Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 128

West Virginia teachers strike awakened “sleeping giant” of labor activism for teachers

Teachers hold a rally outside the Senate Chambers in the West Virginia Capitol, March 5, 2018. (Credit: AP/Tyler Evert)

West Virginia teachers may have headed back to school after a deal for a 5 percent pay raise, but their recent strike has inspired teachers from other states to fight for better pay, health and retirement benefits and improved working conditions. Noah Karvelis, an Arizona music teacher and organizer for the Facebook group Arizona Educators United, told the website Shadowproof that the West Virginia strike “woke up a sleeping giant” among teachers all over the United States.

Arizona teachers started #RedForEd, a campaign in which teachers, lobbying for a pay raise, wear red to protest outside the state capital in Phoenix. In just two weeks, AZ Central reports, Arizona Educators United has attracted more than 34,000 members. Teachers have not yet set a date for a strike, but they’re planning a statewide day of action protest on March 28.

 In Kentucky, five districts are closing Wednesday to attend a rally in Frankfort to protest Senate Bill 1, which would hurt teachers’ retirement benefits, ending traditional pensions for future teachers and cutting the cost of living benefits for those currently retired. Governor Matt Bevin is already under fire for calling teachers who oppose the bill “ignorant” and “selfish.”

Oklahoma teachers, however, may be closest to following West Virginia’s footsteps; teachers in the state have told the state legislature that they have until April 1 to give teachers their first raise in 10 years, or they will strike.

Their livelihoods depend on it. As Mary Best, a classroom teacher for 33 years and now president of the Oklahoma chapter of the American Federation of Teachers, told AlterNet, “Since 2008, Oklahoma has led the nation in cuts to education (23.6 percent). Student enrollment has steadily increased, but funding has decreased.”

“Momentum for a teacher walkout has been growing since the failure of the Oklahoma legislature to pass a pay raise,” Best continued. Like in West Virginia and Arizona, she believes “the social media moved the action. A Facebook group ‘Oklahoma Teacher Walkout – The Time Is Now!’ emerged and fueled the movement. The group grew to over 40,000 in the first weekend, and the group currently has over 69,000 members.”

Alicia Priest, the president of the Oklahoma Education Association, said that before setting a strike deadline, teachers have tried multiple other tactics in the decade since their last raise (proposing bills through the state legislature as well as ballot initiatives), but none of them worked.

She emphasized that a strike for better teacher pay is as much about advocating for students, noting that if teachers are not fairly compensated, they often end up paying for supplies out of their salaries, taking on second jobs and sometimes leaving the profession altogether. Oklahoma, which ranks 49 out of 50 in teacher pay, is already losing qualified teachers to other, better-paying states. Priest noted, “We have 300 graduates from colleges of education ready to be teachers, and one district alone has 330 openings.”

She continued, “We’re already at a deficit because students aren’t choosing teaching as a career because of working conditions. That makes me incredibly sad because I love teaching. It’s an amazing profession.”

A strike, Priest said, “emboldens our teachers and gives them hope, that when they step out of their classrooms, they do it to advocate for their students.” She called the strike a “last-ditch effort to make a difference in funding for Oklahoma students.”

As in West Virginia, public support for the teachers’ strike has been high. “Parents and students have been supportive and view it as a lesson in organizing,” said Best. “In Oklahoma City, many of the parents will be present at the capitol.” Priest agrees, noting that “our communities know that underfunded schools are hurting them, and makes it so higher-paying jobs aren’t coming into our state.”

She’s been heartened at the outpouring of support, recalling how, “in Tulsa, a group of parents organized parents and kids [are organizing] at every school in Tulsa, cheering teachers on as they walked out of the school building at the end of the contract day.”

In return, and in response to concerns over childcare and lost school lunches, Priest says teachers—in addition to organizing their own protests — have been “organizing all over the state to have childcare services and making sure students aren’t food insecure. It’s all pretty exciting.”

Best agrees that public support is critical, advising that other teachers considering a strike should, “Make sure you have statewide support from the community. Also, it is important to make sure that the majority of districts will participate. In Oklahoma, with 515 districts, this has been difficult. Fortunately, our largest districts are participating.”

Both union leaders agree that West Virginia’s strike, and the protests in Oklahoma, Arizona and Kentucky, is a good sign for labor unions, and teachers’ unions especially, going forward. “I do think the tide is turning,” Best said. “Teachers are tired of salaries that have not have kept pace with other professions.”

Priest even thinks public support for teachers could impact the upcoming midterm elections: “We are going to be pushing from this time forward [that] there is a direct correlation between who is in office and what’s going on in funding for public schools. If [a candidate] says they support public schools and then votes a different way, then we need to make a change at the ballot box.”

Storied hawk John Bolton to replace H.R. McMaster as Trump’s National Security Adviser

John Bolton (Credit: AP/Steve Ueckert)

As expected as they’ve come to be in the Trump epoch, there’s nothing quite like an end-of-the-week White House staff shakeup. On Thursday evening, President Donald Trump announced on Twitter an important — albeit much-speculated and anticipated — staff change. H.R. McMaster is out as National Security Adviser, and John Bolton — Fox News commentator, former U.N. ambassador, and legendarily isolationist neoconservative warmonger — is in.

I am pleased to announce that, effective 4/9/18, @AmbJohnBolton will be my new National Security Advisor. I am very thankful for the service of General H.R. McMaster who has done an outstanding job & will always remain my friend. There will be an official contact handover on 4/9.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 22, 2018

“I didn’t expect this announcement,” Bolton told Martha MacCallum on Fox News Thursday evening, about an hour after the announcement. “I think I still am a Fox News contributor.”

Bolton continued to bask in his glory, relishing in a pinch-me, this-isn’t-real moment.

“It’s still sinking in, so I haven’t thought about it a great deal,” Bolton remarked on being appointed by Trump. “He may be a different kind of president than others but that’s what the people voted for.”

Bolton is the third TV personality to join Trump’s ranks in the last couple weeks. CNBC commentator Larry Kudlow recently became Trump’s chief economic adviser, and on Monday Joseph E. diGenova, another frequent Fox News contributor, joined Trump’s legal team.

Speculation began to surface about McMaster’s dismissal earlier in the month. The Washington Post reported that Trump was making plans to fire McMaster due to Trump’s inability to get along with the three-star Army general, but was waiting to find a suitable replacement before formalizing the announcement. This report was denied in a tweet by White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

Bolton said during his interview with Fox News that there will be a transition period and he looks forward to working with McMaster and his team.

Bolton is an interesting, but not surprising choice, for Trump to make to fill McMaster’s proverbial shoes. As a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, who once called to defund the U.N., Bolton has a reputation as a nationalist, a hawk, and a war-mongerer. Bolton has hinted he favors unilateral military intervention over diplomacy. In February 2018, he penned an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal explaining how he is supportive of a preemptive strike on North Korea. In it, Bolton wrote:

“Pre-emption opponents argue that action is not justified because Pyongyang does not constitute an ‘imminent threat.’ They are wrong. The threat is imminent, and the case against pre-emption rests on the misinterpretation of a standard that derives from prenuclear, pre-ballistic-missile times.”

Bolton will be Trump’s third national security adviser in the last 14 months.

John Dowd’s resignation could hurt Trump’s chances at beating back probe

FILE - In this April 29, 20111, file photo, attorney John Dowd walks in New York. Dowd, President Donald Trump's lead lawyer in the Russia investigation has left the legal team, is confirming his decision in an email to The Associated Press. Dowd says he "loves the president" and wishes him well. (AP Photo/, File) (Credit: AP/Richard Drew)

News broke on Thursday that John Dowd, President Donald Trump’s lead lawyer for special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, resigned.

A source close to the matter told the New York Times that Dowd left because Trump had “ignored” his advice. Previously, reports surfaced that Dowd had considered leaving the legal team a couple times previously because he allegedly felt he had no influence over Trump’s conduct. Dowd denied this, while Trump himself took to Twitter on March 11, 2018 to reassure the public everything was running smoothly regarding his legal team.

The Failing New York Times purposely wrote a false story stating that I am unhappy with my legal team on the Russia case and am going to add another lawyer to help out. Wrong. I am VERY happy with my lawyers, John Dowd, Ty Cobb and Jay Sekulow. They are doing a great job and…..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 11, 2018

However, in Dowd’s comments to the New York Times on Thursday, he said that he still believed in Trump’s case, and expressed his “love” for Trump despite leaving.

“I love the president,” Dowd told the New York Times. “I wish him the best of luck. I think he has a really good case.”

Did Dowd resign — or was he given an ultimatum by the president? Given the White House’s purposely obfuscatory communication nature, we may never know. However, what we do know is that Dowd’s departure emphasizes Trump’s growing uneasiness regarding Mueller’s probe, and his impulse to nix anyone who isn’t laser-aligned with his views.

Moreover, Dowd’s departure could have something to do with a public gaffe Dowd made several days ago. Indeed, following the news that former F.B.I. deputy director Andrew McCabe was fired, Dowd publicly requested for an end to the Mueller probe.

“I pray that Acting Attorney General Rosenstein will follow the brilliant and courageous example of the FBI Office of Professional Responsibility and Attorney General Jeff Sessions and bring an end to alleged Russia collusion investigation manufactured by McCabe’s boss James Comey based upon a fraudulent and corrupt dossier,” Dowd said in a statement to CNN.

Dowd’s gaffe was that at first, he reportedly told The Daily Beast he was speaking on behalf of President Donald Trump when giving the statement; later on, he retracted that attribution.

On Monday, reports surfaced that a shakeup of Trump’s legal team was imminent after news broke that Trump hired Joseph E. diGenova, a lawyer whom Salon columnist Heather Digby Parton characterized as “a GOP hitman and conspiracy-mongerer” with a long history of taking up the mantle of questionable right-wing conspiracy theories. Digby Parton noted previously that Trump may not be aware that diGenova previously expressed the legal opinion that a presidential indictment could be a positive thing for the United States.

While the recent shakeups have risen eyebrows, legal team turmoil could mean that Trump is less capable of defending himself against Mueller’s probe, should the president become the focus. Turnover, disagreements, and fear of one’s boss don’t always create the best foundation for a legal defense.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg speaks out about Cambridge Analytica scandal

FILE - In this Nov. 3, 2015, file photo, Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg speaks during a forum in San Francisco. . (AP Photo/Eric Risberg, File) (Credit: AP)

As Facebook’s leadership continues to pick up the pieces over the damning revelations that data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica pilfered tens of millions of users’ personal data, Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg sat down with CNBC’s Julia Boorstin to discuss the scandal and the social network’s role in giving the political data analytics firm, hired by the Trump campaign in 2016, access to private information of more than 50 million Facebook users.

“This was a huge breach of trust and I am so sorry that we let so many people down,” Sandberg said on CNBC. “This is about trust and earning the trust of people who use our service is the most important thing we do, and we are very committed to earning it.”

The COO said Facebook has already begun “taking aggressive steps” to make the platform “more transparent,” but added that “there will always be bad actors.”

Sandberg also admitted that the company “didn’t realize the gravity of this issue sooner,” though reports suggest Facebook knew about the data harvesting for two years but didn’t act on it. She also apologized for not speaking out publicly about the matter sooner.

Sandberg’s interview comes one day after Mark Zuckerberg’s spoke with CNN’s Laurie Segall about Cambridge Analytica’s misuse of Facebook data and the company’s response.

The Facebook CEO said he’s “really sorry that this happened,” and that it had been a “mistake” to trust Cambridge Analytica or any app developer to delete data after signing a legal certificate. He also admitted that the company had made flaws in building the platform — that ultimately led to the data firm’s ability to obtain personal profile information of 50 million users — and in not probing the matter further.

“I regret that I didn’t do that at the time,” Zuckerberg said. “What’s clear is that in 2016 we were not on top of a number of issues as we should have, whether it was Russian interference or fake news.”

The CEO’s comments signal a shift in perspective from the days following the 2016 presidential election, when he called the “idea of fake news on Facebook— of which it’s a small amount of content — influenced the election in any way” a “pretty crazy idea.”

“The reality here is that this isn’t rocket science,” Zuckerberg said. “I mean, there’s a lot of work that we need to do make it harder for nation states like Russia to do election interference, to make it so that trolls and other folks can’t spread fake news.”

Zuckerberg also said he would be “open” to testifying before Congress regarding the recent privacy controversy.

The data breach scandal is the latest controversy to rock Facebook. The billion dollar company has previously come under scrutiny for discriminatory ad-targeting practices, fact-checking, questionable political ties, and free speech rules in Europe. Since news broke over the weekend that Facebook enabled Cambridge Analytica to access private user information without their consent, the company has lost $59 billion in value and unleashed a #DeleteFacebook campaign.

 

“Portlandia”: The end of the Rose Route

Andy Kindler, Carrie Brownstein, and Fred Armisen in "Portlandia" (Credit: Augusta Quirk/IFC)

The passage of time and progress sometimes conspire to ruin a city’s primordial magic. Those of us who live throughout the Pacific Northwest have witnessed this truth. Slowly but steadily our regional weirdness has faded into an urbanized normalcy enabled by an influx of transplants and tech companies. Some of us came here for the trees, mountains and sturdy small houses only to find ourselves living in the shadow of condos.

Even so, the version of Portland, Oregon seen over the eight seasons of IFC’s “Portlandia” is a place that doesn’t need to fight the fade. Its weirdness is irrepressible and eternal; even Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein’s Goth couple Jacqueline and Vince concern themselves with the same mundane distractions as dowdy Peter and Nance.

Still, we know enough about these characters to sustain our interest throughout repeat airings — which is a decent indication that perhaps the series’ ending has arrived right on time. Portland may still be a hotbed of picky, eco-conscious, foodies and bizarre pop-up stores, but it long ago ceased to be a city where young people go to retire. And the penultimate episode’s central pop theme was a jaunty tune hanging on the refrain, “Let’s give up/ Let’s all give up now!” Carrie and Fred weren’t talking about the series, they were referring to the world.  “The less you care,” Fred advises his friend, “the happier you’ll be.”

That’s not entirely true of this finale season, coming to a close Thursday at 10 p.m. on IFC. If anything Brownstein, Armisen and their fellow executive producer Jonathan Krisel have proven throughout these final ten episodes that “Portlandia” cares deeply about the town it calls home and the ways the world is changing it. Every character received a fond send-off, a number of them doing so from the viewpoint of a garbage can that went AWOL from the home of the series’ Goth couple. (Symbolic much?)

This last splash hasn’t been interested in smoothing over the less attractive qualities of its denizens and the rampant self-satisfied nature of PC culture in general, either. Prior to its premiere, Brownstein characterized this last season as being informed by the overwhelming sense of disaster and doom hanging over the planet.

True to that idea, these final episodes included dark skits positing that the shallow permissiveness of our “you do you” philosophy enable evil to flourish; that the dominant culture’s sensitivities over racial homogeneity  (personified in Portland by its mayor, Kyle MacLachlan) gets in the way of addressing racial conflict in a meaningful way. Even the show’s fictionalized versions of its stars can barely put a bow (or a bird) on the supposed benefit of working the gig economy as they talk to kids on career day in one sketch. Yes, it’s funny. Ha ha. And unless things change, it also portends a tough tomorrow for the elementary schoolers they’re chatting with.

There is all this, along with ludicrous sketches about, say, our unnatural attachment to celebrities via the filter of social media and the tyranny of gratuities for expensive non-essential services. To the end “Portlandia” bounces between darkness and bubbly light quickly enough to make a point without injuring anyone with perceived barbs, a skill not easily duplicated in half-hour comedies. But then, Portland is a destination unto itself, a burg bursting at the seams with walking parodies who embrace the town’s demonstrable lunacy with blind enthusiasm.

The show’s affectionate finale season methodically says toodle-loo to all of this, warning of scarier days ahead while acknowledging that the city is still a place of plenty. The essence of what makes “Portlandia” great and Portland so very good remains alive to its very end, in a finale that remains true to the core of the series and its devotion to the timelessness of its weirdness. Before the season Brownstein promised to leave fans feeling good about its departure. In the end, the show did something better: it guarantees that we’ll want to visit time and again, regardless of what the future holds.

American scam: My kid and I are both supposed to go broke paying for college? Forget it

(Credit: Getty/baona)

I opened my daughters’ college funds when they were babies. I’ve put money into them every month since. I’ve lived through moves, medical disasters and multiple layoffs. And as my firstborn daughter now approaches her high school graduation, I know that 18 years of saving have not yielded much in the way of college tuition. I also know that the current American student tuition and loan system is a more shocking shell game than I’d even dreamed.

My own education began in earnest last autumn. At a State University of New York college fair, a financial aid representative told a room full of hopeful parents that with family and student loans, they expected each student to graduate with a monthly loan payment of a mere $250. I get that this doesn’t sound wildly off the projected debt track for most recent graduates, but it does presume a steady job with a respectable starting salary right out of the gate — a particularly tricky projection if you’re going for a liberal arts degree. And considering that millennials are currently unemployed at triple the overall national rate, tell me how solid you are in your financial optimism for the generation coming up behind them. Meanwhile, our nation’s student loan debt is the second-highest consumer debt category, with the average class of 2016 graduate carrying nearly $38,000 in loans. It’s a trillion-dollar crisis.

When we toured a SUNY campus in October, I asked a financial aid officer what kind of merit-based aid the school granted. “It’s very competitive,” she said, deploying the exact same tone that Rodeo Drive shopgirl used on Julia Roberts in “Pretty Woman.” “But you might get aid from some of the SUNYs you wouldn’t want to go to.” She then disparagingly named a smaller university in the same academic system.

A few weeks later, at a respected Catholic university, an administrator answered my question about how they assess financial aid awards for families with fluctuating incomes by proffering a goofy shrug. The message was clear. They don’t care. And why should they? They get paid, whether you stand to lose everything or not.

It all feels chillingly familiar. We bought our apartment in 2006, after searching exhaustively through three peak years of the subprime mortgage heyday. (I even wrote a book about it.) Back then, I remember realtors and loan officers who pushed aggressively for ways to make our dream home a reality, individuals who talked through the fine print like they were skating through the side effects in an antidepressant TV commercial. I basically wanted to take a “Silkwood” shower every day. But the current student loan game is even more insidious — enticing two distinct generations to simultaneously gamble their saved and future earnings.

Just last week, the New York Times editorial board spoke out against Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ “eagerness to shill for corporate interests” after her department issued guidance  that essentially kneecaps states from stepping in to regulate direct student loans. Over the past few years, as the shady practices  of many loan programs began coming to light, some states have tried to intervene to better protect students from misinformation and deceptive offers. In 2015, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau identified “a wide range of sloppy, patchwork practices that can create obstacles to repayment, raise costs, cause distress, and contribute to driving struggling borrowers to default.”  It also noted what can only be described as a full-blown crisis — “one out of four student loan borrowers struggling to repay their loans or already in default.”

Yet the enticements just keep coming. Last week, a package from one of the SUNY schools my daughter was accepted to arrived, addressed to her. The outside promisingly declared “Financial Aid Award.” The “award” for a $25,000 a year school was $1,500 in scholarship money, $5,550 in federal direct unsubsidized loans and a cheerful message that “Your parents may be eligible for up to $17,131 in a Federal Parent PLUS loan.” PER YEAR. The private universities she’s been accepted to have all — in a move that feels a lot like when I worked retail, and had to mark up merchandise in order to then mark it “on sale” — offered her $20,000 scholarships against tuition of $67,000. PER YEAR. After our federal and state student financial aid, we’re nowhere close to paying for that.

I keep wondering how other people are doing it. A few weeks ago, I went out with a friend whose daughter is currently attending a prestigious Northeastern university. Her family is more well-off than mine, but they’re not the kind of people for whom a $68,000 a year bill is no sweat either. They got a little financial aid, she told me, and the rest they were making up for in loans — both parental and student. “We took out a second mortgage,” she told me, as I nearly fell off my barstool. Another friend has two kids in the same $73,000 a year school. “Loans,” she shrugs. “The number doesn’t even seem real.” The only family I know that isn’t completely flipping out features a dad who briefly made a ton of money in entertainment and cashed out while he was on top. His kid goes to a modest state school in another part of the country.

These are not reckless people. These are not dumb people. These are, however, parents who went to colleges with names that open doors. Parents whose own mothers and fathers provided well for them, people who got good grades and waited tables and made it work. I’m scared for them.

The expectation that we can give our kids what our families gave us seems like a reasonable one. It’s also an illusion. My alma mater, Temple University, costs $30,000 more a year than when I attended — and received decent merit-based financial aid. The dream of state schools as an affordable alternative has gotten pretty shaky too. In November, CNBC reported that tuition has risen by 213 percent at public four-year colleges in the past three decades. SUNY Binghamton, with its nearly 40 percent tuition increase since 2011, is far from unique. In just the past 10 years, in-state tuition and fees at public colleges increased by 65 percent.

Education costs have risen at a pace triple that of housing in the same period. A recent Rolling Stone report called student debt “America’s next financial black hole.” As it ominously observed, the system is rigged: “You can’t get out of the debt. Since most young people find themselves unable to make their full payments early on, they often find themselves perpetually paying down interest only, never touching the principal.” 

There will always be people around to make you feel like a failure for not being able to afford something that costs too much money. People who disparage you if your skills and academic talents aren’t aligned with our shocking wealth gap. It’s a system that thrives on shame. But if you, as either a student or a parent, believe the rules of the game haven’t completely changed, you’re vulnerable to devastating exploitation.

Last week, a string of acceptances came in to our house from our New York City university system. (Which within living memory was entirely free, or close to it, for all students.) Their tuition clocks in at around $7,000 a year, and they’re good schools. We’re still waiting on a few other schools, including a few that offer need-blind aid. It’s excruciating.

I know that education is a gamble. Can these schools give my daughter what a bigger-name school — and all that debt — can’t? I honestly can’t predict that. I certainly recognize the seductive allure of a green campus away from home, of big-name professors and a cohort of influential lifelong connections. I understand that “But you wouldn’t go bankrupt at 30!” is a phrase destined to fail any teenager’s marshmallow test. 

How can I explain that the more financial independence my daughter has, the easier it will be if she wants to make a career choice that isn’t about the biggest paycheck, and the safer she’ll be if she ever has to leave an abusive relationship? How do I say that a system designed to impoverish everyone hurts women so much more? We’re still in the throes of figuring it all out. I don’t judge anyone else’s private financial choices. But there’s no way I can bet everything my child and I have — or ever will have — because some financial aid officer tries to sell me something I can’t even remotely pay for. I have to stay sane. Because in four years, I have to do this all over again with her sister.

Hear the real Dr. Gonzo roar: Astonishing new PBS doc celebrates Oscar Zeta Acosta

Oscar Zeta Acosta, 1970. (Credit: Courtesy of Raul Ruiz)

In Phillip Rodriguez’s new PBS documentary “The Rise and Fall of the Brown Buffalo,” Oscar Zeta Acosta — the Chicano Rights author, attorney and activist who Hunter S. Thompson would depict in his 1971 work “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” as Dr. Gonzo — immediately takes center stage: in footage from an East Los Angeles rally against police brutality, Acosta, dressed in a broad cowboy hat, exclaims to the crowd: “Our representatives are not in the government, this is not our government, and the sooner we get that straight in our heads, the sooner we’ll get together. Or else they’re gonna keep on killing us. I swear to god they’re gonna keep on killing us. They’re gonna wipe us out!”

It’s a deeply affecting clip: suddenly and starkly — rising up as if from the proverbial projector itself — Acosta has returned (just when we need him most) to offer a warning to us all.

However, what’s noteworthy about this upcoming documentary is that, throughout the hour-long storyline, Rodriguez repeatedly weaves historical footage with re-created, live-action scenes. What results is an astonishing, genre-bending work of creative storytelling that also happens to be deeply rooted in years of verifiable research.

“The Rise and Fall of the Brown Buffalo” reclaims Acosta as a brilliant political, legal and authorial force who challenged societal and institutional injustice at every step — someone who understood, from the start, the price his dissent would demand. In this sense, the film raises a question that feels especially pertinent today: how do you fight back against people who, because of the enormous power they’ve acquired, consider themselves and their institutions above the law?

For Oscar Acosta, the answer was as simple as it was stark: by risking everything — including, if necessary, your life.

The first portion of the film settles on Acosta’s upbringing in the small, heavily segregated town of Riverbank, California, an experience that would prove foundational to his heightened awareness of class and race. We also bear witness to his time in the Air Force and, afterward, in San Francisco in the early 1960s, as well as his struggles with faith, family, psychiatric treatment, writing, law school, and the bar exam, which he’d pass in June of 1965.

For the next two years Acosta practiced as an attorney in Oakland as part of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society initiative — helping, day in and out, the poorest members of the community — until, in 1967, disillusioned and worn out, he’d quit his job and drive east, lighting out for parts unknown.

Eventually he arrived in the remote town of Aspen, Colorado. On a cold July evening he walked into a bar and, as the film depicts, announced to the patrons there — which happened to include a 30-year-old journalist who’d recently published his first book (about the motorcycle gang the Hell’s Angels) — that he was, in fact, the trouble they’d all been spending so much of their lives waiting for. The Brown Buffalo, Acosta called himself.

“Oscar had different values than anyone else in town,” one of the attendees that night would later relate. “He was socially conscious, and we were not.”

Hunter S. Thompson was intrigued. The rest of the evening the two of them would talk — about politics, about San Francisco, about the future of the country — and from that point on, Acosta and Thompson would be inextricably linked, each one challenging the other intellectually at every chance. “The Rise and Fall of the Brown Buffalo” harnesses this tension by deftly re-creating — via its use of contemporary actors (Jesse Celedon is charismatic as Acosta, and Jeff Harms offers a delightfully subdued version of Thompson) their political dialogue — which has been drawn for the most part from their extensive correspondence.

I won’t spoil the pith of these exchanges — Rodriguez, working with the film’s writer, David Ventura, renders them vividly — but it’s fair to say that the central point of contention can be summarized as such: is it better to work within the democratic means of our republic to effect change, or have things become so institutionally unjust that the only way forward is to tear the whole thing down and start again? In other words: should we rely on electoral agency (Thompson) or revolution (Acosta)?

Their intellectual relationship would culminate around their shared outrage toward the blatant abuses being perpetrated at the time by Los Angeles law enforcement: on August 29th, 1970 the prominent journalist Ruben Salazar was murdered by a sheriff’s deputy during an all-out police riot — an event that Thompson, due to Acosta’s insight and connections, would eventually render into an intricate, 19,200-word article for Rolling Stone (“Strange Rumblings in Aztlan”) that ruthlessly and systematically indicted the police-state mentality of L.A.’s cops; in hindsight, it’s an article that remains one of Thompson’s very best.

But to be clear: while Hunter S. Thompson’s friendship with Oscar Acosta remains central to this documentary — for fans of Gonzo Journalism and of Thompson in general, :The Rise and fall of the Brown Buffalo” is a must-see film — Phillip Rodriguez is first and foremost telling a story that hasn’t yet been fully articulated: the role that Oscar Acosta played, for a brief but brightly delineated stretch of time, in our larger American narrative of political and cultural change.

There’s so much more I’d like to say about this remarkable documentary — about its all-Latino production crew; about its lucid depiction of the Chicano Rights Movement and the formation of groups like the Brown Berets; about Acosta’s brilliant legal challenge to the entire Los Angeles Superior Court Grand Jury system; and about the scene early-on (one of my very favorite) in which Oscar Acosta and Hunter Thompson drive to Judge Arthur Alarcon’s house in L.A. and Acosta, using gasoline, lights the entire lawn on fire, all the while reciting word-for-word the famous quote by Jesus in Luke’s Gospel on the hypocrisy of the law (“Woe unto you also…”) — however, in anticipation of the premiere, I think it’s important to keep in mind two quotes.

The first is from the middle of the film: “The persons that make the law,” Acosta intones, “the persons that enforce the law, they fall into one pattern: they are white, and they are rich, and they are old.”

The second is from near the end; standing at the window of a forlorn 1974 Mexico hotel room, Oscar Acosta proclaims: “What is clear to me is that I am neither a Mexican nor an American. I am a Chicano by ancestry and a Brown Buffalo by choice. And I suspect the gods of war are not yet through with me.”

Slack makes an odd privacy update amid unfolding Facebook privacy scandal

(Credit: AP/Mark Lennihan)

Updated at 5:14 pm PST to add statement from Slack

A recently announced privacy update to popular work chat app Slack may give its millions of users pause, particularly in light of the escalating revelations over how analytics firm Cambridge Analytica was able to pilfer millions of users’ data via social media megalith Facebook.

Slack’s privacy changes, which are being made to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), will go into effect on May 25 — but they could put users in the dark about access their employers have to private messages, and whether they are notified about that access. In the new Slack privacy regime, users will be able to download private and public data from their workspace without notifying members.

For those unfamiliar, Slack is a workspace tool used by many companies and groups for internal communication and planning. A mix between Google Drive and AOL Instant Messenger, Slack started as an internal communication tool before becoming a public product with millions of daily users. Slack allows casual chats between coworkers as well as the ability to share company documents and spreadsheets.

As Slack explained to Salon via email:

On the Plus and Enterprise Grid plans, customers, go through an application process to request access to a self-service tool to download private and public data from their workspace without notifying members. Each application goes through a human review process to vet all export requests. Companies might need to export data for regulatory or compliance reasons. Previously, employers with certain plans who enabled Compliance Exports had to notify members if they were going to download the data.

This means that the owner of your workspace — your boss — could see your private messages to a coworker. The changes will go into effect on April 20, 2018.

Slack added that they will be emailing users this week regarding the changes.

“We are announcing these changes so customers can prepare themselves for GDPR’s implementation, which impacts any company offering goods or services to EU-based customers. For the latest information about changes to our tools and Privacy Policy please see our Help Center and Privacy Policy,” a spokesperson told Salon.

Previously, Slack offered a “compliance export” which was only available to certain customers who applied and were approved to use the tool. The owners would have to enable this function beforehand, and when enabled, a notification would be given to the user.

The point of GDPR is indeed to protect user privacy, but paradoxically, the GDPR places enhanced requirements on “controllers” (employers) and entrusts them to be good stewards of their users’ personal data.

It’s indeed an interesting time to make such a jarring privacy update, as other outlets have pointed out. Digital privacy protections are under scrutiny in the wake of a still-unfolding Facebook scandal. The changes raise a more difficult question: Can we trust that any level of privacy remains online?

 

NRATV: CNN didn’t cover Maryland shooting hero, only wants “dead children”

(Credit: YouTube/NRATV)

After Tuesday’s school shooting in Maryland was halted by an armed resource officer, CNN ignored the incident, because the network allegedly only wants to cover stories with “dead children.” That is, of course, just the latest conspiracy theory being floated by the National Rifle Association’s streaming channel NRATV.

The NRA has faced waves of criticism in the wake of the recent school shooting in Parkland, Fla., last month, which sparked a national movement seeking common-sense gun reform. While surviving students have organized a massive march on Washington, DC this coming Saturday, the NRA claims the media is actually pushing the agenda.

“If they can’t have the story they want — which is dead children, by the way — to push this anti-gun assault on our Second Amendment, then they push the march,” NRATV host Grant Stinchfield alleged in a segment that aired on Wednesday.

Stinchfield was referring to the shooting at Great Mills High School on Tuesday, in which the aforementioned shooter was killed by the armed officer — and two students were injured.

It didn’t take long for the NRA to essentially declare the situation a victory — because the shooter was stopped by a firearm — despite its typical hiatus when a mass shooting occurs.

Stinchfield slammed CNN for its lack of coverage of the Maryland shooting — and lack of praise for the resourceful officer who was able to end it. The NRA mouthpiece claimed that, out of the six major CNN shows that air live in the afternoon and throughout the night, only two had briefly mentioned the story.

“When the Maryland school shooting broke — the story — I told you throughout the day that no one was giving it the coverage it deserved,” Stinchfield said. “Instead of celebrating a hero cop who saved countless lives, they celebrate porn stars. No time for a hero.”

“For weeks they were looking for solutions to save kids’ lives. And the solution that we pushed — more armed security — a solution that works? They ignore it when we prove that it works,” he continued. “When that hero cop proved that it works. It’s coverage that they didn’t do that makes it so despicable.”

The NRA has evidently gotten desperate, but CNN’s Jake Tapper, who was name-dropped by Stinchfield, made sure to give the major gun lobbying group a fact check on Twitter.

False. https://t.co/hRmGuein5h https://t.co/gT4NFJhrdL

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) March 20, 2018

The NRA’s popularity has also taken a hit in recent weeks as 40 percent of Americans now see the organization in an unfavorable light, while only 33 percent view it favorably, according to a new NBC/WSJ poll. For some comparison, 45 percent saw the group in a positive light back in April 2017, while only 33 percent held a negative view.

Watch the full NRATV clip via Media Matters for America below.

Black holes aren’t totally black, and other insights from Stephen Hawking’s groundbreaking work

(Credit: AP Photo/Matt Dunham, FILE)

Mathematical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking was best known for his work exploring the relationship between black holes and quantum physics. A black hole is the remnant of a dying supermassive star that’s fallen into itself; these remnants contract to such a small size that gravity is so strong even light cannot escape from them. Black holes loom large in the popular imagination — schoolchildren ponder why the whole universe doesn’t collapse into one. But Hawking’s careful theoretical work filled in some of the holes in physicists’ knowledge about black holes.

Why do black holes exist?

The short answer is: Because gravity exists, and the speed of light is not infinite.

Imagine you stand on Earth’s surface, and fire a bullet into the air at an angle. Your standard bullet will come back down, someplace farther away. Suppose you have a very powerful rifle. Then you may be able to shoot the bullet at such a speed that, rather than coming down far away, it will instead “miss” the Earth. Continually falling, and continually missing the surface, the bullet will actually be in an orbit around Earth. If your rifle is even stronger, the bullet may be so fast that it leaves Earth’s gravity altogether. This is essentially what happens when we send rockets to Mars, for example.

Now imagine that gravity is much, much stronger. No rifle could accelerate bullets enough to leave that planet, so instead you decide to shoot light. While photons (the particles of light) do not have mass, they are still influenced by gravity, bending their path just as a bullet’s trajectory is bent by gravity. Even the heaviest of planets won’t have gravity strong enough to bend the photon’s path enough to prevent it from escaping.

But black holes are not like planets or stars, they are the remnants of stars, packed into the smallest of spheres, say, just a few kilometers in radius. Imagine you could stand on the surface of a black hole, armed with your ray gun. You shoot upwards at an angle and notice that the light ray instead curves, comes down and misses the surface! Now the ray is in an “orbit” around the black hole, at a distance roughly what cosmologists call the Schwarzschild radius, the “point of no return.”

Thus, as not even light can escape from where you stand, the object you inhabit (if you could) would look completely black to someone looking at it from far away: a black hole.

But Hawking discovered that black holes aren’t completely black?

The short answer is: Yes.

My previous description of black holes used the language of classical physics — basically, Newton’s theory applied to light. But the laws of physics are actually more complicated because the universe is more complicated.

In classical physics, the word “vacuum” means the total and complete absence of any form of matter or radiation. But in quantum physics, the vacuum is much more interesting, in particular when it is near a black hole. Rather than being empty, the vacuum is teeming with particle-antiparticle pairs that are created fleetingly by the vacuum’s energy, but must annihilate each other shortly thereafter and return their energy to the vacuum.

You will find all kinds of particle-antiparticle pairs produced, but the heavier ones occur much more rarely. It’s easiest to produce photon pairs because they have no mass. The photons must always be produced in pairs so they’re moving away from each other and don’t violate the law of momentum conservation.

Now imagine that a pair is created just at that distance from the center of the black hole where the “last light ray” is circulating: the Schwarzschild radius. This distance could be far from the surface or close, depending on how much mass the black hole has. And imagine that the photon pair is created so that one of the two is pointing inward —toward you, at the center of the black hole, holding your ray gun. The other photon is pointing outward. (By the way, you’d likely be crushed by gravity if you tried this maneuver, but let’s assume you’re superhuman.)

Now there’s a problem: The one photon that moved inside the black hole cannot come back out, because it’s already moving at the speed of light. The photon pair cannot annihilate each other again and pay back their energy to the vacuum that surrounds the black hole. But somebody must pay the piper and this will have to be the black hole itself. After it has welcomed the photon into its land of no return, the black hole must return some of its mass back to the universe: the exact same amount of mass as the energy the pair of photons “borrowed,” according to Einstein’s famous equality E=mc².

This is essentially what Hawking showed mathematically. The photon that is leaving the black hole horizon will make it look as if the black hole had a faint glow: the Hawking radiation named after him. At the same time he reasoned that if this happens a lot, for a long time, the black hole might lose so much mass that it could disappear altogether (or more precisely, become visible again).

Do black holes make information disappear forever?

Short answer: No, that would be against the law.

Many physicists began worrying about this question shortly after Hawking’s discovery of the glow. The concern is this: The fundamental laws of physics guarantee that every process that happens “forward in time,” can also happen “backwards in time.”

This seems counter to our intuition, where a melon that splattered on the floor would never magically reassemble itself. But what happens to big objects like melons is really dictated by the laws of statistics. For the melon to reassemble itself, many gazillions of atomic particles would have to do the same thing backwards, and the likelihood of that is essentially zero. But for a single particle this is no problem at all. So for atomic things, everything you observe forwards could just as likely occur backwards.

Now imagine that you shoot one of two photons into the black hole. They only differ by a marker that we can measure, but that does not affect the energy of the photon (this is called a “polarization”). Let’s call these “left photons” or “right photons.” After the left or right photon crosses the horizon, the black hole changes (it now has more energy), but it changes in the same way whether the left or right photon was absorbed.

Two different histories now have become one future, and such a future cannot be reversed: How would the laws of physics know which of the two pasts to choose? Left or right? That is the violation of time-reversal invariance. The law requires that every past must have exactly one future, and every future exactly one past.

Some physicists thought that maybe the Hawking radiation carries an imprint of left/right so as to give an outside observer a hint at what the past was, but no. The Hawking radiation comes from that flickering vacuum surrounding the black hole, and has nothing to do with what you throw in. All seems lost, but not so fast.

In 1917, Albert Einstein showed that matter (even the vacuum next to matter) actually does react to incoming stuff, in a very peculiar way. The vacuum next to that matter is “tickled” to produce a particle-antiparticle pair that looks like an exact copy of what just came in. In a very real sense, the incoming particle stimulates the matter to create a pair of copies of itself — actually a copy and an anti-copy. Remember, random pairs of particle and antiparticle are created in the vacuum all the time, but the tickled-pairs are not random at all: They look just like the tickler.

This copy process is known as the “stimulated emission” effect and is at the origin of all lasers. The Hawking glow of black holes, on the other hand, is just what Einstein called the “spontaneous emission” effect, taking place near a black hole.

Now imagine that the tickling creates this copy, so that the left photon tickles a left photon pair, and a right photon gives a right photon pair. Since one partner of the tickled pairs must stay outside the black hole (again from momentum conservation), that particle creates the “memory” that is needed so that information is preserved: One past has only one future, time can be reversed, and the laws of physics are safe.

In a cosmic accident, Hawking died on Einstein’s birthday, whose theory of light — it just so happens — saves Hawking’s theory of black holes.

Christoph Adami, Professor of Physics and Astronomy & Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, Michigan State University