Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 169

The story of Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, America’s first black pop star

Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield (Credit: Wikimedia)

In 1851, a concert soprano named Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield embarked on a national tour that upended America’s music scene.

In antebellum America, operatic and concert songs were very popular forms of entertainment. European concert sopranos, such as Jenny Lind and Catherine Hayes, drew huge crowds and rave reviews during their U.S. tours. Lind was so popular that baby cribs still bear her name, and you can now visit an unincorporated community called Jenny Lind, California.

Greenfield, however, was different. She was a former slave. And she was performing songs that a burgeoning field of American music criticism, led by John Sullivan Dwight, considered reserved for white artists. African-American artists, most 19th-century critics argued, lacked the refined cultivation of white, Eurocentric genius, and could create only simple music that lacked artistic depth. It was a prejudice that stretched as far back as Thomas Jefferson in his “Notes on the State of Virginia” and was later reinforced by minstrel shows.

But when Greenfield appeared on the scene, she shattered preexisting beliefs about artistry and race.

‘The Black Swan’

Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield was born into slavery in Natchez, Mississippi, around 1820. As a girl, she was taken to Philadelphia and raised by an abolitionist.

Largely self-taught as a singer, she began her concert career in New York with the support of the Buffalo Musical Association. In Buffalo, she was saddled with the nickname “the Black Swan,” a crude attempt to play off the popularity of Jenny Lind — known as “the Swedish Nightingale” — who was wrapping up one of the most popular concert tours in American history.

In 1851, Colonel Joseph H. Wood became Greenfield’s promoter. Wood, however, was an overt racist and inhumane promoter known for creating wonderment museums in Cincinnati and Chicago that featured exhibits like the “Lilliputian King,” a boy who stood 16 inches tall. With Greenfield, he sought to replicate the success that another promoter, P.T. Barnum, had with Jenny Lind.

In a letter to Frederick Douglass, Martin R. Delany, a physician, newspaper editor and Civil War hero, wrote that Wood was a fervent supporter of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and would not admit black patrons into his museums or at Greenfield’s concerts.

For Greenfield’s African-American supporters, it was a point of huge contention throughout her career.

Critics reconcile their ears with their racism

In antebellum America, the minstrel show was one of the most popular forms of musical entertainment. White actors in blackface exploited common stereotypes of African-Americans, grossly exaggerating their dialect, fashion, dancing and singing.

For example, the popular song “Zip Coon” portrayed African-Americans as clumsily striving for the refinement of white culture. The cover of the sheet music for “Zip Coon” shows an African-American attempting to mimic refined fashions of the day and failing. The song goes on to mock its subject, Zip Coon, as a “learned scholar,” while putting him in situations where his apparent lack of intelligence shows.

Greenfield’s performances, however, forced her critics to rethink this stereotype. The Cleveland Plain Dealer described the confusion that Greenfield caused for her audiences:

“It was amusing to behold the utter surprise and intense pleasure which were depicted on the faces of her listeners; they seemed to express — ‘Why, we see the face of a black woman, but hear the voice of an angel, what does it mean?’”

Critics agreed that Greenfield was a major talent. But they found it difficult to reconcile their ears with their racism. One solution was to describe her as a talented, but unpolished, singer.

For example, the New-York Daily Tribune reported that “it is hardly necessary to say that we did not expect to find an artist on the occasion. She has a fine voice but does not know how to use it.” (We see a similar phenomenon today in sports coverage, in which black athletes are often praised for their raw physical athleticism, while white athletes are praised for their game intelligence.)

By performing repertoire thought too complex for black artists – and by doing it well – Greenfield forced her white critics and audiences to reexamine their assumptions about the abilities of African-American singers.

A star is born

On Thursday, March 31, 1853, Greenfield made her New York City premiere at Metropolitan Hall.

Originally built for Jenny Lind, it was one of the largest performance halls in the world. The day before the concert, the New-York Daily Tribune carried an ad that read, “Particular Notice — No colored persons can be admitted, as there has been no part of the house appropriated for them.” The ban resulted in a citywide uproar that prompted New York City’s first police commissioner, George W. Matsell, to send a large police unit to Metropolitan Hall.

Greenfield was met with laughter when she took to the stage. Several critics blamed the uncouth crowd in attendance; others wrote it off as lighthearted amusement. One report described the awkwardness of the show’s opening moments:

“She was timidly led forward to the front of the stage by a little white representative of the genus homo, who seemed afraid to touch her even with the tips of his white kids [gloves], and kept the ‘Swan’ at a respectful distance, as if she were a sort of biped hippopotamus.”

Despite the inauspicious beginning, critics agreed that her range and power were astonishing. After her American tour, a successful European tour ensued, where she was accompanied by her friend Harriet Beecher Stowe.

A singer’s legacy

Greenfield paved the way for a host of black female concert singers, from Sissieretta Jones to Audra McDonald. In 1921, the musician and music publisher Harry Pace named the first successful black-owned record company, Black Swan Records, in her honor.

But these achievements are byproducts of a much larger legacy.

In Stowe’s novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” one of the slave children, Topsy, is taken in by a northern abolitionist, Miss Ophelia. Despite her best attempts, Ophelia can’t reform Topsy, who continues to act out and steal. When asked why she continues to behave as she does —despite the intervention of implied white goodness — Topsy replies that she’s can’t be good so long as her skin is black because her white caregivers are incapable of seeing goodness in a black body. Her only solution is to have her skin turned inside out so she can be white.

Stowe’s argument was not that we should begin skinning children. Rather, Topsy is a critique of the act of “othering” African-Americans by a dominant culture that refuses to acknowledge their full humanity.

After Greenfield’s New York concert, the New-York Daily Tribune recognized the monumental nature of Greenfield’s heroics. The paper urged her to leave America for Europe — and to stay there — the implication being that Greenfield’s home country wasn’t ready to accept the legitimacy of black artistry.

But Greenfield’s tour did more than prove to white audiences that black performers could sing as well as their European peers. Her tour challenged Americans to begin to recognize the full artistry — and, ultimately, the full humanity — of their fellow citizens.

Adam Gustafson, Instructor in Music, Pennsylvania State University

Exploiting black labor after the abolition of slavery

(AP Photo/Bullit Marquez) (Credit: AP)

The U.S. criminal justice system is riven by racial disparity.

The Obama administration pursued a plan to reform it. An entire news organization, The Marshall Project, was launched in late 2014 to cover it. Organizations like Black Lives Matter and The Sentencing Project are dedicated to unmaking a system that unjustly targets people of color.

But how did we get this system in the first place? Our ongoing historical research project investigates the relationship between the press and convict labor. While that story is still unfolding, we have learned what few Americans, especially white Americans, know: the dark history that produced our current criminal justice system.

If anything is to change — if we are ever to “end this racial nightmare, and achieve our country,” as James Baldwin put it — we must confront this system and the blighted history that created it.

During Reconstruction, the 12 years following the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, former slaves made meaningful political, social and economic gains. Black men voted and even held public office across the South. Biracial experiments in governance flowered. Black literacy surged, surpassing those of whites in some cities. Black schools, churches and social institutions thrived.

As the prominent historian Eric Foner writes in his masterwork on Reconstruction, “Black participation in Southern public life after 1867 was the most radical development of the Reconstruction years, a massive experiment in interracial democracy without precedent in the history of this or any other country that abolished slavery in the nineteenth century.”

But this moment was short-lived.

As W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, the “slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”

History is made by human actors and the choices they make.

According to the choices made by Southern white supremacists after abolition, and the rest of the country’s accommodation, “explain more about the current state of American life, black and white, than the antebellum slavery that preceded.”

Designed to reverse black advances, Redemption was an organized effort by white merchants, planters, businessmen and politicians that followed Reconstruction. “Redeemers” employed vicious racial violence and state legislation as tools to prevent black citizenship and equality promised under the 14th and 15th amendments.

By the early 1900s, nearly every southern state had barred black citizens not only from voting but also from serving in public office, on juries and in the administration of the justice system.

The South’s new racial caste system was not merely political and social. It was thoroughly economic. Slavery had made the South’s agriculture-based economy the most powerful force in the global cotton market, but the Civil War devastated this economy.

How to build a new one?

Ironically, white leaders found a solution in the 13th Amendment, which ended slavery in the United States in 1865. By exploiting the provision allowing “slavery” and “involuntary servitude” to continue as “a punishment for crime,” they took advantage of a penal system predating the Civil War and used even during Reconstruction.

A new form of control

With the help of profiteering industrialists they found yet a new way to build wealth on the bound labor of black Americans: the convict lease system.

Here’s how it worked. Black men — and sometimes women and children — were arrested and convicted for crimes enumerated in the Black Codes, state laws criminalizing petty offenses and aimed at keeping freed people tied to their former owners’ plantations and farms. The most sinister crime was vagrancy — the “crime” of being unemployed — which brought a large fine that few blacks could afford to pay.

Black convicts were leased to private companies, typically industries profiteering from the region’s untapped natural resources. As many as were forced into back-breaking labor in coal mines, turpentine factories and lumber camps. They lived in squalid conditions, chained, starved, beaten, flogged and sexually violated. They died by the thousands from injury, disease and torture.

For both the state and private corporations, the opportunities for profit were enormous. For the state, convict lease generated revenue and provided a powerful tool to subjugate African-Americans and intimidate them into behaving in accordance with the new social order. It also greatly reduced state expenses in housing and caring for convicts. For the corporations, convict lease provided droves of cheap, disposable laborers who could be worked to the extremes of human cruelty.

Every southern state leased convicts, and at least nine-tenths of all leased convicts were black. In reports of the period, the terms “convicts” and “negroes” are used interchangeably.

Of those black Americans caught in the convict lease system, a few were men like Henry Nisbet, who murdered nine other black men in Georgia. But the vast majority were like Green Cottenham, the central figure in Blackmon’s book, who was snatched into the system after being charged with vagrancy.

A principal difference between antebellum slavery and convict leasing was that, in the latter, the laborers were only the temporary property of their “masters.” On one hand, this meant that after their fines had been paid off, they would potentially be let free. On the other, it meant the companies leasing convicts often absolved themselves of concerns about workers’ longevity. Such convicts were viewed as disposable and frequently worked beyond human endurance.

The living conditions of leased convicts are documented in dozens of detailed, firsthand reports spanning decades and covering many states. In 1883, Blackmon writes, Alabama prison inspector Reginald Dawson described leased convicts in one mine being held on trivial charges, in “desperate,” “miserable” conditions, poorly fed, clothed, and “unnecessarily chained and shackled.” He described the “appalling number of deaths” and “appalling numbers of maimed and disabled men” held by various forced-labor entrepreneurs spanning the entire state.

Dawson’s reports had no perceptible impact on Alabama’s convict leasing system.

The exploitation of black convict labor by the penal system and industrialists was central to southern politics and economics of the era. It was a carefully crafted answer to black progress during Reconstruction — highly visible and widely known. The system benefited the national economy, too. The federal government passed up one opportunity after another to intervene.

Convict lease ended at different times across the early 20th century, only to be replaced in many states by another racialized and brutal method of convict labor: the chain gang.

Convict labor, debt peonage, lynching — and the white supremacist ideologies of Jim Crow that supported them all — produced a bleak social landscape across the South for African-Americans.

Black Americans developed multiple resistance strategies and gained major victories through the civil rights movement, including Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Jim Crow fell, and America moved closer than ever to fulfilling its democratic promise of equality and opportunity for all.

But in the decades that followed, a “tough on crime” politics with racist undertones produced, among other things, harsh drug and mandatory minimum sentencing laws that were applied in racially disparate ways. The mass incarceration system exploded, with the rate of imprisonment quadrupling between the 1970s and today.

Michelle Alexander famously calls it “The New Jim Crow” in her book of the same name.

Today, the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world, with 2.2 million behind bars, even though crime has decreased significantly since the early 1990s. And while black Americans make up only 13 percent of the U.S. population, they make up 37 percent of the incarcerated population. Forty percent of police killings of unarmed people are black men, who make up merely 6 percent of the population, according to a 2015 Washington Post report.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We can choose otherwise.

Kathy Roberts Forde, Chair, Associate Professor, Journalism Department, University of Massachusetts Amherst and Bryan Bowman, Undergraduate journalism major, University of Massachusetts Amherst

John Kelly is willing to resign: report

John Kelly (Credit: AP/Susan Walsh)

White House Chief of Staff John Kelly has reportedly been murmuring to fellow officials that he’s willing to resign over the backlash that erupted over his reaction to Rob Porter’s domestic violence allegations, according to multiple reports.

New York Times sources say a resignation isn’t “imminent,” and that no “formal offer” has been made. However, sources told ABC News that Tom Barrack, a billionaire who chaired Trump’s presidential inaugural committee, was allegedly approached to gauge interest about the job. According to the report, Barrack said he wouldn’t take it. The ABC report also suggested that Kelly is indeed willing to step down.

Reports surfaced earlier on Friday alleging that Donald Trump was furious with Kelly.

“Who does this guy think he is?” Trump said of Kelly, according to a source who spoke with Axios. As far as a replacement goes, the New York Times reported that “Trump has recently asked advisers what they think of Mick Mulvaney, who currently holds twin posts as director of the White House budget office and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as a possible chief of staff.”

All of this arrives on the heels of blurred reporting on the timeline of when and what exactly Kelly knew about Porter’s alleged past. If Kelly knew about Porter’s past transgressions long before the Daily Mail published photos of one of Porter’s ex-wives with a black eye, the White House indeed hired and protected a known domestic abuser.

White House officials’ reactions have stayed in the key of shock.

Meanwhile, Trump praised Porter to reporters on Friday.

“He did a very good job when he was in the White House, and we hope he has a wonderful career, and he will have a great career ahead of him,” Trump said. “But it was very sad when we heard about it, and certainly he’s also very sad now.”

According to the report in the New York Times, Kelly tried to clarify the timeline to staff on Friday morning which some officials allegedly knew wasn’t true. The report states:

On Friday morning at the White House, Mr. Kelly appeared to be trying to paint his handling of the matter in a more favorable light. At the end of the senior staff meeting, Mr. Kelly volunteered that he had something he wanted to “clarify,” according to people with knowledge of his remarks.

Mr. Kelly went on to say that he had learned of Mr. Porter’s true situation less than an hour before he removed him from his job. Two people familiar with the comments said that most of the staff appeared incredulous; one person said several people in the room knew that the timeline Mr. Kelly had presented was false.

As the meeting broke up, Ms. Hicks loudly complained about what had transpired, a person briefed on the meeting said.

White House Communications Director Hope Hicks is reportedly romantically involved with Porter.

Is it so wrong to love Leni Riefenstahl’s “Olympia”?

Still from "Olympia" (Credit: Olympia-Film)

Okay, time to fess up. Much like Thomas De Quincey, almost 200 years ago, became hooked on opium and went on to write about it, I have devolved into an Advil addict here in 2018 whenever I see a Social Justice Crusader attempting to police what art I cannot partake of and be enriched by.

This happens often, but not as often as it could, if SJWs actually knew anything about art, which is rare. That’s bound to be the case when your existence and sense of self is predicated on pointing at things you wish to tell others to avoid, thus making real connections exceedingly difficult to come by, thus feeding your depression and self-loathing. An emotionally violent and vicious cycle that ultimately creates a prevailing numbness, which leads to an absence of nuanced thought, legitimate empathy, love and self-love, and us being where we are as a society. It’s that. It’s not your elected leaders. Everything stems from us.

Nothing is more of a surefire migraine starter for me than people white-knighting it with art. I pre-dose these days with my gel caps before reading some articles, which I’d be better off avoiding. Look, if you care about something, and you are knowledgeable on the subject, I am all for you shouting from the mounts, but learnedly, thoughts/theories/conclusions totally oppositional to what I believe.

I can’t imagine there’s a person who does more Beatles-related work, for instance, than I do, and if you have a compelling argument why “Abbey Road” is dreadful, which I could not agree less with, I’d love to hear it. It’d entertain me, make me think, make me respect you. My loyalty is to truth and beauty, but there are all kinds of angles from which we can approach those twin peaks.

What galls me, though, is when people call out one work of art, based on something they know, or think they know, about the life of the person who created it, while letting every other artist skate — as in, pass on by, unchecked — simply because these geniuses of society have never read a biography in their lives.

Because if you’re going to do the whole “art is not separate from the artist” thing and adjudicate on what people should partake of based on that, you need to stop going to the museum, never watch Turner Classic Movies again, never listen to the Beatles or just about any rock band, put down that classic novel, ditch Miles Davis and jazz, and if you think the people who made most of our best classical music were patron saints of SJW-dom, you are fooling yourself. This is censoring based upon an individual’s ignorance and, in following, hypocrisy. It’s also killing culture incrementally every day, though there is going to come a moment when it snaps back in the other direction. Art lasts; SJWs, who are so rarely about equity, are flushed, their anemic, would-be souls with them.  

Which brings us to Leni Riefenstahl. The Criterion Collection — which everyone likes, right? — has just released an enormous box set totaling more than 50 films, all centered on the Olympics. I tend not to like the Olympics that much. It’s sports-lite, in some ways. I’m into Jessie Owens and the 1980 U.S. men’s hockey team, but often the Olympics serve as the kind of sports you get into if you’re a hipster who only likes tennis — a rich person’s sport where people virtue signal by conversationally referring to Federer by his first name — and the Kentucky Derby, which are ideal for hipster parties where at least two people have “Paris Review” tote bags. In short, dabbling fare for the people who always had a note to get out of gym class.

Having said that, I am aware of no finer sports film than Riefenstahl’s 1938 “Olympia,” which was so expansive and exacting as to require two parts totaling 226 minutes, and which is included in this box set. I’ve been watching it since I was 15 years old, mesmerized by what is tantamount to a Cubist-naturalism take on sports — which you wouldn’t think possible — and cinematic techniques that dazzled me in the same manner that Orson Welles did when I first saw “Citizen Kane.”

Herein lies the controversy, and why it took some pelvic-region fortitude for Criterion to include this film: We are not exactly sure to what extent Riefenstahl may have been a willing member of the Nazi party. Let’s put it this way: If you want to think she was, you can certainly read a number of facts that way, just as if you wish to believe otherwise, there are facts to tip the scales in the direction you wish.

She may have had a crush on Hitler. She shot “The Triumph of the Will,” which certainly is not anti-Nazi — and was a big influence on “Star Wars,” actually — but I’m also not sure, this being 1934, how much she might have known, could have known. Plus, sometimes artists are so locked up in making art that a kind of willful ignorance occurs, where anything extraneous to that art-making is pushed out of the consciousness.

I’m that way. I could not tell you what “Shades of Grey” is for the life of me. Is that the same as Nazism? Obviously, there’s hardly more of a fatuous claim you could make, but my point is that I have no clue what passed through Riefenstahl’s mind, so far as her inward creative process went, even after reading just about everything written on her.

I also know that there are a lot of would-be “tough guys” — I’m using the term as we all know how it means, not differentiating in the relative toughness of genders — who now talk, and blog, and endlessly palaver, about how they would have acted differently at some point in history, when everyone around them was acting the same way, which is BS, as these people are almost always acting the way everyone around them in their lives acts right now. Which empowers them. If everyone else acted a different way, well, boy howdy, they’d get on board with that right quick. It’s hard to be the lone dissenting voice, or one of them, in the other team’s stadium. I guess. I don’t know. And, when I watch “Olympia,” I really don’t care.

Riefenstahl shoots Jessie Owens with the rapture of the poet’s eye, a poet in love with Owens’ own artistry. We are lucky we have this footage, the epitome of athletic grace on the big screen, and that must have burned Hitler’s ass. But fear not: It’s cool and easy to fall under the spell of this film if you’re not a sports person, and I get how people inclined to what we perceive as quieter, more contemplative pursuits can find sports off-putting, which often takes the form of a kind of intimidation.

We feel that we will not be able to penetrate the athletic world, maybe, and be successful in it, because success, so often in sports, is not based on anything subjective. It is talent-based. That is why I value sports like I do in the present day as one of the last battlements of meritocracy. Publishing is certainly an anti-meritocracy. I don’t believe there is anyone who has ever walked this earth, for instance, who actually thinks Lydia Davis is any good at writing and would wish to be stuck alone with only her drivel on a desert island, but if you’re in the in-crowd, this is what you pretend to believe, or work to get yourself to believe. It is what awards are given to. If only lies came encased in gelatin-coatings like pills.

“Olympia” makes sports universal in a startling way, though, by extending the rules of the game — to borrow a phrase from Jean Renoir — to transcend what happens on the pitch, race track, or in the pool. The reason the NFL is so successful is because it has turned a sport into a form of non-sport. That is, to appreciate, say, hockey or baseball, you need a kind of understanding as to what it means to execute a power play with the center cuing everything from the bumper position, or just how valuable it is that your nine-hole hitter hit behind the runner on second to move him to third with less than two outs.

The NFL has become gladiatorial. It’s about big passing numbers, big hits, hating the Patriots. It’s more broad, less nuanced, in its presentation. Of course, this is in appearance only, as football is pretty damn complex at the level of what is really going on, but Riefenstahl was even more successful with her alchemy in “Olympia.”

She is a painter of faces, of desire, of endurance, and from the faces these emotions modulate to play anew in calf muscles, beads of sweat, slumped shoulders when defeat sets in, that quick intake of breath upon the realization that there will be more games in the future, and Defeat, the pesky cousin the Reaper, may be bested after all.

She blended the long take with quick cuts like an editing virtuoso. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the way Riefenstahl cuts in “Olympia,” with some of them being timed to heartbeats, it seems, was an influence on Richard Lester’s “A Hard Day’s Night” and future music videos.

She shoots from all angles, including from down low, as Welles was fond of, with that juxtaposition of fluid camera work and chopping-cuts fracturing, then remodeling, what another director would have turned out as well-worn images. This is Cubist, in a sense, splintering the whole so as to better reveal a larger, more impactful whole, but it’s also as congruous as an air current drying a sweaty brow.

Watch the famed diving sequences to get a feel for Riefenstahl’s balletic, painterly, paradoxical mastery where the master shot and the cut-in are one, with the past, the present, the oncoming, the close, the far, the beside and the between all gloriously — learnedly — superimposed. That should not be possible, but this is a brilliant artist. It’s a cinematic sleight-of-hand, but one, again paradoxically, with no trickery in it that never departs from the real and the truthful in changing how we look at the world and wonder what else we may have been missing and not seeing, as it were, not as we wished, or assumed, it to be.

It wouldn’t kill you to do the same thing with Leni Riefenstahl and “Olympia.” Leave her out of it, if you wish, or tar her in your mind as you see fit, if that helps you out, I guess. I would say it probably doesn’t at all, maybe work on that here in the new year, and take a gander at yourself the way she observes those bodies piercing the water. Be more plink, and less plunk, and bathe in the art we’re lucky enough to have. It’ll get the grime of ignorance off of you and you’ll swim better, in the metaphorical sense. Hell, maybe in the physical one, too.

“Strike Back” brings women into the action

“Strike Back,” Cinemax’s long-running military action ripper, is unlike most series.

Generally, shows returning to the air after an extended hiatus contend with a portion of doubt among the faithful, especially if those fans are conditioned to associate them with a specific dynamic.

And “Strike Back” has a definite formula. Its current incarnation represents the drama’s sixth season overall, and fifth as a Cinemax entity, and features an entirely new cast. A certain amount of resupplying a show’s roster is to be expected of a series about a covert special operations force. Soldiers can’t outrun bullets and fire forever, and the actors playing them eventually move on.

But where “Strike Back” found success in previous seasons was in capitalizing upon the buddy action partnership of Sergeant Michael Stonebridge (Philip Winchester) and former Delta Force operative Damien Scott (Sullivan Stapleton), a relatively staid British specialist (played by an American actor) partnered with a wild-man American (played by an Aussie).

Though Stonebridge and Scott weren’t the original “Strike Back” duo, the pair personified show’s engine: two guys linked in a platonic work marriage requiring them to blow stuff up and kick international criminals and terrorists in the face. Think Jason Bourne, minus the brainwashing and refinement but with added humor, scruff and random sex scenes.

This Stonebridge-and-Scott-free “Strike Back” doubles the team from two agents to a four and, more significantly, adds two female leads to the mix. Rough-and-ready Gracie Novin (Alin Sumarwata) and the more refined Captain Natalie Reynolds (Roxanne McKee) stand beside field operatives Thomas “Mac” McAllister (Warren Brown, from “Luther”) and Samuel Wyatt (Daniel MacPherson).

And it’s Reynolds, not McAllister or Wyatt, who is the ranking agent leading the team into places where the regular British and American armies will not tread. In contrast to White House policy, Section 20 views far-right white nationalists as equal threat to other extremists; with the first two episodes the action sprints from confronting a terrorist cell in Libya (actually Jordan; apparently the king is a big fan of the show) to chasing down far-right extremists in Europe.

Two episodes of the new 10-part season have made their U.S. debut on Cinemax, where it airs Fridays at 10 p.m., and thus far the new “Strike Back” feels very much like it always has. This is as much of a testament to the appeal of the new cast as the series’ resilient structure.

“Section 20, the ‘Strike Back’ concept is something which is kind of universal,” executive producer and director MJ Bassett told Salon in a recent interview. “The soldiers come and go, but the ambitions of what both the show and those characters within the show want to do remains ultimately the same.”

“This show wants to be an entertainment,” Bassett continued. “It fills a gap in the television world which nothing else exists within. When we went [away], I expected to see another kick-ass military show come along and nothing did. They’re all a little bit serious.”

Bassett’s focus has always been to ensure that the show feels like a “wild ride” first and foremost. It’s also a series with plot arcs extending through entire seasons with unpredictable twists, and narratives spurred along by a do-or-die mission as opposed to poetic dialogue or character backstory.

Episodic tension is derived from speeding from one deadly confrontation to another, in a series of near-miss pursuits of villains bent on destabilizing nations that sends the team to far-flung locales around the globe. Production for this season took place in Jordan, Croatia and Hungary, for example.

That said, the frequently FUBAR nature of Section 20’s missions enables viewers to invest in the characters. As such, one may notice that there’s room for improvement in terms of finding parity with the personality portraits of the men and the women, especially in this season’s opening episodes.

When this was pointed out to Sumarwata and McKee, Sumarwata theorized, “It does probably play that way at first when you watch it, I think, maybe because they were trying to stay true to the genre of the show.”

In terms of the dialogue, “I’d always fight for it. I’d be like, it should just be written like we’re men. Or, not men, like we’re soldiers. In the beginning there was always kind of this thing about guys, all the banter, and we always had to fight to get more,” she said, adding ,“I think they will keep working at that, but it’s a great start to even have two female leads. And incredibly timely, especially now, what with everything that’s happening.”

To this McKee quipped, “#TimesUp.”

Incorporating women into the field operations isn’t new to “Strike Back,” which previously added Rhona Mitra’s prickly Rachel Dalton to the Stonebridge and Scott outfit in one of its best seasons. Female commanders also are common in Section 20, with Nina Sosanya commanding missions as Colonel Adeena Donovan.

“What MJ wanted to achieve,” McKee explained, “was less of the sexual nature between the soldiers and more of the understanding of getting the job done as soldiers working together within a unit, rather than just being humans who are maybe having a flirtation, or emotional investment in each other at the beginning because we wanted to show that they’re soldiers with a job to do.”

Bassett added, “The world has moved on a little bit in terms of machismo, in terms of the mix of men and women who serve in the military, and who they are represented on television. I believe in diversity massively and it’s that sense of, how can we reflect this new world, keep the flavor of the old of the show and infuse it with something new and exciting so it doesn’t feel like it’s a dinosaur show?”

In many ways “Strike Back” stands as the quintessential Cinemax series, the bridge between the channel’s former brand as a repository of B-movies and soft-core to its current state as an action-centric premium channel that isn’t shy about busting out the skin flicks for night owls.

What makes the series stand out from other network originals, though, is that the action felt intricately choreographed and the missions embarked upon by special operations group Section 20 looked real and were staged in a way that allowed the military expert consultants’ work to glow through the actors. Basically, it’s a weekly action flick cast with an impressive roster of talent, starting with Richard Armitage and Andrew Lincoln in the first season, when it first aired in the U.K. before being re-branded for American audiences as “Strike Back: Origins,” and followed by the partnership between Stonebridge and Scott, the version American audiences are most familiar with.

Simmering beneath their run-and-gun bravura all the while was a darkness informed by battle trauma and personal tragedy. This brings us to an aspect of “Strike Back” that probably irked its female fans more than the men watching with them — in previous seasons, female characters often had an expiration date and thinner character development.

Bassett concedes that the series gained that reputation. “But this time around, I wanted to make sure that it was a much more level playing field. Their gender is not really relevant anymore. They are just operators. And because we’ve gone to four principals rather than two, now it makes no difference. It’s just whatever the mission dictates and needs, is we’re assigning them. The dynamic changes, and we avowedly said the previous incarnation was a buddy show, this is more of a group show. This is more building a family unit, in that looser sense of family, that kind of interaction.”

It is a jump for viewers, Sumarwata conceded, to take a series built around two men and add a pair of female soldiers beside them. That said, “I felt like it could’ve been pushed even more to have the two females being front and center with all the banter right from the beginning. But it’s OK. I still give them props for even having us on the show!”

She added, “Hopefully by the end of the season you don’t go, ‘oh, that’s a female soldier.’ You just say, ‘That’s a soldier.’”

Amazon launching private delivery service to compete with UPS and FedEx: report

(Credit: AP/Mark Lennihan))

Amazon has cast its eye on another industrial frontier: package delivery services.  The tech conglomerate is reportedly gearing up to launch a new delivery service called “Shipping with Amazon” — or SWA — that will compete with  United Parcel Service Inc. and FedEx Corp, the Wall Street Journal reports.

According to the report, the delivery service will pick up packages from businesses that sell goods on Amazon and will ship and deliver them to consumers; it expands on a pilot project that launched in 2016 in Los Angeles. The new service is expected to launch in the coming weeks in Los Angeles with third-party merchants, and plans to open its services eventually to other businesses, too.

The report states:

“With the new “Shipping with Amazon” option, Amazon plans to send its drivers to pick up shipments from warehouses and businesses itself and deliver the packages when it is able, the people said. For shipments outside Amazon’s delivery reach, the U.S. Postal Service and other carriers will take care of the so-called last mile to customers’ doorsteps.

Amazon is allegedly planning to underprice UPS and FedEx; the rate structure remains unclear, though. When contacted by Salon, an Amazon spokesperson said: “We’re always innovating and experimenting on behalf of customers and the businesses that sell and grow on Amazon to create faster lower-cost delivery choices.”

This comes on the heels of the news that Amazon wants to get its private paws in the healthcare industry. Recently, reports surfaced of an initiative in which Amazon would partner with JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Berkshire Hathaway Inc. to form a new healthcare company for their employees. This isn’t its only recent vertical integration for the company: Last summer, it announced it was acquiring Whole Foods, an acquisition likely intended to help grow its grocery selection. Amazon already has its own variation of a Hollywood studio with Amazon Studios, and a cloud-computing service. Together, the company is starting to look an awful lot like the world-dominating “Buy N Large” corporation from the dystopian Pixar movie “Wall-E.”  Mistrust of Amazon may have been what caused Twitter to explode in speculation following the news of a delivery service.

Some think it could be “one of the largest market disruptions we’ve seen in years”:

Amazon to launch a massive delivery service to compete with FedEx and UPS. The service will be called Shipping With Amazon and will be one of the largest market disruptions we've seen in years. FedEx / UPS currently have a combined market cap of $160B https://t.co/w5ZTohAdqu pic.twitter.com/BwnN5NXwEj

— Michael Quoc (@michaelquoc) February 9, 2018

Others speculate it could become the world’s largest private carrier.

Amazon does this extensively in India. Pick up from merchants and direct delivery. I won't be surprised that it may become the largest private carrier by volume within a few years.

— Chirag (@chirag) February 9, 2018

Another Twitter user described it as a “charter school” equivalent to postal delivery. (Notably, the report on SWA implies it would still be reliant on the government-run United States Postal Service for “last mile” deliveries.)

Amazon shipping will be the charter school system of postal delivery. Some resourced people will love it and wonder what the big deal is when other parts of the the city and rural areas can’t get anything delivered anymore. https://t.co/cEmRy1jYfp

— Gabriel Piemonte (@gabrielpiemonte) February 9, 2018

While some consumers might be enamored by this initiative, given Amazon’s treatment of its warehouse and service workers it is fair to wonder the types of conditions that Shipping with Amazon workers will have to endure, and to what degree it will rely on contractors and non-union labor.

Historically, Amazon has beat the we’re-creating-jobs-drum in moves like this, especially when the jobs are operational and targeted toward lower and middle-class communities. However, as the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) noted in a recently-published report, counties that have Amazon fulfillment centers don’t observe a boost in the local economy as promised. It’s also been widely reported that some Amazon warehouse employees haven’t always worked under the best conditions.

According to data on Glassdoor, a UPS package handler has an average annual salary of $27,249—with an additional cash compensation of $10,000. A UPS driver can make an average of $65,540 a year. According to various job postings seeking Amazon drivers, while it’s unclear if they’re specifically related to this new initiative, they’re being advertised as hourly wages between $13 and $15, which at full-time would equate to an annual salary of $27,040–$31,200 before taxes.

Though SWA’s operational structure is unclear, one thing appears to be certain: starting anew in the shipping industry is a truly massive industrial and logistical undertaking — as FedEx CFO Alan Graf described to the Wall Street Journal in 2016.

“The level of global investment in facilities, sorting, aircraft, vehicles, people to replicate the service we provide, or our primary competitor provides, is just daunting, and frankly, in our view, unrealistic,” Graf said. “We’ve been at this for 40 years.”

Rachel Brand, next in line to oversee Mueller investigation, abruptly leaves DOJ

Rachel Brand (Credit: Jeff Malet Photography)

Rachel L. Brand, the third-ranking officer at the Justice Department, will plans to step down from her job as associate attorney general, according to a report by the New York Times that has been corroborated by multiple news agencies late Friday afternoon. Brand has been on the job for only nine months.

The news of Brand’s departure comes as the Justice Department and the FBI have been on the defense following criticism and attacks from President Trump.

On Feb. 2, Trump said, “The top Leadership and Investigators of the FBI and the Justice Department have politicized the sacred investigative process in favor of Democrats and against Republicans – something which would have been unthinkable just a short time ago,” in a tweet.

The top Leadership and Investigators of the FBI and the Justice Department have politicized the sacred investigative process in favor of Democrats and against Republicans – something which would have been unthinkable just a short time ago. Rank & File are great people!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 2, 2018

As third in the line of succession, Brand is second in succession to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who is presiding over Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Should Trump fire Rosenstein, a move he has reportedly considered, Brand would be in charge.

In another Times report published January 25, reporters Maggie Haberman and Michael Schmidt quoted a source and wrote, “Another option that Mr. Trump considered in discussions with his advisers was dismissing the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, and elevating the Justice Department’s No. 3 official, Rachel Brand, to oversee Mr. Mueller.”

In her role as Associate Attorney General, Brand reports directly to Rosenstein and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who has recused himself from the Russia investigation. Brand held positions at the Justice Department over the past three presidential administrations before becoming Associate Attorney General in May 2017. She was appointed by President Obama to serve as one of five Senate-confirmed members of the Private and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, a position she held from 2012 until 2017. From 2003 to 2007, President George W. Bush had appointed Brand to serve as the Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney general for the Office of Legal Policy, and then as the Senate-confirmed Assistant Attorney General for Legal Policy.

The New York Times reported she is leaving for a job as a general counsel in the private sector.

The White House — and this admin — are in a state of crisis. Rachel Brand, #3 at DOJ, is leaving, per somebody close to her & admin, "because she is very smart, accomplished, and talented, and wants to protect her career." She is going to Walmart, this source says.

— Eliana Johnson (@elianayjohnson) February 9, 2018

Brand has not yet publicly confirmed her resignation from the Justice Department.

A big step toward a blood test for Alzheimer’s

(Credit: Shutterstock/DedMityay)

For the most part, clinical trials in Alzheimer’s disease have been woefully disappointing — failed drug after failed drug. Even colossal drugmaker Pfizer announced earlier this month that it will stop pursuing treatments for the disorder out of scientific and financial frustration. Yet a Japanese study published Jan. 31 in Nature reports on a screening test that could improve the success of Alzheimer’s drug research.

The new findings suggest a simple blood test can accurately predict levels of a protein called amyloid beta in the brain that begins appearing early in the course of the disease before symptoms appear. Amyloid buildup is a key pathological feature of Alzheimer’s, and determining the degree to which someone’s brain is riddled with the molecule is essential for designing effective clinical trials.

At the moment the only way to accurately measure amyloid in a living person is either via costly positron emission tomography imaging (PET scan) or by sampling cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) with a lumbar puncture, or spinal tap. A blood test would offer a cheaper, far less invasive means of determining a patient’s amyloid status. This could encourage more patients to enter clinical trials. It could also help researchers distinguish people with brewing Alzheimer’s from those with other forms of dementia.

Senior study author Katsuhiko Yanagisawa, director general of the National Center for Geriatrics and Gerontology in Japan, is convinced that enough amyloid penetrates the blood-brain barrier to make its way into the bloodstream to be a useful measure of cognitive function. “We think amyloid blood tests could replace costly, invasive amyloid tests, especially when it comes to detecting preclinical Alzheimer’s,” he says. “We hope our biomarker better facilitates clinical trials for [Alzheimer’s] by improving enrollment of participants.”

To measure bits of amyloid coursing through the bloodstream, Yanagisawa and colleagues used a technique called immunoprecipitation with mass spectrometry, which deploysantibodies to bind and identify proteins. The study included 121 people from Japan and 252 from Australia, and both groups involved individuals with normal brain function, mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s. They found the amount of amyloid present in the blood correlated with the degree of cognitive problems. Blood amyloid levels also correlated with findings in the same patients from PET scans and spinal fluid measures.

Yanagisawa believes a simple amyloid blood test would enable recruitment for clinical trials of new drugs in a larger share of the population, as opposed to only those with access to advanced academic centers. Scaling up trial numbers should also help trials more accurately represent the actual population. “This does seem to be an important study,” says James Hendrix, who was not involved in the new research and is director of Global Science Initiatives for the Alzheimer’s Association, the largest nonprofit funder of Alzheimer’s research. “It is from a top research team. It is a decently large sample size. And most important, they are correlating their results to PET and CSF. That cross-validation to other techniques is great to see — we haven’t seen this before for a blood test in Alzheimer’s.”

Emory University neurologist William Hu, who also did not participate in the study, agrees. “The findings are promising as reliable blood biomarkers can lead to early detection with a relatively straightforward procedure and lower costs. Yet he cautions the accuracy of amyloid PET scanning — the standard against which the blood test is being measured — remains controversial, compared with true gold standard of Alzheimer’s, a postmortem inspection of brain tissue.

Hu also points out the overall levels of amyloid differed between the Japanese and Australian groups. “I believe the technology will need further development and standardization to provide more accurate amyloid measures,” he says.

What little encouraging Alzheimer’s treatment data does exist — including that around a promising drug called aducanumab — suggests medications that have gone through clinical trials seem to work better earlier in the dementia disease course, before patients develop full-blown Alzheimer’s. A blood test in at-risk patients would make it an awful lot easier for researchers to identify people at risk for the disease in whom treatment and preventative measures could be more effective.

Yanagisawa and colleagues are now extending and expanding their study in hopes of bringing an amyloid blood test closer to routine clinical use. Multiple authors on the paper have even filed for patents for the technique.

For now, measuring dementia risk with a simple blood drawremains in the realm of research. “It’s good to see this type of study advance, as we desperately need noninvasive and low-cost markers for Alzheimer’s disease,” Hendrix says. “But still, at this point it is not ready for prime time.”

Rand Paul reveals the Republican deficit charade

Rand Paul (Credit: Getty/Alex Wong)

As Donald Trump rose to the top of the Republican power structure in 2016 and 2017, several Republican senators have boosted their national profiles by denouncing his various actions as irrational and authoritarian.

Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul and Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake have repeatedly been hailed by desperate grassroots Democrats for occasionally speaking out against Trump. During the lead-up to this morning’s mini-government shutdown, however, all three senators revealed that their critiques of the president have really been about opposing Trump from the far-right.

We also learned another thing: conservatives only care about deficits when it comes to increasing spending. They don’t care about them when it comes to cutting taxes. It is remarkable how quickly Republicans have reverted to their basic policy approach from 2001-2006: big tax cuts plus spending increases.

After Paul used a procedural loophole to shut down the government for a few hours after midnight, all three senators voted against the last-minute bipartisan budget continuing resolution on the grounds of its proposal to increase federal spending by $300 billion over the next two years. But not even three months earlier, all three also voted for a tax reduction proposal that the Congressional Budget Office said would increase the federal budget deficit by $1.4 trillion over ten years.

“Fiscal responsibility is more than a political talking point to trot out when the other guys are in charge,” Flake said during a Senate floor speech which denounced “reckless spending” but did not discuss his earlier vote for an even larger, unfunded tax cut.

Sasse was similarly unwilling to discuss his vote to increase the deficit for tax reductions, in a statement which criticized the measure that President Donald Trump signed this morning:

“This bill is too expensive and too unwilling to prioritize. Yes, we need more spending on defense. But no, we do not need more across-the-board spending on every single government program every single bureaucrat ever imagined.”

Unlike Flake and Sasse, Paul was willing to admit that Republicans were being hypocritical — but only on deficit spending under former president Barack Obama.

“If you were against President Obama’s deficits and now you’re for the Republican deficits, isn’t that the very definition of hypocrisy?” he asked during a floor speech of his own.

Paul did address the topic of tax cuts in a later part of his hour-long disquisition that tried to justify increasing the national debt as justifiable solely on ideological grounds:

And some have said ‘well how can you be a deficit hawk if you voted for the tax cut?’ Well one, because I think you own your labor, you own the fruits of your labor. You own all of it. You give up some of your labor to live in a civilized world.

And so my question to you is that everything you make, everything you own, everything that comes from the sweat of your brow and the work of your hands is yours. And if you give up some, you’re giving up your liberty. And you give up a little bit of your liberty you give up a little bit [of] your wages to live in a civilized world, to have law and order and have some government. So I’m OK with that.

But I ask you, do you want to give up more or less? Do you want to give up a hundred percent of your paycheck or do you want to give up ten percent of your paycheck?

We should always be about minimizing government so taxes really are about how much of your liberty you get to keep, how much of the liberty to continue spending your own money.

And the other side of the ledger is spending.

At least Paul bothered to offer a rationale for his contradictory actions. Sasse and Flake don’t respect their fellow Americans enough to even offer any sort of explanation.

Inside the Trump Administration’s plan to shrink the NLRB

(Credit: AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)

Labor rights advocates are alarmed by a proposal to centralize more control of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) at the agency’s Washington, D.C., headquarters and shrink its network of regional offices. Widely viewed as another effort by appointees of President Donald Trump to reverse some union-friendly policies promoted by Obama appointees, the proposal is a step toward an even smaller role for the NLRB in protecting workers’ rights, these advocates charge.

News of the proposal leaked out to media outlets in mid-January, first to the Daily Labor Report and then to the The New York Times. The news reports focused on objections to the proposal by NLRB staff members at the agency’s 26 regional offices. Some of those staffers would be demoted, or lose their jobs entirely, if the proposal is implemented by NLRB General Counsel Peter B. Robb.

Trump appointee Robb “is a man in a big hurry” to remake the NLRB into an agency more responsive to the anti-union demands of conservative Republicans and business interests, says William B. Gould IV, a former NLRB chairman now teaching law at Stanford University. “He looks to be seizing control of the complaint process,” at the regional level, Gould tells In These Times. “That’s terribly important because it is the regional offices that are the great strength of the NLRB… The regional offices are where a union shop steward or a legal practitioner can go to have complaints handled in a professional way.”

Robb, appointed by Trump in September of last year and sworn in Nov. 17, comes to the post with strong anti-union credentials. As described by The New York Times, he was appointed “after a career largely spent representing management, including handling part of the Reagan administration’s litigation against the air traffic controllers’ union that waged an illegal strike in 1981. Most labor historians say the government’s hard line in firing the controllers contributed to organized labor’s decline…”

Robb’s proposal comes on the heels of recent decisions by the five-member board to roll back some Obama-era initiatives that favored unions. Those decisions were more explicitly political, coming after votes by board members in which Republican Party appointees narrowly prevailed over Democratic appointees. As general counsel to the agency, Robb is not a board member, but rather a White House appointee in charge of administering the day-to-day affairs of the agency under the general direction of the Board members.

According to Michael C. Duff, a professor at the University of Wyoming College of Law, the NLRB votes and the actions by Robb are “of a piece with the Trump agenda to downgrade the agency as a defender of labor rights as spelled in the National Labor Relations Act.” A former NLRB staff lawyer himself, Duff tells In These Times that “I don’t have a good feeling about what is going on. There is a sense that the agency is being hollowed out.”

“You get a sense that they [Republican appointees] are going to reverse everything,” in NLRB policy that is favorable to workers, Duff continues. As a former staffer who is still in regular contact with some of his NLRB colleagues, Duff says “the situation is probably more dramatic than it looks … [The trend] is essentially a repudiation of labor law as we know it.”

Part of the “hollowing out” process is cutting the budget of the agency. Daily Labor Report’s Laurence Dubé reported last year that a 6-percent proposed cut would mean the elimination of 275 jobs from the agency’s staff. The budget has not been finalized, but staff cuts are expected in the coming year, and may  continue throughout the Trump administration, predicts Duff.

Burt Pearlstone, president of the National Labor Relations Board Union, says the staff union has no comment on Robb’s proposal at this time. He tells In These Times that the executive committee of the staff union may take  up the issue at its next scheduled meeting, by may also wait until Robb’s proposals are more formalized

The staff union represents more than 700 NLRB employees in the regional offices and a second independent union, the National Labor Relations Board Professional Association (NLRBPA), represents many staff members at Washington, D.C., headquarters. No representative of the NLRMPA could be reached for comment.

Robb’s proposal to demote employees and consolidate regional offices was outlined in a conference call Jan. 11, in which Robb described the plan to NLRB mid-level administrators. According to Gould, the administrators were not provided with a written version of Robb’s proposal, but were alarmed enough to respond with a written objection that has been published by Daily Labor Report.

“As you can imagine, the information you provided to the Regional Directors has created much uncertainty and has disheartened us … It was unclear to us how many Districts you envision, how many Regional Offices would remain, how many Regional Directors would remain in that position, what the supervisory ratio would be, and when you envision removing Regional Directors from the Senior Executive Service… However, any anticipated changes must be thoughtfully considered so that the great work of the Agency remains. We would like to work with you in developing changes that would be appropriate to meet our challenges,” the NLRB staffers wrote.

“The NLRB has a lot of problems as an agency. The number of cases they handle is way down from when I started work at the Philadelphia regional office (in 1997), but there are still not enough people to handle the work load,” comments Duff.

“Pay freezes and government shut downs have an effect [on morale],” Duff continues. “From what I am hearing now, things are actually worse than you think.”