime but a farce.

I didn’t know Toback. I must have seen him at infrequent faculty meetings, but we taught in different writing programs. There was no reason for our paths to cross. Ever. So I have no memory of him until the day I flung open the door of my Chinatown loft in response to a knock, expecting to greet my downstairs neighbor, and in walked Toback. My antennae went up.  How had he managed to get past the locked street door? I remember talking fast, trying to get him out of my place without provoking a confrontation. He agreed to leave with me — to go out for tea or lunch or some little excursion I proposed — but first he insisted on using my bathroom, from which he soon emerged naked. I remember the way he listed the many things he had in mind for me to do for him. Among them, one demand persists in memory, perhaps because it was at once so specific and so bizarre: that I suck and pinch his nipples.

I beat him to the door, furious at being driven from my own loft. I think I threatened to come back with the cops. Something scared him anyway.  From a shop on the street, I watched as he left my building on the run, waddling away at top speed.

Reader, if you think that nothing really happened, then you are mistaken. This incident took place almost 50 years ago and though I hadn’t thought of it in ages — not until his name popped up in the media — the memory remains remarkably raw. I still want to see him marched naked through the streets of Manhattan and Los Angeles to the jeers and uproarious laughter of women.

At the time, Toback was no more than 25 years old, while I was nearly 10 years older, a thoroughgoing feminist, and luckily faster on my feet than him. But recent reports say that, in the 1980s and later, Toback routinely focused his attacks on very young women, some of them teenagers, using promises of film stardom (sound familiar?) to lure them into encounters that left them sodden with shame. He is now in his seventies and, although women have reported his predation several times in major magazines, he was still on the prowl last month and had never before been called to account for his actions.

What could be more despicable than this: that for more than four decades, while he and his kind were allowed to practice undeterred, he only got better at his game of assaulting women.

A Catalogue of Violations

Not long after my run-in with Toback, a university professor from whom I was taking a writing course came calling to discuss my “extraordinary work” and emerged from that same Chinatown bathroom in a similar state of nakedness. (Do they follow some instruction manual I’ve never seen?) By then I was writing and photographing as a freelancer for the travel section of the New York Times, an unpaid task that entitled me to receive midnight phone calls from the drunken travel editor detailing the things I might do for him to insure a “real job” with the Times.  That’s when I became a freelancer elsewhere, always ready to cut and run. I’ve been a loner ever since.

I could tell you stories of other professors, editors, journalists, and TV hosts. But they would be much the same as those we read almost every day now as women go public with their own stories of sexual harassment and worse at the hands of powerful men in the film industry, major media outlets, Silicon Valley, and Congress, among other places. In response, almost every day come new denials, excuses, or half-baked apologies.

Some commentators are now reconsidering Bill Clinton’s record in the sharper light of the present moment.  Others ask if the current “witch hunt” for sexual predators has gone too far.  Expecting inevitable backlash, some recommend that women exercise restraint — as all of us have been taught to do for so many eons — lest some unsubstantiated accusation discredit the stories of thousands of women reporting #MeToo.  I don’t share such tender concern for the reputations of men, especially not that of the president, the self-congratulatory pussy-grabber-in-chief whose followers seem to mistake his behavior for the norm, if not an aspirational ideal.

Discussion of these matters quickly becomes political, eliciting erratic, gender-bending partisan judgments.  Some prominent Republican men called for former judge Roy Moore of Alabama, accused of harassing and assaulting teenaged girls when he was a 30-something assistant district attorney, to endhis campaign for the Senate, while many Republican women in that state, including many who are presumably the mothers of daughters, continue to stand behind him.

At the same time, Democrats parse which of Bill Clinton’s accusers to believe and which not. And who hasn’t thought again about Clarence Thomas?  He was elevated to the Supreme Court by an all-white male Congressional committee despite the thoroughly credible testimony of harassed law professor Anita Hill and the accounts of many other women, similarly violated and ready to testify against Thomas, but never called. Given his long misogynistic history on the court, isn’t it time to look at his testimony again? Did he commit perjury to gain his seat? And if so, what’s to be done about his consistent judicial record inimical to the common interests of women?

It’s Not Just Sex

Little or none of male harassment and predation is truly about sex, except insofar as men weaponize their sad libidos to pin women to the floor. Monstrous men commit what’s called sexual harassment and sexual assault not because women are irresistible but because they can’t resist the rush of power that rises from using, dominating, degrading, humiliating, shaming, and in some cases even murdering another (lesser) human being. (Sexist, not sexual, may be a more accurate adjective.)

Often — especially when the woman is better looking and more talented or qualified than her assailant — he gets an additional powerful kick from having “taught the bitch a lesson.”  A smug sense of power (“When you’re a star… you can do anything”) colors the phony apologies of accused predators. (“It was never my intention to leave the impression I was making an inappropriate advance on anyone.”)  Though a man may be truly sorry to be found out, it’s next to impossible for him, after that blast of solid-gold supremacy, to pretend to even a particle of remorse.

The times call for accusations to be scrupulously accurate. Yet it’s misleading to think of sexual harassment and sexual assault as separate and isolated indignities when in real life one so often segues into the other. Such terms arose in the course of intensive work by feminists of the so-called second wave, which is to say feminists like me who began work in the 1960s and 1970s.  One of our tasks was to expose and document the extent of violence against women in the United States. At that time, misogyny emanated from the pores of patriarchal men, poisoning the very air we breathed. We found overwhelming the violence such men committed against women and girls of all colors who did not conform to their notions of decorative and deferential “femininity.”

The fact that male violence methodically constricts female lives is so appalling that most women simply couldn’t acknowledge it. Psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman, in her landmark study Trauma and Recovery (1992), described things as they were at the time: “Most women do not… recognize the degree of male hostility toward them, preferring to view the relations of the sexes as more benign than they are in fact. Similarly, women like to believe that they have greater freedom and higher status than they do in reality.”  Beneath the revelations of sexual harassment and assault today lie the same hard-rock foundations of male hostility that Herman described a quarter century ago.

To document male violence and depict how it works in daily life, second-wave feminists tried to break it down into its component parts: discrimination and domination — psychological, sexual, and physical — in the home, the schools, the workplace, the church, the courts, the prisons, and public life. We wrote the history of male violence against women, while exploring its effects at that time and its future prospects.  Our generation produced groundbreaking books on patriarchy (Kate Millet, Sexual Politics, 1970), rape (Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will, 1975), sexual harassment (Catherine McKinnon, Sexual Harassment of Working Women, 1979), pornography (Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women, 1981), the battered women’s movement (Susan Schechter, Women and Male Violence, 1982), men murdering women (Diana Russell, Femicide, 1992), and feminist consciousness (Gloria Steinem, Revolution from Within, 1993).  I wrote a history of American women who did not conform: Women Who Kill (1980). For countless women of my generation, this documentation and the movement for change became our life’s work.

The next generation of women thought differently. Many younger women, even some who call themselves feminists today, were persuaded by the hostile counterattack against the women’s movement (meticulously deconstructed by Susan Faludi in Backlash, 1991) that we uptight “man-haters” had wildly exaggerated the violence women face.  They, on the other hand, proudly proclaimed their youth, intelligence, ambition, and control of their own lives. They would not be victims or feminists either. We knew how they felt, for we had felt that way, too, when we were young. Then they went out to work and met the monsters.

To understand what actually happens to women, you only have to listen to or read any of the accounts pouring forth right now to denounce “sexual harassment.”  The stories are laced with fear about immediate physical threats and, more pointedly, with anger and despair about the potential demolition of their jobs, future careers, and life as they had envisioned it for themselves.

From the stories of individual women, it’s clear that predators violate the neat categories of feminist scholarship, shifting seamlessly from harassment to coercion to physical assault, rape, and worse. The “sexual” strategies exposed by these repetitive accounts are similar to those described in police reports on battered women, seasoned prostitutes, and women subjected to incest, trafficking, rape, and femicide. These are stories of the lives and deaths of millions of women and girls in America.

Behind all of them is the deafening sound of a silence that has persisted throughout my long life. But these past weeks have been startlingly different. By now, we — both women and men — should have heard enough to never again ask: “Why didn’t she come forward?” Let this be our own “open secret.” We all know now that a man who assaults a woman does so because he can, while a woman who comes forward, even with our support, is likely to be violated and shamed again — as were the women who came forward to accuse presidential candidate Donald J. Trump.

Now What?

None of this is new, though we tend to act as if it were.  Just last week, for instance, I heard three young women radio reporters explain that women back in the 1970s or 1980s accepted “unwanted male attention” in the office and in life “because that’s just the way things were.” (Harvey Weinstein offered the same excuse: “All the rules about workplaces and behavior were different. That was the culture then.”)

Please, can we get this straight?  Back in those ancient times — the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s — we did not accept violence against women in the workplace or any place else.  It’s true we hesitated to report it to employers or the police, because when we did, we had to watch them laugh it off or send us packing. But we did call it out. We named it. We described it. We wrote books about all forms of violence against women — all those “man-hating” books that these days, if anyone cares to look, may not seem quite so obsolete.

We worked for change. And now only 40 or so years later, here it seems to be. Los Angeles Times reporter Glenn Whipp broke the story of James Toback’s predation based on the complaints of 38 women. Within days that number had grown to 200. By the time I emailed him my story, the number reporting Toback assaults had hit 310.  In a follow-up article, Whipp mentioned that the Manhattan District Attorney’s Sex Crimes Unit wanted to hear from women Toback had attacked in their jurisdiction. I called and left a message, making good my threat to bring in the law after only about 45 years.

For the first time, someone other than my best friends might listen. Somebody might even call me back. But today, as I write, New York Timesreporters Megan Twohey, Jodi Kantor, Susan Dominus and their colleagues describe in hair-raising detail “Harvey Weinstein’s Complicity Machine,” a catalogue of “enablers, silencers, and spies, warning others who discovered [Weinstein’s] secret to say nothing.”  With their collaboration, Weinstein, like Toback, has preyed upon women since the 1970s.

The Times reports that among Weinstein’s closest media pals is David J. Pecker, the chief executive of American Media Inc., which owns The National Enquirer, a gossip rag whose reporters Weinstein could use to dig up dirt on his accusers. Reportedly, Weinstein was “known in the tabloid industry as an untouchable ‘F.O.P.,’ or ‘friend of Pecker.’”  It’s no surprise to learn that another predator who shares that untouchable F.O.P. status in the tabloids is Donald “grab ‘em by the pussy” Trump.

The question is unavoidable: If serial sexual predation disqualifies a man from being a film producer, screen writer, movie star, network newsman, talk show host, journalist, venture capitalist, comedian, actor, network news director, magazine editor, publisher, photographer, CEO, congressman, or senator, why shouldn’t it disqualify a man from being president of the United States? Shouldn’t sexist serial sexual assault constitute an impeachable high crime or misdemeanor?

We may find out. Time magazine passed over the president as its “person of the year” to name instead the “” — the brave, outspoken women who inspired the #MeToo campaign. Pictured on the cover along with actress Ashley Judd and pop star Taylor Swift is a Mexican strawberry picker, using a pseudonym for her safety. Her presence and the arm of an unidentified hospital worker seated just out of the frame signal that we might yet learn how this cultural awakening is playing out in ordinary America for women working in the far less glamorous worlds of fast-food chains, nursing homes, hospitals, factories, restaurants, bars, hotels, truck stops, and yes, strawberry fields.

So where do we go from here?  This train has left the station and rolls on. In some photos of those smart young relentless women journalists at the Times, I’ve noticed that their footwear tends not to stilettos, but to boots, which as every woman knows, are good for marching and for kicking ass. That’s promising.

But since I’ve traveled this route before, you’ll have to excuse me for thinking that when this big train passes, it could leave behind a system — predators, enablers, silencers, spies, and thoroughly entrenched sex discrimination — not so very different from that of the 1970s. And if that happens, no doubt those lying dead on the tracks will prove, upon official examination, to be female.

A leader as malignant as Trump stays in power with help

Donald Trump; Stephen Bannon (Credit: AP/Matt Rourke/Reuters/Carlo Allegri)

Anyone who spends a lot of time studying the mind, behavior, emotions and communications of human beings could have told you Donald Trump was disturbed and unfit to hold the office of president, or any significant public service office, well before he decided to make a run for it. When he did make that fateful decision, there were plenty of warnings from experienced politicians, leaders, journalists, and ordinary citizens alike that this was not a good idea.

It did not take long for experienced mental health experts to speak out, abandoning the equivalent of professional gag orders for the sake of what many considered to be of higher importance and graver concern. They believe Trump is not only “not a good idea,” but a danger to America, to the world and to the existence of American democracy (see The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump). It seems the country has found validity for its own fears and reactions in the analyses of these experts about how truly dangerous he is.

But Trump does not exist in a vacuum. He is not an island. If we keep hysterically reacting to every off-the-wall and totally dangerous tweet until our nervous systems ebb just enough to allow for the new normal, he will continue to terrorize us and eventually obliterate those facets of America even the least patriotic among us hold dear. Trump is the epicenter of a system that, even if frightened by him, or privately confused by his behavior, is nonetheless working very hard to maintain him in power. He is being explained, supported and justified by enablers, and many of them.

When he blows through norms of presidential conduct, they stretch the norms to make room for him, as if we had all agreed presidential norms were far too restrictive and needed loosening. When he lies, they lie right along with him as if there really were such things as “alternative facts.” When he says something openly hateful, it is denied that it was hateful, as if we all don’t share a common language and cultural understanding. When he threatens and humiliates his own staff we are told he is being “reined in,” as if the American public should find comfort in the idea that the president needs to be reined in. And when he turns around and does it again at the remotest sign of competition, we are asked to accept that no one can control him and that controlling him is not in anyone’s job description.

Let’s give some of these dangerous enablers a little benefit of the doubt. It is safe to assume some of them are simply afraid of him. He is a bully and has been his whole life. One can only imagine how he has alternately charmed and seduced thousands of people simply to turn on them or communicate that he would if they ever stepped out of line. I certainly can feel empathy for that. After all, he is very powerful. And a powerful and disturbed man is a dangerous thing.

Let’s assume others are still under the sway of his charm or his big, simple, “let’s get things done” personality, even if reality shows that not much is getting done. They, like any hubristic teenager, can still convince themselves that they are the exception. They may be very motivated to please him and believe that if he is displeased with others it is their own fault. They are under the illusion that he would not turn on them either because 1) they are better; or 2) they know how to manage him. This is a hazardous bet to be sure, but understandably human.

Then there are the deniers. Perhaps they do not feel very secure and so their best survival instinct is to deny what is right before their eyes. Perhaps they keep telling themselves that he will eventually settle down and become a regular president. They may engage in “if only” thinking, as in, “If only the press would just let this whole Russia thing go, he could stop being so afraid and would settle into the job,” or, “If only we could get that tax bill passed, he would relax.” To take in that something is deeply wrong is simply too much for us human beings sometimes, and so the explanation is always that it’s “out there” instead of staring us in the face.

Still others are motivated to further their own agendas. Perhaps they see the ineptitude, impulsivity, delusion, mendacity and how all that in one package is not a great gift. But it is the deal they made. Maybe they even betrayed their own consciences to support him, and now owning that is too hard politically and even too hard psychologically. They have been waiting years to push through a political agenda and conservative judges. The tunnel vision on those issues, as well as the fate of their own political careers, allows them to continue to justify keeping up appearances and keeping him in power, despite the queasiness some may feel.

And finally, there are those who are motivated either by pure greed or lust for power, or both. The desecration of whole swaths of different people (most recently Native Americans, Puerto Ricans and Muslims) and the degradation of a system of checks and balances does not give them the willies, because they hope to capitalize on it. The corporate donors who hope to get rich off the tax scheme, the directors of various departments enriching themselves and holding positions of power they never would have held because are not qualified for them, the racists whose long-disguised hatred is joyfully rekindled every time Trump tweets, all relish the brutish tactics of Trump because none of them truly believes in equality. They wear their lapel American flags while they fail to be moved by the idea of America itself.

Whether we can empathize or not, all of these enablers are endangering us. This president and this administration are so much more dominated by vice than by the slightest desire to be virtuous. Fear, pride, weakness, foolishness, selfishness, and greed are all human experiences and something we are all vulnerable to at some point or another. But when they are chronic and when that chronicity has deleterious effects on others, they need to be challenged. We do not elect people to be run by their vices. Nor do we elect them to ignore the debilitating vices of others also in power. We elect them to be guided by their better selves, to embody and make decisions on behalf of all of us based on courage of conviction, concern for fellow human beings (even above themselves at times), intelligence and good discernment, and some connection to a communal striving toward a better life for all. And the beauty of our democracy is that we can stop electing them and we can make their work very unpleasant if they do not measure up to those high expectations.

So what are we doing about the dangerousness of our president and his many enablers? Could we be enabling them in some way? Do we wallow in our helplessness because we are not near the center of power, nursing our anxiety and letting ourselves off the hook? Are we crippled by our fear? Are we engaging in our own self-soothing denial? Do we pass the buck onto the next person, just cross our fingers, or perhaps sanctify Robert Mueller as our next savior? Are we blinded by our own hopes for a financial reward for suffering this presidency? Do we secretly nurture fears and hatred of other people enough to hope for that wall, ignoring all the signs that Trump has never been who he said he could be?

Trump is not the only dangerous one. Anyone who excuses him and does not hold him to account for his behavior in a serious way every time is enabling, and therefore dangerous. If we are not finding ways to participate in our democracy both to resist the destructive things he is doing and to build enough momentum to get him out of office, we are dangerous as well.

In some collective way, whether we voted for Trump or not, we are responsible for the calamity of this presidency. This is because the epicenter cannot hold if the system changes. And the system cannot change until we hold ourselves and all the enablers responsible. We are all potentially dangerous. But we are also all potentially corrective.

 

Eileen M. Russell is a clinical psychologist in private practice in New York and New Jersey. She is senior faculty at the AEDP Institute, adjunct faculty at NYU/ Bellevue Hospital and faculty at the Trauma Treatment Program at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies in NYC. She is the author of Restoring Resilience: Discovering Your Clients’ Capacity for Healing.

Tax bill’s attack on higher education undermines America’s economic vitality

Howard University in Washington, D.C. (Credit: Library of Congress/Carol M. Highsmith)

With the Senate’s passage of the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,” President Donald Trump seems close to notching his first legislative victory — a huge tax cut for the 1 percent. All that remains is the need to reconcile the Senate bill with the version passed earlier by the House of Representatives.

The bill is a travesty. Never have so many been forced to give up so much to benefit so few. The president’s claims to the contrary notwithstanding, this is no wonderful Christmas present for the American people. It’s more like a grimy lump of coal — many lumps, in fact.

In a pair of bills that each runs to more than 400 pages, it is not hard to find objectionable provisions. As a long-time academic, I am particularly appalled by the treatment of America’s colleges and universities, the widespread network of institutions charged with training America’s talent pool of the future.

The Republican plan undermines what its backers claim is their goal: boosting America’s economic vitality. Here’s why.

Targeting higher ed

For instance, as part of its effort to pay for the generous tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, Republicans aim to impose a 1.4 percent tax on investment income at private schools with endowments worth at least US$250,000 per full-time student. This would affect as many as 70 schools and cost them an estimated $2.5 billion over a decade.

Not only will that shrink the resources available to support research, much of which helps to fuel the nation’s economic growth. It will also make it more difficult to hold down rising tuition expenses, thus closing off educational opportunities for many students from lower- and middle-income families.

Public universities in states like New York and California can also expect to be hard hit by the bill’s elimination of the federal deduction for state and local taxes. Since this change will actually add to residents’ overall tax bills, state governments are bound to come under voter pressure to offset them with tax cuts closer to home, which in turn will require corresponding expenditure reductions. Public universities, by definition, tend to be highly dependent on the public purse for their revenues. That makes them particularly vulnerable targets when budgets are slashed at the state level.

Those of us who teach in the University of California system, for instance, still remember the pay cuts we all had to endure when Sacramento’s budget was hit by the Great Recession of 2008-2009. Funding for the system as a whole was cut by 40 percent, leading to an exodus of faculty, tight limits on new hires and severe limits on financial aid for students. It took years for support of instruction and research to return to pre-crisis levels.

And even more egregious are some “reforms” in the House version that might yet make it into law depending on how negotiations with the Senate turn out. The House bill is far stingier than the Senate’s when it comes to higher education. For example, House Republicans propose eliminating a benefit that lets some taxpayers deduct student loan interest. That too will close off opportunities for many poorer students.

The House bill also takes aim at a break that presently makes graduate school more affordable by allowing students to work as research or teaching assistants for tuition waivers that don’t count as taxable income. Counting these waivers as income would make graduate school unaffordable for tens of thousands of current and would-be students.

All in all, the House bill alone would reduce tax incentives for higher education by an estimated $64 billion over 10 years.

Higher ed’s economic impact

Whatever the final shape of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the provisions targeting higher education will have adverse economic effects that will be both substantial and long-lasting.

Numerous studies have shown that a college education adds substantially to an individual’s lifetime earning potential. Research by the College Board, a nonprofit that helps students prepare for college, shows that the median income of bachelor’s degree recipients with no advanced degree and working full time in 2011 was $56,500, some $21,100 more than median earnings of high school graduates. Put another way, the benefits of a four-year college degree are equivalent to an investment that returns 15.2 percent per year — over a lifetime. And the earnings premium grows even wider for additional years of study.

Furthermore, over time individual earnings tend to rise more rapidly for those with higher levels of education, and unemployment levels are significantly lower. The evidence is strong that these benefits bolster the overall economy as well.

Zvi Griliches, a Harvard economist who died in 1999 and was a specialist on the topic, found that the historical growth of years devoted to higher education and other advanced training accounted for about a third of productivity growth in the U.S. economy over the 50-year period he examined.

These productivity gains, in turn, translated into higher output and incomes for the economy as a whole, adding substantially to America’s wealth.

Evidence also suggests that regions with a higher proportion of college graduates tend to have lower crime rates, higher levels of civic participation and improved performance across a number of other socioeconomic measures.

Shattered dreams, stunted economy

In its essence, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act embodies a contemptuous disregard for intellectualism and expertise that over time can only erode the quality of the U.S. work force.

Many schools will see their budgets cut; faced with higher fees and tuition, many students will be forced to drop out — their dreams shattered, their earning potential stunted, their contribution to the American economy significantly curtailed.

America will not be made great again by attacking its system of higher education in such a mindless manner.

Benjamin J. Cohen, Professor of International Political Economy, University of California, Santa Barbara

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The one complaint you might have about your glorious MacBook Pro? The major lack of ports. For those times you want to multitask while still maintaining your new tech’s sleek exterior, there’s the HomeSpot USB-C Hub for MacBook Pro.

This utilitarian, streamlined hub adds two USB-C, three USB-A 3.0, an SD and a microSD port to your MacBook Pro — that means you can charge your devices and send out a 4K video at the same time. That’s right, you don’t have to choose between doing different tasks. You can do it all at once.

This handy hub is compatible with 2016 and 2017 MacBook Pro 13″ and 15″ models and gives you significantly more flexibility while you work.

It’s the perfect stocking stuffer for the productivity-driven person — usually, this HomeSpot USB-C Hubs for MacBook Pro is $159.99, but you can get it now for $54.99, or 65% off the usual price.

American Taliban

(Credit: Getty Images)

I had a nightmare some years ago. I had moved from Los Angeles to a southern state that had gone from marginally purple to bright red in the last election. The Republicans held the governorship and both houses of the legislature for the first time in generations, and every day you could pick up the paper and watch them go to work. They didn’t have a state income tax, and most of the state revenue was raised by sales taxes, and a weak economy had caused those to come up short recently, so what did they do? They raised the state sales tax on groceries. That’s right, they raised taxes on food. While they were at it, they raised taxes on drugs. So poor and middle class people in the state would pay more taxes to feed their children and to keep them healthy. But they weren’t finished. They cut funding for education, they cut funding for infrastructure repair, they cut funding for health care, and when Obamacare passed, they refused the funding it offered that would have increased enrollment in the state Medicaid program, causing funding to be cut to hospitals all over the state, and at least seven rural hospitals to close.

There came a night when I woke up sweating from a nightmare. It came to me in a dream that there was a plan behind all of this, an overall design to actually harm the lives of a certain number of citizens in the state. In my nightmare, there was a room where a bunch of men sat around and talked about this stuff. They knew what they were doing. They knew what the results would be. They planned out the bills and the votes, and they passed the laws, and then they carried them out.

Somehow I managed to get myself back to sleep, but when I woke up, I remembered the nightmare vividly. I had a friend who lived in a state in the Midwest who had been involved in politics his entire adult life. I decided I would call him and tell him my nightmare and ask if any of it could be true. Could one political party actually have a plan to harm the citizens ? Was I going crazy?

I asked him, could my nightmare be true? Absolutely, he said. He began describing the county where he lived. He had been on the school board for many years, one of three Democrats on board controlled by a Republican majority. This was a wealthy suburban county with a healthy tax base and a school budget that was in excellent shape every year. What could be wrong with that? Well, the county had enough money that they could fund a study of the problems their schools faced and come up with a program to fix stuff like graduation rates and reading and math scores. Their data in past studies was good enough that had tried funding some solutions, and they worked. If they spent this much, they could increase graduation rates by ten points. If they spent that much, they could increase reading scores at fourth and eighth grade levels.

Then the Republicans reached their limit. They knew that spending another few hundred per student per year would yield specific improvements in graduation rates, the numbers of students who would qualify for college, and so forth. But businesses needed a certain number of high school drop-outs to fill minimum wage jobs. They needed a population with a certain percentage that hadn’t gone to a four year college and would take low-wage jobs. They needed, in short, an underclass, and spending more on education wouldn’t yield one that was large enough. So there they stood with identifiable and achievable goals in front of them.

My friend told me that privately Republicans would admit what they were doing. But they never talked about it publicly. They didn’t for office stating their goals. They came up with other stuff to motivate their voters, “values” issues, “education” issues like school choice and charter schools and vouchers, attacks on the teachers’ union. Behind the scenes, however, they were voting to keep a certain number of their fellow citizens undereducated. They were using their votes to maintain a class of people whose labor would help to make the people who they served rich. It wasn’t cynical. It was purposeful.

Republicans aren’t a political party anymore. They’re the American Taliban. They’ve set out to lay waste to America as we’ve known it, and it’s gotten a lot harder to keep up with them, hasn’t it? The evil buggers have been nibbling away at us like ducks for so long there is hardly any flesh left on our bones. The latest scam they came up with was as predictable as it was venal. The “deficit hawks” in the Republican party who wouldn’t pass a single bill during the eight years Obama was in the White House unless it was “paid for” are in a so-called conference committee splitting hairs over how many trillions they’re going to add to the national debt.

Meanwhile, their gimlet-eyed death ferret speaker of the house just announced plans last week to lay waste to “entitlements.” You remember “entitlements,” don’t you? Those are the programs you actually pay for with your payroll taxes, Social Security and Medicare, which aren’t entitlements at all, but rather the federally established insurance policies that protect the elderly against poverty and disease.

“We’re going to have to get back next year at entitlement reform, which is how you tackle the debt and the deficit,” the Death Ferret said while being interviewed on a radio talk show. Medicare and Medicaid “are the big drivers of the debt” Speaker Paul Ryan explained. “That’s where the problem lies, fiscally speaking.”

Do you see the genius at work here? I mean, just look at them! First they pass a so-called “tax cut” that actually raises taxes on tens of millions of lower and middle class Americans while cutting taxes on millionaires and billionaires and adding trillions to the deficit. Then they use the increase in the deficit to justify cutting the two federal programs that actually work to aid the people whose taxes they just raised.

They do have a plan. We’ve spent the last 10 months watching them carry it out. Part of the plan is to overturn every single thing Democrats did under Obama. They wanted to repeal the Affordable Care Act completely. When squabbling amongst themselves put that out of reach, they started nibbling at it. The tax bill includes a provision they’re currently arguing over that would do away with the insurance mandate that would could potentially end coverage of pre-existing conditions.

They’re not stopping there.They aren’t even pretending anymore. They’re running on this stuff. Suppress the votes of fellow citizens who are black, latino, and poor? Check. Keep them in poverty by refusing to raise the $7.25 minimum wage? Check. Allow owners of restaurants to collect tips and dole them out any goddamn way they want? Check. Take away the ability of teachers to deduct money they spend out of their own pocket to help educate their students? Check. Tax contract workers’ income at regular rates while taxing owners’ pass-through income at lower rates? Check. Lower corporate tax rates while raising workers’ taxes? Check. Repeal the Johnson Amendment so billionaires could make tax-deductible “donations” to churches which could turn around and spend the same money on political campaigns? Check. Make it harder for workers to file discrimination suits? Check. Make it easier for polluters to foul the air and water? Check. Appoint a Secretary of Education who wants to privatize public education? Check. Allow billionaires to deduct certain expenses for their Gulfstreams? Check. Leave in place laws that allow offshore trusts and other tax avoidance schemes used by millionaires and billionaires? Check. Prepare the upcoming 2020 Census so it will provide a population count ripe for corrupt gerrymandering? Check. Pass an insane law that will enable lunatics to carry concealed guns across state lines into places where concealed-carry is illegal? Check.

It’s not a nightmare, it’s a goddamned political program, and they don’t need Donald Trump to carry it out. Everything we’ve seen over the last month proves that every Republican currently breathing oxygen stands foursquare behind this stuff. If they were willing to support Roy Moore’s failed campaign for United States Senate, they’ll do anything. They’re in it for the long haul and they won’t stop. They’ll nibble at our democracy until it’s a skeleton lying in a globally-warmed desert somewhere in a formally blue state where it used to rain.

30 things we love about Alabama

Doug Jones and his wife Louise (Credit: AP/John Bazemore)

Democrat Doug Jones was victorious in Tuesday’s senate election against alleged statutory rapist and Boss Hogg cosplayer Roy Moore, a man, who aside from the sexual-misconduct accusations, is on record saying racist, homophobic and sexist remarks. Even still, the election was painfully close, with white voters (men and women, people with college degrees and not) turning out for Moore.

Given the high-stakes election — which, with Jones’ victory reduces the Republican majority down to just one seat and gives the Democrats an early win ahead of many of the significant elections next year — Alabama has been in the national spotlight all season. Alas, this meant hearing scores sweeping stereotypes and caricatures about the state and its constituents from both the right and left.

More so perhaps than anything else, this campaign and the way it ended should serve to remind people that Alabama is much more than what Roy Moore and costal critics make it out to be. After all, it’s the state where a committed black electorate saw through the politics the GOP candidate represented and answered him with an organized, nearly universal response that swung the final outcome. As writer and teacher Clint Smith aptly tweeted Tuesday night: “don’t erase the lives & experiences of black, brown, & LGBTQ folks in Alabama who don’t subscribe to the same politics as those who are voting for Moore.”

Beyond the battle between Moore and Jones, and even politics more generally, Alabama has produced important civil rights figures, legendary athletes and performers, and is home to various museums, organizations and centers that work tirelessly to make the state and country at large a more equitable, cultured, worthy place.

Alabama, like every state in the U.S. is complicated in both its history and current politics — but it’s important to not negate the people and institutions in Alabama who’ve worked for decades to change its narrative.

This is all to say that there’s a lot of things to love about the red-leaning state once you set aside your preconceptions. Here’s just a few.

Birmingham Civil Rights Institute

This museum and research center tells the story of Birmingham’s role in the fight for civil rights, both as an epicenter in the movement in the 1950s and ’60s and also as an ongoing capital for black people and black freedoms.

Shepherded into being by the city’s first black mayor, it officially opened to the public in 1992, recently celebrating its 25th anniversary. Significantly, it stands across the street from the 16th Street Baptist Church where four young black girls lost their lives after white supremacists detonated a bomb in 1963. While there are several prominent civil-rights centers in the south, Birmingham’s remains one of the largest and oldest.

While tributes to the grace of various civil-rights leaders are many here, this is not a place that hides the ugliness of segregation and racism. Exhibits such as the “Confrontation Gallery” show the daunting white robes and hoods members of Ku Klux Klan wore as they terrorized black communities. It’s not just a catalog of who fought for equality, but a sharp exploration of why they were fighting.

Angela Davis

Political activist Angela Davis was born and raised in Birmingham, and her commitment to social justice has not wavered in over five decades of  work. Davis is most known for her iconic afro, membership in the Communist Party, affiliation with the Black Panther Party and for becoming a political prisoner after being charged with conspiracy, something she was eventually acquitted of after thousands organized for her release.

But Davis has continued to be a fierce advocate for many of important causes nationally and abroad, forwardeding an internationalist and intersectional approach to social justice. Her work includes authoring books connecting the struggles between Ferguson and Palestine, pointed examinations of the prison-industrial complex and meditations on women, race and class.

Davis has spoken out against the death penalty, transgender discrimination and misogyny within civil rights movements and organizations. Simply, she is a tireless champion for the values she learned in Alabama.

Rosa Parks Library and Museum

The Rosa Parks Library and Museum, located on the grounds of Troy University in Montgomery, preserves the legacy of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the individuals who made such a profound and powerful protest victorious. The museum also highlights the many contributions of the woman who became known as the “mother of the civil rights movement.”

There are several components to the museum, but most notably is an exhibit that functions as a reenactment of the day in 1955 when Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery City Bus to a white man, a moment that many see as the spark that lit the civil-rights movement. No impromptu, unplanned moment of resistance, the move was strategic for Parks and the organizers she worked with. More crucially, the museum shows how it was one part of a larger career of activism and advocacy on behalf of black people and women.

Southern Poverty Law Center

Founded in 1971 by Morris Dees and Joseph Levin Jr., the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has fought and continues to fight against hate and bigotry and defend marginalized people through litigation, education and advocacy in a way that few organizations ever has.

As its website explains: “Our lawsuits have toppled institutional racism and stamped out remnants of Jim Crow segregation; destroyed some of the nation’s most violent white supremacist groups; and protected the civil rights of children, women, the disabled, immigrants and migrant workers, the LGBT community, prisoners, and many others who faced discrimination, abuse or exploitation.”

SPLC is also known for documenting and exposing hate groups, as well as taking on criminal justice reform. The Center has its own magazine called “Intelligence Report” and founded the Civil Rights Memorial located across the street from its center. Both institutions in Montgomery were built around the corner from the church where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. presided as pastor during the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Evander Holyfield

Heavyweight and cruiserweight champion, Evander Holyfield was already one of boxing’s revered White Hats before the bout in June 1997 when, in a clinch in the third round, Iron Mike Tyson bit off a chunk of his right ear and spit it onto the mat in center ring. Who needs that? Certainly not Evander Holyfield, an Olympic gold medalist who had won and lost and then successfully defended his heavyweight title three times before retiring in 1992, and then abandoned retirement in order to fight Tyson.

What few people recall about the Tyson fight, originally billed as “The Sound And The Fury,” is that when it resumed immediately following his disfigurement, Tyson almost succeeded in biting off Holyfield’s left ear. “The Bite Fight” as it has been remembered was stopped before the start of the fifth round. Whatever he was doing, and whoever was biting him, Holyfield’s always paired determination with true class — a true credit to his state.

Joe Louis

Much like his fellow Alabaman pugilist, Holyfield, the “Brown Bomber” combined technique and raw power to become a champion in the ring. Unlike Holyfield, however, Louis was also a profoundly consequential figure in black history, one whose value is often overlooked by white society.

One of the most famous men of his age and perhaps the first black international hero (most of America saw Jack Johnson as a villain), he inspired crowds of African-Americans to take to the streets, cheering his name during a time when they didn’t have much to cheer about. Long after his career was done, President Ronald Reagan said of the man, “Joe Louis was more than a sports legend — his career was an indictment of racial bigotry and a source of pride and inspiration to millions of white and black people around the world.”

Corretta Scott King

Born in Heiberger, Corretta Scott King was much more than just the wife of Dr. King. She was an author, activist, singer and civil rights leader in her own right. Her advocacy work only increased after King’s assassination as she assumed roles in the women’s movement, founded the King Center and was instrumental in the recognition of Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a national holiday.

 

Jesse Owens & Carl Lewis

Owens is one of the greatest track-and-field athletes of all time. Fellow Alabaman Lewis kept his athletic legacy alive in the latter part of the 20th century. Owens won four gold medals during Adolf Hitler’s 1936 Berlin Olympics, undercutting the Nazi myth of the “master race”. Lewis, for his part, won nine gold Olympic medals and has been called “Olympian of the Century” by Sports Illustrated. Two fast men, one home state.

Doug Jones

Now, what’s good about Doug Jones isn’t just limited to his win over Moore. Nor is it circumscribed by the graceful, simple way he went about campaigning or actually listened to black voters while doing so. As a lawyer, he’s also brought to justice abortion-clinic bombers, prosecuted some of the KKK members who torched Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963 killing four young girls, held Monsanto to task and more.

 

Muscle Shoals Sound Studio

If you’ve ever had a soul, rock R&B or pop song from the ‘60s or ‘70s by Percy Sledge, Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin, Etta James, the Rolling Stones, Bob Seger or many others stuck in your head, there’s a decent chance it came out of this out-of-the-way studio with instrumentals from the legendary Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section. While off the beaten path, it’s ground zero for much of the music that provides the soundtrack for America.

 

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Rosenbaum House

While nowhere near as famous or spectacular as the architect’s “Falling Water” house, this ranch-style, single-family home in Florence may be just as influential and is certainly more livable. Warm, yet angular, welcoming, yet bold, it offers not just a model for the ideal modern home, but a blueprint for living happily with arresting architecture, not just cooped up in it.

 

The U.S. Space and Rocket Center

Located in Huntsville, it’s not just one of the largest museums dedicated to space exploration, it’s one of the most open and welcoming. From the titanic rockets that boosted the early days of the American space program outside, to the simulators and exhibits inside, it makes exploration technology something as approachable, touchable and inspiring as it should be.

U.S. Veterans Memorial Museum

Similarly, this other Huntsville institution, “where every day is Veterans Day,” doesn’t keep history under wraps. Unlike the marble monuments to our service members all over our country, this museum takes visitors up close to the arms they carried, the items they used and, in its outside portion, the vehicles they rode in.

 

Alabama Football

Simply put, Alabama owns college football. The Alabama Crimson Tide and the Auburn Tigers have set the standard with 21 National Championships between them. The names on the field are legendary — Bear Bryant, Joe Namath, Bo Jackson, Cam Newton — and the annual Iron Bowl between the state rivals is a classic.

SAW’s Soul Kitchen and BBQ

No one does soul food and BBQ quite like the south and SAW’s is a staple in Alabama. The pork and greens is a patron favorite, but the menu of these sister restaurants offers many, many more mouth-watering options. Don’t leave the state without a visit.

 

Hangout Music Fest

Once a year, people travel from all over the South to let loose at this three-day music festival on the beaches of Gulf Shores. At what some may consider to be the Coachella of Alabama, musical artists such as The Black Keys, The Killers, the late Tom Petty and Stevie Wonder have all graced the stage in the last few years.

 

Alabama Wildlife Rehabilitation Center

Located in Oak Mountain State Park, it’s the oldest wildlife rehabilitation center in Alabama and cares for almost 2,000 bird patients every year. What started as a volunteer-based organization in 1977 has now grown into one of the largest, and most vibrant, wildlife rehabilitation centers in the country.

 

Highlands Bar & Grill

This French restaurant features a menu that changes daily, making it a place both tourists and residents can return to since its foundation in 1982. But the experience at Highlands Bar & Grill goes beyond just the cuisine. Fine dining Alabama-style, it’s a cultural institution.

 

Dexter Parsonage Museum

Another iconic landmark for the civil rights movement, the Dexter Parsonage Museum is famous for being the home where Dr. King and his family lived during some of his most productive, consequential years. A center point for the Montgomery Bus Boycott, it’s a tangible artifact from those days you can walk into.

 

Ave Maria Grotto

A synthesis of religious kitsch, folk-art splendor and Christian reverence, Ave Maria Grotto presents itself as a series of miniature landmarks, from Jerusalem to the Vatican, painstakingly crafted by a monk, Brother Joseph Zoettl. Despite being off the beaten path, Ave Maria Grotto has taken its place in the canon of American folk-art monuments, likely because it’s so quintessentially American.

Fort Gaines

The site is famous for its role in the Battle of Mobile Bay during the Civil War and remains home to many of its relics including original cannons, the massive brick fortifications and the anchor from Admiral David Farragut’s flagship, USS Hartford. More than just an attraction for history buffs, though, Fort Gaines sits right at the lip of the Gulf on Dauphin Island, a beautiful location in and of itself.

Hank Aaron & Willie Mays

Alabama is home to two of the greatest, and most idiosyncratic, baseball legends. Aaron went straight from playing in an Alabama city league to the national level where he eventually broke Babe Ruth’s homerun record with a certain quiet grace and dignity. Mays, the “Say Hey Kid,” was far more flash and dash, but no less talented. Famously, he’s been in the starting lineup for more MLB All-Star Games than any other player in history.

 

Mia Hamm & Bo Jackson

And that’s not the end to Alabama’s athletic legacy. Not only is Hamm a two-time FIFA Women’s World Cup winner, she’s also a two-time gold medalist. Bo Jackson, an Auburn alum, is the famously multi-faceted athlete who played both baseball and football, becoming a massively popular all-star in both sports on the professional level.

 

USS Alabama Battleship Memorial Park

This relic South Dakota-class battleship is the sixth to be named after the State of Alabama. Commissioned in 1942 and a veteran of both theaters of World War II with nine battle stars, she’s a must-see sight for history fans passing through Mobile. She sits moored next to other attractions such as an aviation museum, an outdoors arms gallery and the submarine USS Drum, a World War II survivor herself.

 

W.C. Handy & Hank Williams

And, yes, many famous musicians have called Alabama home, including W.C. Handy. Born in Florence, Alabama, in 1873, the African-American composer was so influential he’s become known as the “Father of Blues.” Hank Williams, too, helped lay the brickwork for an entire genre. The Mount Olive native is perhaps the quintessential country star and, overall, one of the most influential singers of the 20th century.

 

Helen Keller

Born in Tuscumbia just 19 months before she lost her sight and hearing, Keller’s writing and, at times, speech transformed the way the world views disability. Through the help of Anne Sullivan and others, Keller overcame what many at the time viewed as the permanent isolation of deafness, dumbness and blindness to become perhaps the best advocate for the disabled this nation has ever had and a co-founder of the ACLU. It is through her example that many began to view physical limitations as obstacles to be overcome, not permanent boundaries.

 

Acre Restaurant

Located on one full acre of land in Auburn’s historic downtown, the aptly named Acre is a farm-to-table operation owned by Alabama-born and San Antonio-raised Executive Chef David Bancroft. Opened in a stone house in 2013, the kitchen garden grows everything from Arbequina olives to collard greens and lemongrass. What Bancroft doesn’t grow himself he gets from nearby ranchers, fishermen and foragers. Try the roasted gulf snapper served with creamed popped corn and collards.

 

Richard Shelby

There’s a lot of things you can hold against the senior U.S. senator from Alabama, but you can’t call him a coward. He’s blood-red on almost every issue you can name from abortion and gun control, to health care and the environment. But when it came between choosing his party’s agenda by voting for Roy Moore and doing the right and moral thing, he chose the high ground. “I think the Republican Party can do better” than Moore, he told CNN. “The state of Alabama deserves better.” He cast his vote for a write-in conservative candidate and left the election with his dignity intact, which is a lot more than many in the GOP can say.

Charles Barkley

Barkley grew up 10 minutes outside of Birmingham, in Leeds, and all through his storied career in the NBA played the heel to faces like Magic Johnson and Isiah Thomas and, especially, Michael Jordan. Barkley left the league for the chattering classes court side in 2000 and has been a reliable, enjoyable provocateur ever since. A life-long Republican, Barkley flirted momentarily with statewide office in 2008 but recanted that promise to run for governor when the opportunity arose two years later. This year, he tore a path through the state campaigning against Roy Moore and for Doug Jones.

 

“To Kill A Mockingbird”

Published in 1961 and based on events in and around Monroeville where author Harper Lee grew up, the lessons of “To Kill A Mockingbird” about the death of innocence in a radicalized America may be the one universally accepted text that children are encouraged to read in order to begin an explanation of the color line in this country. In an odd way, it might the state’s greatest tangible gift to America’s children

What’s at stake if we lose net neutrality? A guide for the perplexed

(Credit: Getty/Salon)

Tomorrow, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will vote to keep or eliminate net neutrality rules — and if net neutrality is discarded, their decision could potentially turn the American Internet into an oligarchy, controlled and mediated by a few large corporations. The unraveling of these rules, which were established in 2015 under the Obama administration, is a partisan issue to be sure — nearly all Democrats are pro–net neutrality, and the charge to end net neutrality is spearheaded by a few Republicans like FCC chairman Ajit Pai and President Donald Trump — yet its impact will affect all American internet users regardless of political persuasion. For the record, that’s most of the country: only 13 percent of Americans don’t use the internet.

If you didn’t follow the debate leading up to the implementation of the rules in 2015, you might be more confused about why everyone is freaking out about Thursday’s vote; or, perhaps, what the impact on consumers will be if the overturn is passed, which is likely considering the party split of the commission. Here, we’ve put together a Salon explainer guide.

First, what is net neutrality?

“Net neutrality is the rules of the road that are designed to keep a level playing field between Internet service providers (ISPs) and other players in the broadband space,” Amber McKinney, Assistant Managing Editor at the legal publication Law360, and who covers telecommunications, explained to Salon.

Currently, the U.S. has 62 ISPs, including big names like AT&T Wireless, Sprint, T-Mobile, Xfinity (a Comcast product) and U.S. Cellular.

Why is this happening now?

In 2014, Obama passed an order that classified the Internet as a Title II entity under the Communications Acts, which ultimately established restrictions for Internet providers that inhibited them from blocking content, accessing content, and throttling Internet content — which is when ISPs intentionally slow (or speed) a specific Internet service. As Obama explained during the initial debate a few years ago, “no service should be stuck in a ‘slow lane’ because it does not pay a fee.”

According to McKinney, there were several instances in which ISPs took advantage of an Internet without net neutrality rules, which is what helped pave the way for Obama’s net neutrality rules. In 2007, Jon Hart of California, sued Comcast for allegedly blocking him from using the peer-to-peer application BitTorrent. In 2012, AT&T limited the use of Apple’s Facetime feature on their phones, in an attempt to save bandwidth.

However, after President Donald Trump took office in January, he appointed Ajit Pai as the chairman of the FCC. Pai was already a commissioner at the FCC, having been nominated by Barack Obama in a recommendation from Sen. Mitch McConnell, R.-Ky. The FCC is always comprised of five commissioners, and no more than three can belong to a party—as it stands, three, including Pai, are Republicans.

Since Pai has become Chairman, he’s made it the FCC’s priority to reverse Obama’s net neutrality rules. In his proposal, net neutrality regulations would essentially become obsolete.

When Pai announced the new order, he claimed that Obama’s order forced the government to micromanage the Internet.

“We propose to repeal utility-style regulation of the Internet. We propose to return to the Clinton-era light-touch framework that has proven to be successful. And we propose to put technologists and engineers, rather than lawyers and accountants, at the center of the online world,” Pai said in a statement about the rollback.

He also pointed to small ISPs, and their inability to grow due to Obama’s net neutrality rules.

“Small ISPs faced new regulatory burdens associated with common carrier compliance. Innovative providers hoping to offer their customers new, even free services had to fear a Washington bureaucracy that might disapprove and take enforcement action against them. With the possibility of broadband rate regulation looming on the horizon, companies investing in next-generation networks hesitated to build or expand networks, unsure of whether the government would let them compete in the free market,” he said.

Since then, Internet pioneers and Democratic Senators have publicly asked Pai to delay the vote. A Republican, Mike Coffman, R-Colo., also asked Pai to delay the vote. The request to delay the vote isn’t only motivated by irreconcilable party differences, it’s also because of a debacle regarding the FCC comments section on the matter. When Pai announced his plan to reverse Obama’s net neutrality rules, he said the FCC would accept and consider comments on the matter; yet the FCC comment page ended up being trolled by bot accounts that spammed the page. In fact, according to a Pew Research Center study, fifty-seven percent of publicly-posted comments on the FCC’s website came from temporary or duplicate emails.

In an open letter penned by Apple’s co-founder Steve Wozniak; Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web; Vinton G. Cerf, whose nickname is the “father of the Internet,” and more, it was revealed the the FCC has neglected to acknowledge Freedom of Information Act requests related to the fake comments.

A twinge of hypocrisy

What’s a political debate without a little hypocrisy? Congressman Coffman, R-Colorado, wrote a letter to Pai in which he pointed out how Pai’s previous words contradict his current stance.

As Coffman wrote:

“As you stated in your dissent to the previous FCC’s open Internet proceeding, ‘A dispute this fundamental is not for us, five unelected individuals, to decide. Instead, it should be resolved by the people’s elected representatives, those who choose the direction of the government—and those whom the American people can hold accountable for that choice.’”

Yet, here we are.

Future implications

As the hours countdown to Thursday’s vote, there’s no end in sight to suggest that the vote will be delayed or the overturn won’t pass, which means consumers should begin to mentally prepare for an Internet without net neutrality regulations. According to McKinney, like anything, changes would be implemented at a slow pace, and there’s no way to truly predict what they would look like, but many are pointing to Portugal as an model of the types of tiered-Internet packages ISPs would offer.

For example, an ISP could charge $25 for a basic Internet access, and then ISPs could add extra charges for additional services like streaming video or using social media. It’s unclear if American consumers would stand for that, but the rollback would give ISPs an opportunity to experiment.

The other potential implication is what ISPs will do to companies who get a lot of traffic, or have features that require a lot of bandwidth. McKinney told Salon that one way to think about this is to look to Ikea, a furniture retail company that gets a lot of traffic. “Let’s say Ikea has a VR component to see what a piece of furniture would look like in your living room, but that feature takes up a lot of bandwidth,” she says. “The ISP might charge more for that feature, and Ikea could say that’s not worth it to us, and they’d take it off their website.”

Moreover, this vote also comes at a moment when the news industry faces a crisis of public faith, largely as a result of attacks on the news industry’s credibility from the president and his allies.  If the net neutrality rules are overturned, McKinney tells Salon it could have an impact on news sites as well.

“An Internet service provider, say Comcast that also owns NBCUniversal Media, could decide to provide content from NBC on a ‘fast lane,’ meaning stories and video clips load quickly, while throttling the same type of content from a competitor’s news site, making that media load more slowly,” she told Salon. “It remains unclear how much the Federal Trade Commission will be able to police these kinds of arrangements, and whether the scenario above with two related companies will be treated differently for enforcement purposes from a situation where one media outlet simply pays Comcast or another ISP a higher rate to make sure their content is provided on one of the internet fast lanes.”

Even though the vote doesn’t hinge on citizen voters, a recent poll by Politico and Morning Consult has found that 52 percent of voters are in favor of Obama’s net neutrality regulations, including 53 percent of Republicans and 55 percent of Democrats. Likewise, a University of Maryland poll, quoted in the Washington Post yesterday, noted that “large majorities of Americans — including 3 out of 4 Republicans — oppose the government’s plan to repeal its net neutrality rules for Internet providers.”

Not another Trump University: Does Arizona need Woz U?

Steve Wozniak (Credit: AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

At an October tech conference in Arizona’s Paradise Valley, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak announced a new online technology education platform called Woz U. He expressed hope it would revolutionize the industry and become the standard for software and technology education. “Our goal is to educate and train people in employable digital skills without putting them into years of debt,” Wozniak said. “People are often afraid to choose a technology-based career because they think they can’t do it.”

As of now, Woz U only offers two 33-week courses for customer-support specialists and software developers, both MOOCs, or massive open online courses. But Wozniak’s plans don’t stop there, as he also hopes to add data science, mobile application and cybersecurity programs to the curriculum.

Woz U, which will be based out of Scottsdale, has plans to expand the school into physical campuses all across the country, with the goal of setting up campuses in more than 30 cities across the country and another 15 internationally. This initiative, called Woz Academy, will begin in 2018, although no future sites have been announced. Another part of Wozniak’s plan, called the Accelerator, is to create a different kind of school that will aim to attract elite tech talent and innovators to participate in an immersive 12-month program that will offer paid internships. The Accelerator will also have a physical campus in a yet undisclosed location in Arizona.

Woz U has already run into some issues within the state regarding accreditation and logistics. The school does not have a physical campus, but does have an office in Scottsdale that will serve as its headquarters. The Arizona State Board for Private Postsecondary Education, the state agency that regulates for-profit schools, announced Woz U is not licensed to operate in Arizona. 

Because the news release and website for the school describe it as an “Arizona-based” school offering classes with headquarters in Scottsdale, that would mandate it get a license or face a Class 3 misdemeanor if the school advertises, recruits students or operates without a license.

The programs being offered now are run by a for-profit education company called Southern Careers Institute, which doesn’t have the best track record of success for its students. Only 31 percent of the students who attend SCI graduate, a staggeringly low score, even among for-profit schools.

According to the website, the school is working in partnership with Exeter Education, whose CEO, Brent Richardson, was the former chairman of another for-profit school in Arizona, Grand Canyon University. The premise of Woz U wouldn’t be a new one, as there are other similar programs that used MOOCs to teach tech-based skills. But the other elements of his proposed goal for what the school will become are surely innovative on the surface.

However, Woz U currently doesn’t offer any form of degree or certification for completing the courses offered at the moment. Aside from the two MOOCs offered, those interested are limited to requesting more information about what the program will look like eventually. The site itself outlines the vision for the school, but for the time being it offers nothing but the prospect of something better coming in the future, albeit with the Woz’s stamp of approval.

But with Woz U’s partnership with a for-profit company, it raises questions of why it chose Arizona to set up shop.

History of for-profit education in Arizona 

Arizona is a state that welcomes for-profit colleges with open arms. Arizona has 26 different for-profit colleges, ranging from job-specific schools for cosmetology and auto mechanics, to more traditional or online schools like the University of Phoenix.

Arizona is more than just welcoming to for-profit schools; it may be the best place in the country for them. The country’s largest for-profit college, the University of Phoenix, was established in Arizona because, as the founder John Sperling once told the Arizona Republic, there were no regulations. It’s no coincidence that the school’s name also adorns the Arizona Cardinals football stadium, providing, if nothing else, a symbolic representation of the significance of for-profit education in the state.

Arizona politics are also heavily influenced by the lobbying arm of the for-profit education industry. Arizona Senators Jeff Flake and John McCain worked to nix an investigation by the Pentagon into aggressive recruiting practices aimed at veterans by the University of Phoenix, whose parent company was one of the primary campaign contributors for both senators. A bill was proposed last year in the state Senate to lower the state property tax for for-profit colleges from 18.5 to 5 percent, which would essentially only benefit schools with a physical campus like Grand Canyon.

For-profit education problems

For-profit education has its many detractors, who cite a multitude of issues that plague the industry. Large for-profit schools such as ITT Technical Institute and Corinthian Colleges were shut down in 2016 because of predatory advertising practices and a failure to ensure students become gainfully employed, or in other words, are able to get jobs that make it possible for them to pay off their debt. For-profit schools have also been criticized for taking advantage of first-generation students, minorities and veterans by deceiving them and not delivering on promises of career advancement and job placement, let alone graduation.

Many have argued that for-profit schools take advantage of these types of students who might not be aware of other options available at traditional two- and four-year public institutions. They have also been the subject of a number of investigations and studies that have shown for-profit schools have higher default rates on loans, are more expensive than public colleges and have lower graduation rates than their public counterparts. Perhaps the most famous example of a for-profit institution taking advantage of students is Trump University, which was owned and operated by Donald Trump and was open from 2005-10. Now defunct, Trump agreed to a $25 million settlement with over 3,700 former students, who alleged in a class-action lawsuit the school took advantage of them. They argued they were defrauded by the school, pressured into paying thousands of dollars for real estate seminars that failed to deliver on the promises advertised. The suit claims they were pressured into signing up for the expensive seminars through aggressive sales techniques and false promises on the curriculum and business opportunities. Trump denies any wrongdoing and has even hinted at reopening the school in the future, despite the settlement. 

Not all for-profit schools are bad, as there are a number of trade and vocational schools that are highly successful in training and educating new professionals. They also serve a vital role in the education ecosystem, in that they are responsible for filling a major gap in the marketplace for skilled workers by graduating almost half of all the associates degrees for computer science and information technology.

Those that run afoul and fail, however, especially such large schools like ITT and Corinthian, present a number of problems. More than 90 percent of students at for-profit schools rely on federal loans to pay for school, compared to 43 percent of students at public colleges. The schools themselves also rely heavily on federal funds, so when the schools go belly up like many did last year, the students are left in crippling debt and the taxpayers are footed with the bill.

Is Woz U different from other for-profit schools? 

The concept of Woz U is noble one, and it certainly hasn’t defrauded any students. Another part of the plan is to fund K-12 programs that focus on science, technology, engineering, the arts and mathematics (STEAM). But while it may look promising to some, to many it could just be another school offering the promise of career enhancement and opportunity with no proof that it can do either.

The timing of the announcement to create another for-profit school is interesting as well. In 2016, the Obama administration placed restrictions on schools and began monitoring those who were defrauding their students or not equipping them with gainful employment. Schools found to violate the rules would lose federal funding or accreditation, as was the case with ITT and Corinthian. But the new administration and education Secretary Betsy DeVos have already rolled back those regulations, potentially ushering in another wave of for-profit schools unencumbered by rules that help protect the interests of students. 

Woz U promises to educate and train, without going into years of debt, but with no degree or certificate programs, will the price be worth it? Wozniak’s personal investment in the school seems to be a good sign for the school and its potential students, but that gets tricky when the school worries more about the bottom line than preparing its students for successful lives and careers. The school could become a hotbed for innovation like envisioned, but the history of for-profit schools may suggest otherwise.