Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 173

How World War II spurred vaccine innovation

War and disease have marched arm in arm for centuries. Wars magnify the spread and severity of disease by disrupting populations. As large groups of people move across borders, they introduce and encounter disease in new places. Often, they move into crowded, resource-poor environments that allow diseases to thrive.

Before World War II, soldiers died more often of disease than of battle injuries. The ratio of disease-to-battle casualties was approximately 5-to-1 in the Spanish-American War and 2-to-1 in the Civil War. Improved sanitation reduced disease casualties in World War I, but it could not protect troops from the 1918 influenza pandemic. During the outbreak, flu accounted for roughly half of US military casualties in Europe.

As the Second World War raged in Europe, the US military recognized that infectious disease was as formidable an enemy as any other they would meet on the battlefield. So they forged a new partnership with industry and academia to develop vaccines for the troops. Vaccines were attractive to the military for the simple reason that they reduced the overall number of sick days for troops more effectively than most therapeutic measures.

This partnership generated unprecedented levels of innovation that lasted long after the war was over. As industry and academia began to work with the government in new ways to develop vaccines, they discovered that many of the key barriers to progress were not scientific but organizational.

World War II sped the development of flu vaccine

In 1941, fearing another pandemic as it braced for a second world war, the US Army organized a commission to develop the first flu vaccine. The commission was part of a broader network of federally orchestrated vaccine development programs.

These programs enlisted top specialists from universities, hospitals, public health labs and private foundations to conduct epidemiological surveys and to prevent diseases of military importance.

Wartime vaccine programs expanded the scope of the military���s work in vaccines well beyond its traditional focus on dysentery, typhus and syphilis. These new research initiatives targeted influenza, bacterial meningitis, bacterial pneumonia, measles, mumps, neurotropic diseases, tropical diseases and acute respiratory diseases. These diseases not only posed risks to military readiness, but also to civilian populations.

These programs were not a triumph of scientific genius but rather of organizational purpose and efficiency.

Scientists had been laying the groundwork for many of these vaccines, flu included, for years before. It was not until World War II, however, that many basic concepts were plucked from the laboratory and developed into working vaccines.

The newly formed flu commission pulled together knowledge about how to isolate, grow and purify the flu virus and rapidly pushed development forward, devising methods to scale-up manufacturing and to evaluate the vaccine for safety and efficacy.

Under the leadership of virologist Thomas Francis Jr, the commission gained FDA approval for their vaccine in less than two years. It was the first licensed flu vaccine in the US. In comparison, it takes eight to fifteen years on average to develop a new vaccine today.

Flu vaccine, as the Army later discovered, required annual tweaking to match circulating strains of the virus, which it still does today. Even so, the timeline from development to use was a remarkable achievement.

Military needs drove vaccine development

Wartime programs, like the flu commission, developed or improved a total of 10 vaccines for diseases of military significance, some in time to meet the objectives of particular operations.

For instance, botulinum toxoid was mass-produced prior to D-Day in response to (faulty) intelligence that Germany had loaded V-1 bombs with the toxin that causes botulism. Japanese encephalitis vaccine was developed in anticipation of an Allied land invasion of Japan.

Some of these vaccines were crude by today���s standards. In fact some might not receive broad FDA approval today, but they were effective and timely.

How did these programs develop so many vaccines, so fast?

Scientists often conducted research at their home institutions, which allowed the military to gain access to valuable expertise and facilities in the civilian sector.

The government used ���No loss, no gain��� contracts that covered the cost of research and, occasionally, indirect costs, but did not provide a profit. Under normal circumstances, universities would have resisted this technocratic reorganization of their research agenda, but the threat of war softened opposition.

Manufacturers also began to work on projects with little to no profit potential. Because vaccines were recognized as an essential component of the war effort, participating in their development was seen as a public duty.

With industry as a willing partner, wartime programs forged a new research format that effectively translated laboratory findings into working products.

At the time intellectual property protections were less of a barrier to information sharing than they are today. Without these restrictions teams were able to consolidate and apply existing knowledge at a rapid rate.

Borrowing management techniques from industry, flu commission head Francis and his fellow project directors exercised top-down authority, transferring people, resources and ideas to the most compelling projects.

Project directors also managed development in an integrated fashion, coordinating activities across disciplines and developmental phases so that everyone involved understood the upstream and downstream requirements for vaccine candidates.

Working together for the greater good

This cooperative, duty-driven approach to vaccine development persisted into the postwar era, even after the urgency and structure of wartime programs dissolved. This contributed to high rates of vaccine innovation through the middle of the 20th century.

Don Metzgar, a virologist who began working in the vaccine industry in the 1960s explained to me in an interview that, ���pharmaceutical companies looked at vaccine divisions as a public service, not as huge revenue generators.���

When the military requested limited-use vaccines, such as meningococcal meningitis and adenovirus, industry obliged. But a series of legal, economic and political transformations in the 1970s and 80s disrupted this military-industrial partnership. Without industry cooperation, new vaccine development stalled and some existing vaccines were discontinued.

Whether at war or in peace, timely vaccine development is vital. New diseases with pandemic potential occur regularly: SARS in 2003, bird flu in 2005, swine flu in 2009, and Ebola in 2014. Our current vaccine development capabilities are not keeping pace.

Scientific obstacles can be formidable, as our continued struggle to develop vaccines for tuberculosis, malaria and HIV demonstrate. But many vaccines languish in the pipeline for reasons that have nothing to do with science.

Mobilizing federal resources on a massive scale, as we did in the 1940s, is not a sustainable solution, but we can still take a page out of the World War II playbook.

In a crisis, such as the West African Ebola outbreak, industry demonstrated that it still has the capacity to partner for the greater good, even when the business case for a particular vaccine is not compelling.

We need to leverage this capacity by reintroducing the highly integrated research practices to accelerate the translation of laboratory findings into working vaccines. Let���s not wait for history to teach us that lesson again.

Kendall Hoyt, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Dartmouth College

The war that never ends (for the U.S. Military High Command)

"The Vietnam War" (Credit: PBS)

Vietnam: it���s always there. Looming in the past, informing American futures.

A 50-year-old war, once labeled the longest in our history, is still alive and well and still being refought by one group of Americans: the military high command.�� And almost half a century later, they���re still losing it and blaming others for doing so.

Of course, the U.S. military and Washington policymakers lost the war in Vietnam in the previous century and perhaps it���s well that they did.�� The United States really had no business intervening in that anti-colonial civil war in the first place, supporting a South Vietnamese government of questionable legitimacy, and stifling promised nationwide elections on both sides of that country���s artificial border.�� In doing so, Washington presented an easy villain for a North Vietnamese-backed National Liberation Front (NLF) insurgency, a group known to Americans in those years as the Vietcong.

More than two decades of involvement and, at the war���s peak, half a million American troops never altered the basic weakness of the U.S.-backed regime in Saigon.�� Despite millions of Asian deaths and 58,000 American ones, South Vietnam���s military could not, in the end, hold the line without American support and finally collapsed under the weight of a conventional North Vietnamese invasion in April 1975.

There���s just one thing.�� Though a majority of historians (known in academia as the ���orthodox��� school) subscribe to the basic contours of the above narrative, the vast majority of senior American military officers do not.�� Instead, they���re still refighting the Vietnam War to a far cheerier outcome through the books they read, the scholarship they publish, and (most disturbingly) the policies they continue to pursue in the Greater Middle East.

The Big Re-Write

In 1986, future general, Iraq-Afghan War commander, and CIA director David Petraeus penned an article for the military journal Parameters that summarized his Princeton doctoral dissertation on the Vietnam War.�� It was a piece commensurate with then-Major Petraeus���s impressive intellect, except for its disastrous conclusions on the lessons of that war.�� Though he did observe that Vietnam had ���cost the military dearly��� and that ���the frustrations of Vietnam are deeply etched in the minds of those who lead the services,��� his real fear was that the war had left the military unprepared to wage what were then called ���low-intensity conflicts��� and are now known as counterinsurgencies.�� His takeaway: what the country needed wasn���t less Vietnams but better-fought ones.�� The next time, he concluded fatefully, the military should do a far better job of implementing counterinsurgency forces, equipment, tactics, and doctrine to win such wars.

Two decades later, when the next Vietnam-like quagmire did indeed present itself in Iraq, he and a whole generation of COINdinistas (like-minded officers devoted to his favored counterinsurgency approach to modern warfare) embraced those very conclusions to win the war on terror.�� The names of some of them ��� H.R. McMaster and James Mattis, for instance ��� should ring a bell or two these days. In Iraq and later in Afghanistan, Petraeus and his acolytes would get their chance to translate theory into practice.�� Americans ��� and much of the rest of the planet ��� still live with the results.

Like Petraeus, an entire generation of senior military leaders, commissioned in the years after the Vietnam War and now atop the defense behemoth, remain fixated on that ancient conflict.�� After all these decades, such ���thinking��� generals and ���soldier-scholars��� continue to draw all the wrong lessons from what, thanks in part to them, has now become America���s secondlongest war.

Rival Schools

Historian Gary Hess identifies two main schools of revisionist thinking.�� There are the ���Clausewitzians��� (named after the nineteenth century Prussian military theorist) who insist that Washington never sufficiently attacked the enemy’s true center of gravity in North Vietnam.�� Beneath the academic language, they essentially agree on one key thing: the U.S. military should have bombed the North into a parking lot.

The second school, including Petraeus, Hess labeled the ���hearts-and-minders.����� As COINdinistas, they felt the war effort never focused clearly enough on isolating the Vietcong, protecting local villages in the South, building schools, and handing out candy ��� everything, in short, that might have won (in the phrase of that era) Vietnamese hearts and minds.

Both schools, however, agreed on something basic: that the U.S. military should have won in Vietnam.

The danger presented by either school is clear enough in the twenty-first century.�� Senior commanders, some now serving in key national security positions, fixated on Vietnam, have translated that conflict���s supposed lessons into what now passes for military strategy in Washington.�� The result has been an ever-expanding war on terror campaign waged ceaselessly from South Asia to West Africa, which has essentially turned out to be perpetual war based on the can-do belief that counterinsurgency and advise-and-assist missions should have worked in Vietnam and can work now.

The Go-Big Option

The leading voice of the Clausewitzian school was U.S. Army Colonel and Korean War/Vietnam War vet Harry Summers, whose 1982 book, On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War, became an instant classic within the military.�� It���s easy enough to understand why.�� Summers argued that civilian policymakers ��� not the military rank-and-file ��� had lost the war by focusing hopelessly on the insurgency in South Vietnam rather than on the North Vietnamese capital, Hanoi.�� More troops, more aggressiveness, even full-scale invasions of communist safe havens in Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam, would have led to victory.

Summers had a deep emotional investment in his topic.�� Later, he would argue that the source of post-war pessimistic analyses of the conflict lay in ���draft dodgers and war evaders still [struggling] with their consciences.����� In his own work, Summers marginalized all Vietnamese actors (as would so many later military historians), failed to adequately deal with the potential consequences, nuclear or otherwise, of the sorts of escalation he advocated, and didn���t even bother to ask whether Vietnam was a core national security interest of the United States.

Perhaps he would have done well to reconsider a famous post-war encounterhe had with a North Vietnamese officer, a Colonel Tu, whom he assured that ���you know you never beat us on the battlefield.���

���That may be so,��� replied his former enemy, ���but it is also irrelevant.���

Whatever its limitations, his work remains influential in military circles to this day. (I was assigned the book as a West Point cadet!)

A more sophisticated Clausewitzian analysis came from current National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster in a highly acclaimed 1997 book, Dereliction of Duty. ��He argued that the Joint Chiefs of Staff were derelict in failing to give President Lyndon Johnson an honest appraisal of what it would take to win, which meant that ���the nation went to war without the benefit of effective military advice.����� He concluded that the war was lost not in the field or by the media or even on antiwar college campuses, but in Washington, D.C., through a failure of nerve by the Pentagon���s generals, which led civilian officials to opt for a deficient strategy.

McMaster is a genuine scholar and a gifted writer, but he still suggested that the Joint Chiefs should have advocated for a more aggressive offensive strategy ��� a full ground invasion of the North or unrelenting carpet-bombing of that country.�� In this sense, he was just another ���go-big��� Clausewitzian who, as historian Ronald Spector pointed out recently, ignored Vietnamese views and failed to acknowledge ��� an observation of historian Edward Miller ��� that ���the Vietnam War was a Vietnamese war.���

COIN: A Small (Forever) War

Another Vietnam veteran, retired Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Krepinevich, fired the opening salvo for the hearts-and-minders.�� In The Army and Vietnam, published in 1986, he argued that the NLF, not the North Vietnamese Army, was the enemy���s chief center of gravity and that the American military���s failure to emphasize counterinsurgency principles over conventional concepts of war sealed its fate.�� While such arguments were, in reality, no more impressive than those of the Clausewitzians, they have remained popular with military audiences, as historian Dale Andrade points out, because they offer a ���simple explanation for the defeat in Vietnam.���

Krepinevich would write an influential 2005 Foreign Affairs piece, ���How to Win in Iraq,��� in which he applied his Vietnam conclusions to a new strategy of prolonged counterinsurgency in the Middle East, quickly winning over the New York Times���s resident conservative columnist, David Brooks, and generating ���discussion in the Pentagon, CIA, American Embassy in Baghdad, and the office of the vice president.���

In 1999, retired army officer and Vietnam veteran Lewis Sorley penned the definitive hearts-and-minds tract, A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America���s Last Years in Vietnam.�� Sorley boldly asserted that, by the spring of 1970, ���the fighting wasn���t over, but the war was won.����� According to his comforting tale, the real explanation for failure lay with the ���big-war��� strategy of U.S. commander General William Westmoreland. The counterinsurgency strategy of his successor, General Creighton Abrams ��� Sorley���s knight in shining armor ��� was (or at least should have been) a war winner.

Critics noted that Sorley overemphasized the marginal differences between the two generals��� strategies and produced a remarkably counterfactual work.�� It didn���t matter, however.�� By 2005, just as the situation in Iraq, a country then locked in a sectarian civil war amid an American occupation, went from bad to worse, Sorley���s book found its way into the hands of the head of U.S. Central Command, General John Abizaid, and State Department counselor Philip Zelikow.�� By then, according to the Washington Post���s David Ignatius, it could also ���be found on the bookshelves of senior military officers in Baghdad.���

Another influential hearts-and-minds devotee was Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl.�� (He even made it onto The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.) His Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam followed Krepinevich in claiming that ���if [Creighton] Abrams had gotten the call to lead the American effort at the start of the war, America might very well have won it.����� In 2006, the Wall Street Journal reported that Army Chief of Staff General Peter Schoomaker ���so liked [Nagl���s] book that he made it required reading for all four-star generals,��� while the Iraq War commander of that moment, General George Casey, gave Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld a copy during a visit to Baghdad.

David Petraeus and current Secretary of Defense James Mattis, co-authors in 2006 of FM 3-24, the first (New York Times-reviewed) military field manual for counterinsurgency since Vietnam, must also be considered among the pantheon of hearts-and-minders.�� Nagl wrote a foreword for their manual, while Krepinevich provided a glowing back-cover endorsement.

Such revisionist interpretations would prove tragic in Iraq and Afghanistan, once they had filtered down to the entire officer corps.

Reading All the Wrong Books ��

In 2009, when former West Point history professor Colonel Gregory Daddis was deployed to Iraq as the command historian for the Multinational Corps ��� the military���s primary tactical headquarters ��� he noted that corps commander Lieutenant General Charles Jacoby had assigned a professional reading list to his principal subordinates.�� To his disappointment, Daddis also discovered that the only Vietnam War book included was Sorley���s A Better War.�� This should have surprised no one, since his argument ��� that American soldiers in Vietnam were denied an impending victory by civilian policymakers, a liberal media, and antiwar protestors ��� was still resonant among the officer corps in year six of the Iraq quagmire.�� It wasn���t the military���s fault!

Officers have long distributed professional reading lists for subordinates, intellectual guideposts to the complex challenges ahead.�� Indeed, there���s much to be admired in the concept, but also potential dangers in such lists as they inevitably influence the thinking of an entire generation of future leaders.�� In the case of Vietnam, the perils are obvious.�� The generals have been assigning and reading problematic books for years, works that were essentially meant to reinforce professional pride in the midst of a series of unsuccessful and unending wars.

Just after 9/11, for instance, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Richard Myers ��� who spoke at my West Point graduation �����included Summers���s On Strategyon his list.�� A few years later, then-Army Chief of Staff General Peter Schoomaker added McMaster���s Dereliction of Duty.�� The trend continues today.�� Marine Corps Commandant Robert Neller has kept McMaster and added Diplomacy by Henry Kissinger (he of the illegal bombing of both Laos and Cambodia and war criminal fame).�� Current Army Chief of Staff General Mark Milley kept Kissinger and added good old Lewis Sorley.�� To top it all off, Secretary of Defense Mattis has included yet another Kissinger book and, in a different list, Krepinevich���s The Army and Vietnam.

Just as important as which books made the lists is what���s missing from them: none of these senior commanders include newer scholarship, novels, or journalistic accounts which might raise thorny, uncomfortable questions about whether the Vietnam War was winnable, necessary, or advisable, or incorporate local voices that might highlight the limits of American influence and power.

Serving in the Shadow of Vietnam ��

Most of the generals leading the war on terror just missed service in the Vietnam War.�� They graduated from various colleges or West Point in the years immediately following the withdrawal of most U.S. ground troops or thereafter: Petraeus in 1974, future Afghan War commander Stanley McChrystal in 1976, and present National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster in 1984.�� Secretary of Defense Mattis finished ROTC and graduated from Central Washington University in 1971, while Trump���s Chief of Staff John Kelly enlisted at the tail end of the Vietnam War, receiving his commission in 1976.

In other words, the generation of officers now overseeing the still-spreading war on terror entered military service at the end of or after the tragic war in Southeast Asia.�� That meant they narrowly escaped combat duty in the bloodiest American conflict since World War II and so the professional credibility that went with it.�� They were mentored and taught by academy tactical officers, ROTC instructors, and commanders who had cut their teeth on that conflict.�� Vietnam literally dominated the discourse of their era ��� and it���s never ended.

Petraeus, Mattis, McMaster, and the others entered service when military prestige had reached a nadir or was just rebounding.�� And those reading lists taught the young officers where to lay the blame for that ��� on civilians in Washington (or in the nation���s streets) or on a military high command too weak to assert its authority effectively. They would serve in Vietnam���s shadow, the shadow of defeat, and the conclusions they would draw from it would only lead to twenty-first-century disasters.�� ��

From Vietnam to the War on Terror to Generational War

All of this misremembering, all of those Vietnam ���lessons��� inform the U.S. military���s ongoing ���surges��� and ���advise-and-assist��� approaches to its wars in the Greater Middle East and Africa. Representatives of both Vietnam revisionist schools now guide the development of the Trump administration���s version of global strategy. President Trump���s in-house Clausewitzians clamor for ��� and receive����� ever more delegated authority to do their damnedest and what retired General (and Vietnam vet) Edward Meyer called for back in 1983: ���a freer hand in waging war than they had in Vietnam.��� In other words, more bombs, more troops, and carte blanche to escalate such conflicts to their hearts��� content.

Meanwhile, President Trump���s hearts-and-minds faction consists of officers who have spent three administrations expanding COIN-influenced missions to approximately 70% of the world���s nations.�� Furthermore, they���ve recently fought for and been granted a new ���mini-surge��� in Afghanistan intended to ��� in disturbingly Vietnam-esque language ��� ���break the deadlock,��� ���reverse the decline,��� and ���end the stalemate��� there.�� Never mind that neither 100,000 U.S. troops (when I was there in 2011) nor 16 full years of combat could, in the term of the trade, ���stabilize��� Afghanistan.�� The can-do, revisionist believers atop the national security state have convinced Trump that ��� despite his original instincts����� 4,000 or 5,000 (or 6,000 or 7,000) more troops (and yet more drones, planes, and other equipment) will do the trick.�� This represents tragedy bordering on farce.

The hearts and minders and Clausewitzians atop the military establishment since 9/11 are never likely to stop citing their versions of the Vietnam War as the key to victory today; that is, they will never stop focusing on a war that was always unwinnable and never worth fighting.�� None of today���s acclaimed military personalities seems willing to consider that Washington couldn���t have won in Vietnam because, as former Air Force Chief of Staff Merrill McPeak (who flew 269 combat missions over that country) noted in the recent Ken Burns documentary series, ���we were fighting on the wrong side.���

Today���s leaders don���t even pretend that the post-9/11 wars will ever end.�� In an interview last June, Petraeus ��� still considered a sagacious guru of the Defense establishment ��� disturbingly described the Afghan conflict as ���generational.����� Eerily enough, to cite a Vietnam-era precedent, General Creighton Abrams predicted something similar. speaking to the White House as the war in Southeast Asia was winding down.�� Even as President Richard Nixon slowly withdrew U.S. forces, handing over their duties to the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) ��� a process known then as ���Vietnamization��� ��� the general warned that, despite ARVN improvements, continued U.S. support ���would be required indefinitely to maintain an effective force.����� Vietnam, too, had its ���generational��� side (until, of course, it didn���t).

That war and its ill-fated lessons will undoubtedly continue to influence U.S. commanders until a new set of myths, explaining away a new set of failures in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, take over, possibly thanks to books by veterans of these conflicts about how Washington could have won the war on terror.

It���s not that our generals don���t read. They do. They just doggedly continue to read the wrong books.

In 1986, General Petraeus ended his influential Parameters article with a quote from historian George Herring: ���Each historical situation is unique and the use of analogy is at best misleading, at worst, dangerous.����� When it comes to Vietnam and a cohort of officers shaped in its shadow (and even now convinced it could have been won), “dangerous” hardly describes the results. They���ve helped bring us generational war and, for today���s young soldiers, ceaseless tragedy.

Major Danny Sjursen, a TomDispatch regular, is a U.S. Army strategist and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has written a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge.��He lives with his wife and four sons in Lawrence, Kansas.�� Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet and check out his new podcast Fortress on a Hill.

[Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author, expressed in an unofficial capacity, and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.]

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Put down “Hillbilly Elegy” and read this book instead

Smoky Mountains in Tennessee (Credit: Getty/SeanPavonePhoto)

As Donald Trump is fond of pointing out, he��won 306 Electoral College votes,��claiming states as��different from each other as Wisconsin is from Texas, Idaho from Florida. But one red region of the��map��has become a living symbol of��his��victories since the contentious 2016 presidential primary season. When you see headlines��that begin “In the heart of Trump Country��. . . ” chances are, you’re reading a��story��about��Appalachia written by a writer who doesn’t live there. When you��see a headline like��“No Sympathy for the Hillbilly” on a New York magazine column, you get a glimpse of the mainstream media attitudes that��help shape the narrative��that Appalachia��is, at best, a good place to be from.

The Trump Country narrative ��� to put it very reductively, one of poor uneducated racists with no ambition��lashing out in anger against coastal elites with their gourmet lunch meats����� is, as Elizabeth Catte wrote for Salon last fall, “a bad-faith sleight of hand that displaces the reality that the average��Trump voter is a college-educated white individual of some means, not a ‘hillbilly.'”

“It’s an incredibly durable genre that doesn���t change much and hasn���t changed much,” Catte told me last week.��“It���s still going to the same places talking to the same kinds of people. It���s time to consider why that is and why��that���s occurring.”

Catte’s new book “What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia” (Belt Publishing, out Tuesday) is an attempt to push back against destructive myths about the region, its people, and its future.

I spoke with Catte by phone last week about media portrayals of Appalachia, the pitfalls��of economic development��initiatives��like Silicon Holler, how the left could win the region back, and, of course, J.D. Vance. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

As a historian, I assume the amount of attention that���s been put on Appalachia during the 2016 election and its aftermath has been frustrating,��since much of it is in the form of��diagnosing ���what���s wrong with Appalachia��� when knowledge of the region���s history is not as robust as it could be.

I think the first thing to understand about this fascination is we���re not talking about one or two problematic pieces. Appalachia, just like any other part of the country, gets a kind of artificial, perhaps skewed focus during election years and election cycles. So we should expect to see some weird ideas about every part of the country during��those��peak moments. But what I key into in my book is not just the genre and what it says,��but��the sheer ratio of it, and the fact that it started almost a year and a half ago and it���s still going strong. We still have reporters who��are parachuting into small towns in Kentucky and Tennessee and West Virginia to extract these profiles of Trump supporters, and I think that if you are a person who is media savvy or media literate, or just reads a lot of news and keeps up with current events, you feel really fatigued and really saturated by these pieces and what they say.

And what they say is important, because what they���re saying is that Appalachia is a very monolithic region, that it had a unique kind of power to make and create the president of the United States, that it collectedly decided to use its power for bad; and that the people here share a type of conservative and reactionary politics, and we all got together and decided that we were really going to stick it to the coastal elites for ignoring our plight for the last eight years.

These are the reoccurring themes of these pieces: retribution, revenge, desperation, hopelessness, reactionary politics. They���re, in a lot of ways, narratives by omission. Because what you don���t see in these pieces is people of color, people with progressive politics, people who are plugged into environmental issues, people who are fighting the good fight that have different beliefs and attitudes and ideas about what Appalachia needs to do to move forward. All the people that the press are interested in talking to are people that want to move the country and the nation backwards.

What is it about Appalachia that serves��the purpose of illustrating��“this is who��Trump voters are,��and this is how they feel,��and��let’s study them and understand them in order to . . .” what? The dot-dot-dot is rarely really filled in. Why is��a county in West Virginia more likely to get��portrayed as “Trump Country” than, say, Staten Island?

Appalachia has this history of serving as whatever the counterpoint is to our contemporary definitions of progress. For example, right after the Civil War, when progress��was built into ideas about modernization and the development of industry, Appalachia emerged as this really backward place that��could��throw a wrench into the entire system by remaining backwards and primitive, even savage. And what��that argument��does is help industrialists bring people living in the mountains into this exploitative labor system. But there���s a precedent in the history of the region of people who are powerful����� people who have the power to shape narratives and shape economic systems and politics ��� looking at Appalachia not as a place but as a problem to be solved. And I think that is an enduring element of Appalachian history that appeared with force during the 2016 election.

But this��is an election and a phenomenon that needs to be laid at the feet of every white person in this country, regardless of their specific politics or specific voting preferences. Even if it���s through the engagement of asking and answering hard questions about other white people who voted [for Trump].

There is also a history of people who are comfortable, people who are middle-class, projecting their angst onto people of different colors, but also on people who look like them, because it���s a way to engage in escapism and say, ���well, I wasn’t the one��that brought��us to this point. It doesn���t have anything to do with me, it has to do with the people who live in this far-off place who are making very poor choices and have even a deficiency in their culture that has compelled them to act in the way that they act.���

And one of the hallmarks of the Trump Country backlash after Trump won the election,��which continued��after the inauguration when things really started moving, is a really ugly kind of schadenfreude. Watch them get what they deserve: ha ha, you voted for this, there goes your water protection, say goodbye to your health insurance. Not only were they going to project angst, but also helplessness and anger, without delving into the reasons why water protections in the region weren���t great to begin with.

Exactly.

So we have to talk about J.D. Vance, because of the role ���Hillbilly Elegy��� played in setting up and giving a kind of permission for these stories to flourish into a whole subgenre.��He says he���s not running for office now. I was surprised �����I thought that���s what his book was setting him up for.

I���m a little bit surprised, too.

It does feel like it���s��become, for every Appalachian writer, activist, scholar that I���m aware of, a whole part-time second job to respond to Vance���s narrative. ���Hillbilly Elegy��� has been adopted by universities as a book-in-common, it���s been on the New York Times bestseller list. There was a point in time when I would meet people and they���d hear that I���m from Kentucky and they���d just be really excited to talk to me about it. That was the book about Kentucky ��� kind of ��� that they’d read, or heard of.

That is exactly my experience, too. And that���s how I got started formulating the ideas for this book. My partner and I had just moved to Texas because he was taking an academic job as an assistant professor. And I made��so much small talk and had painful, awkward conversations with people I was just getting to know, people who didn���t know what my story was ��� [“Hillbilly Elegy”]��is what they wanted to talk to me about. This is how they wanted to connect with me, in this really superficial way.

And it wasn���t like, ���What do you think about this book?��� It was sort of like making me answer for the ideas that are in the book about the culture in Appalachia, why the economic decline is persistent, and issues with addiction. There was this really accusatory way that people would talk to me about this book, like, ���What do you have to say about this?���

And it was really, really bizarre to me, because I was in places that had obviously, like anywhere else in the country, their share of social problems. Some are very similar to Appalachia. In Texas, the oil industry has an impact similar to the coal industry. And people were just like, ���Tell me, why do you think people don���t behave?��� That���s basically what they were asking me.

They really thought that they��had learned a deep truth from this book, and that they could now deploy this truth out in the world to understand these really complex things that were happening around them that authentically are extremely disturbing. It���s understandable that people would want a navigator out of these complex conversations that we���re having.

I���m going to ask you to generalize a little bit here.��One class of people who really bought into this book and his ideas seem to be educated, media savvy, serious people. It���s a memoir with cultural generalizations painted around personal anecdotes and shaped by his own specific family story. What was it about this narrative that made people drop their skepticism?

I think it speaks with a very rare sense of authority about a region that can be misunderstood, and that���s part of the attraction. There have been authors who have also assumed this yoke of being seen as interpreters of their culture. One that always springs to my mind is Ta-Nehisi Coates. And Ta-Nehisi Coates, to my mind, has been really reflective about what it felt like when white liberals seized on ���Between the World and Me��� and his other writing as sort of the blueprint for understanding African-American culture. Beyond the obvious differences between them, J.D. Vance has not, he seems thrilled to assume this role in public life and has not been reflective about it. He caps it off a bit with this humility thing that he does, but he���s really embraced the role of the explainer-in-chief of the Appalachian region, and the Rust Belt as well. He���s there, a talking head that will explain to you what the problems are. I don���t think J.D. Vance is clairvoyant. When he was setting this book in motion, there���s no way that he could predict that this political moment would develop in the way that it did specifically. But at the same time it���s a niche that���s presented itself to him that he���s enthusiastically assumed.

I think it is aligned with his eagerness to deploy certain conservative politics and certain conservative outlooks.��It��kills me that this is a book that liberals, in particular, and college-educated people think, ���Well, he set his politics aside just to write from the heart.��� They don���t understand, or perhaps they do and they dismiss it, but blaming poverty on poor people is a political opinion. These are people that would be mortified if they had to teach something out of Charles Murray���s bibliography, but��they really love ���Hillbilly Elegy��� and what it says about the poor.

I wonder if there���s some permission being given��to the upper-middle class here�������from someone who, voting record aside, looks like them, travels in the same circles ��� to buy into a very conservative, simplistic narrative about poverty and bootstraps and discipline.

It doesn���t require anything of them, of the readers of the book. They don���t have to do anything, right? Because the problems are all in the individuals that he���s describing, they���re moral and cultural flaws. So if you���re reading this book, you���re not thinking, ���what kind of work do I have to do on myself or within my community to help these problems?��� You���re going to be relieved as hell when you feel, ���I do not have to do anything. These people need to fix themselves.���

I think that���s a big part of the attraction to this book: this mercy that you can just read about problems and not feel obligated or guilty about [not] doing anything about them. You hear, especially from white liberals [the sentiment of], ���Well, there���s only so much white guilt I can take.��� So this is a book that makes them feel��like they can be engaged with social problems without that sense of guilt that they are taught to carry out into the world and use as the basis for social action or social justice.

One of the more upbeat media narratives that���s been coming out from the region lately is around Silicon Holler and the push for coding bootcamps to teach out-of-work coal miners how to be qualified for digital economy jobs. This is a narrative that everyone loves, because everyone wins, right? There���s a political undercurrent to it, too, like maybe we can turn you into people we understand by giving you jobs that we understand.

The article you wrote for Belt magazine, where you describe some of the companies as ���new-collar grifters,��� shows a whole other side to that narrative. Can you talk a bit about how that industry is working right now in Appalachia? Is the willingness to throw money and exposure to these programs creating bigger problems?

In Appalachia, a lot of us are operating under the assumption that the coal industry is on life support right now. Someone is pulling the plug. The functional end of coal will happen within our lifetime.

The idea is this is a time��when we can retake control of our economic fortune. And how do we do that? Because we have lingering environmental issues because of the coal industry, we have depopulation ��� we have lots of young people leaving ��� we don���t have a robust economic transition plan in place. So when people try to brainstorm economic boosterism to the region, they are really attaching to ideas about exactly what you just said ��� “modernity” is��the key word. There���s lots of things going on like drone usage, and virtual reality technology, all that stuff is��a specific form of Appalachian economic boosterism in which we are going to crash, like the Kool-Aid Man, out of the past like, ���Boom! We���re here. We���re modern. This is Appalachia!���

And the problem is that workforce development is not a substitution for buying into this idea that there���s a common good for us, and that we���re all in this together. I think��this is a case made really beautifully by Tressie McMillan Cottom in [her book] ���Lower Ed�������� over time we���ve��[come to rely on] piecemeal training that puts the burden on the worker to always level up and bone up and get new skills and make themselves relevant in the workplace market. The reality is the workplace market is fickle, it���s hyperlocal and there���s really very little agency that some people have to navigate that system without assuming great risk. So coding camps are a high-risk �����and can be low-reward �����solution to economic diversification.

There are great coding companies and coding bootcamp operators in Appalachia, but there are also��those like the ones that I wrote about that seem to be absorbing a lot of federal aid that���s coming into the region to do workforce development and not really giving people who enter the program anything of value in return.

That has a long history, not only with blue collar industries but also during moments like, for example, when the GI Bill first came into being and there was lots of money for education. People��opened shoeshine training academies and��things like that to siphon federal money away for programs that [are supposed to] serve poor and vulnerable people. We have to be super cautious about that. I want the Silicon Holler folks to win. I want them to win and I want them to do good in the world. But I know and I believe that they���re only a piece of the puzzle that we have to work on together. That includes raising the minimum wage for all workers regardless of what industry they���re in and separating health insurance from employment. Also maybe considering a basic income for people who are facing long-term unemployment who do have the potential to benefit from retraining. There are lots of ways I think we can compromise on economic development, but moving full steam ahead with this very optimistic spirit that everything that Silicon Valley does can be done here and it will save us is really flawed.

The flipside is that the unsexy economic development plan for a long time has been build more prisons. In your book you write: “after the mines close, the prisons open.” The prison industry is a major player in Appalachia. Whenever there���s a politician��being asked how to bring jobs to the area, one of the answers has been, ���we’re going to open a prison.��� But that prison density has not transformed the economy. What is the disconnect there? And why don���t we talk about the prison reform activism that���s happening in Appalachia?

Central Appalachia is still one of the most concentrated areas for prison growth in the country. To me it���s a continuation of a logic that���s very common in our country: Economic development comes with certain acceptable risks, and it���s acceptable to harm certain people for the greater good. In Appalachia, the more recognizable story is through the coal industry ��� the idea that we have to unfortunately hurt the environment to be able to continue our way of life, and some people unfortunately will get very ill, and that���s just the way things go. The prison story has become that, too. It���s rooted in white supremacy, and��in the idea that white people have to hurt African-Americans, or be complicit in the suffering of African-Americans, by doing the only work that is available to them and becoming part of the prison industrial complex. It���s really deeply disturbing.

People in Appalachia do incredible things through their activism in terms of prison. And I think everyone should know about this. Because a lot of what they do, they don���t have a lot of tools at their disposal, right? We���re talking about people who work in radio stations and who are very talented, don���t have a tremendous amount of money, and don���t have super powerful platforms. So they do it in the old-school ways that are really familiar to us: broadcasting radio signals into prison, fundraising in the community to actually go to people���s houses and pick them up and take them to visit their loved ones in prison, building power across borders��in the region and borders within communities. It���s really profound when people learn about all the ways that activism takes shape, and all the connections between historic anti-capitalist activism in Appalachia and the very modern problem that we���re facing in our current moment.

���Anti-capitalist activism in Appalachia��� is not a phrase��you see��in the ���What���s the matter��with Trump Country?��� stories. And prison reform��is anti-racism activism, which is also not something that you see attached to the regional identity of Appalachia.

For real.

So what��are some other myths about Appalachia that you find yourself pushing back against?

One thing that is really important to the book is this myth ��� and you���ll recognize it ��� that Appalachia is a region of takers and that we have, over time, come to be complacent on federal assistance, and that we absorb far much more in vital resources than we deserve. Because there���s always this question of who deserves what in these conversations that people like to have in the mainstream about Appalachia. That obscures��the historic function of Appalachia, which has been��for the past hundred years to provide energy for the rest of the country.

People today look at the region and they say, ���Oh, coal is dead.��� But that doesn���t mean that it hasn���t had a cost that we���re still contending with. It doesn���t mean that it hasn���t shaped land ownership patterns in Appalachia beyond what people even within the region can comprehend. It���s affected wealth distribution in the region, health, environment, everything like that.

So when you say, ���People in Appalachia, they just like suck up food stamps and things like that,��� I get really defensive and angry about that. And it���s a hard position to have, because you do risk sounding like, if you���re a progressive person speaking back about this, one of those crazy war-on-coal people the media like to use. ���Coal keeps the lights on!��� It���s a really hard position to articulate and I have much respect for people like [journalist and former coal miner] Nick Mullins who work specifically on changing the media narrative about the coal industry.

But Appalachia gives and Appalachia takes, and this is the way that the country is supposed to function, in terms of its common good. We give energy, land, labor, and take things back in the form of federal assistance and things of that nature. It���s not anymore predatory than, for example, Californians getting federal assistance to convert their businesses into solar energy, for example. This is just the way that the country has been built to function: We have an economic purpose and it���s fair to demand certain benefits back in exchange for our labor, which is the kind of labor that is particularly dangerous and hazardous and has reshaped our world completely.

So the myth I really, really hate �����and this is a failing among liberals and conservatives ��� is that Appalachia is a drain on the country’s resources. Because even after the functional end of coal, there are plans in place to harness fracked gas and other forms of petrochemical energy within the region.

Can the Left win back Appalachia? What do you think they��would have to do in order to do that?

It���s probably the question that I spend the most time in my personal life thinking about. A friend of mine told me that Appalachia feels like one of the few places in America where people organically understand the difference between a leftist and a liberal, without you jumping in and making those connections for them. They understand that there are Democrats, and that there is a separate category of people on the left, and that often their agendas and priorities don���t align.

I hate to sound like somebody who���s stuck in the past but I think there are lessons that we can take in Appalachia from the success of Bernie Sanders in the [2016 Democratic] primary. Primarily, for me, that���s thinking about ways that health insurance connects people across broad spectrums. That tells me that there���s potential to work towards health care reform as a common good.

I think that there are other examples where people can come together regardless of their politics. A big one that���s particular to my part of the region is fighting��natural gas pipelines. This is something where people find common ground ��� conservatives, liberals and leftists alike. It might not be sustainable, but that���s at least something that we have in common.

The word ���neoliberal��� is really complicated, but I think that lots of people in Appalachia do understand that there has been this gradual change in politics that demands that the market fix what���s wrong with various pockets of our country. And so long in Appalachia we���ve been told that we���re going to invest in businesses, we���re going to give businesses tax breaks, it���s going to revitalize the region. We���re going to get you some workforce training, we���re going to send you to community college, and that is going to help you out of the system. And I think that there���s great potential for a type of politician or a type of politics to come into Appalachia that will reject that, and try to focus on labor protections, and things of that nature, to give people a boost.

It would be more realistic, for me, if I was a politician, to come into a community and say, ���I want to challenge the hell out of right-to-work laws��� than me saying ���I���m going to send your kids to community college so things will be better for them than they are for you.��� That���s really the difference in left and liberal-leaning politics in Appalachia. People with neoliberal politics ask us to adopt certain solutions so things can be better for our kids, it seems, and leftist politics has the hope that we can make things better here and now instead. I think��[the leftist message]��would resonate to more people than outside audiences might imagine in Appalachia.

What aren���t people getting wrong about Appalachia? Do you see anything in the wider, national conversation that is right on the money?

One of the things that I don���t talk a lot about in my book is the opioid crisis, which is obviously a big part of the narrative of Appalachia and also the Rust Belt. The reason I don���t spend too much time talking about it is because my book is about debunking misconceptions, and there���s not a lot of misconceptions about how tremendously world-shattering the opioid crisis is here. I have individual quibbles with the way that narrative is shaped, but the reality is that the opioid crisis is tremendously awful in Appalachia, and I think that overall, the narrative is true to life, shall we say. Of course part of the coverage that you have to examine is why it is that white opioid addiction, or white addiction, is being presented in different ways than for example African-American addictions, but that���s beyond the scope of the information that I set out to talk about in the book. But I can confirm that the way that the media generally has covered the opioid crisis in Appalachia has been very strong.

Are there any lessons to be learned from how those stories have been told and how that treatment can be applied to other topics that concern the region?

One thing that happens when people are covering the opioid crisis in Appalachia or elsewhere is that national and local media partners have to work more closely together. Because [national media] want access to sources and subjects and people to talk to, and you have to have a certain sense of trust when you���re talking about people who are very vulnerable. That���s just my perception as someone who doesn���t work too deeply in the media. My understanding is there have been more of those national and local partnerships for opioid crisis coverage than, say, in political coverage.

I also think that some of the national narratives �����again, shaped by voices in local media �����reflect a narrative about Appalachia that is authentically true: Pharmaceutical companies have used Appalachia as a laboratory, essentially, to experiment, and a lot of important people in this chain of command, like the DEA or local physicians, have really looked the other way. That is a narrative that has a lot resonance in Appalachia ��� not just about opioids, but about coal and anything having to do with the environment, too.

Trayvon Martin would have been 23 today

Protestors hold up signs in a march and rally for slain Florida teenager Trayvon Martin (Credit: AP/Julie Fletcher)

In America, one of the richest, and arguably most powerful and innovative countries in the world, being black can still get you killed. Yes, 155 years after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation and��more than half a century��after the Civil Rights Act was passed, ending Jim Crow, something as simple as having black skin can still get you killed.

Imagine having a teenage son��you love dearly. He has your eyes and he smiles just like you. Imagine wanting more for him than you want for yourself. Maybe you kissed him before he slid off to watch the NBA All-Star game. Imagine knowing all of his favorite teams ��� because he��tells��you about them over and over, the way that teenagers do ��� and seeing his eyes light up as he talks about his favorite players. Imagine him enjoying the game so much that you can hear him screaming about it from two rooms over; imagine his face, probably glued to the tube, only pulling it away to slam-dunk pillow cushions��through an invisible rim. He���s worked up an appetite, so he decides to go grab a bag of Skittles and some ice tea ��� his favorite snack.

Imagine waiting for him to come home, and that never happens.

You later find out that he walking back��from the store and was profiled by an armed neighborhood watchman,��a��wannabe cop who called the real��police because he saw a person with black skin. The real cops told this wannabe to stop following the innocent child, but he ignored their orders, kept following him, and��started��a scuffle with your child.��Your child is tough, so he got the best of the wannabe, and the wannabe did what all cowards do�� ��� he drew a gun and��shot your child. It took days of global protests and media scrutiny to get the system, which apparently doesn���t value people like your son, to charge this clown with murder. The clown, the wannabe, won his case. (This doesn’t surprise you, because in��our justice system, when innocent people like your son or Freddie Gray or Michael Brown are killed, we hear negative things about their past; when affluent criminals like��Brock Turner are on trial for rape and sexual assault, we hear about his promising future.)

After the wannabe won his case, he basked in the fame he gained from killing your innocent son.��He took victory lap after victory lap. He went on television, received expensive hotel stays and comps from networks like CNN and even signed autographs at a Florida gun show. The pissed-stained pariahs of America declared this clown, this wannabe, a hero whose autograph was worth having. And it���s so sickening that he still has no shame and would probably be��excited to do it again; just two months ago he threatened Jay-Z over a documentary the hip hop mogul is producing about Trayvon Martin���s life.

Trayvon Martin should have been 23 years old today.

We honor his life as his death sparked a movement that held an ugly mirror up to America, reveling her racist past and present while challenging her to do something about it. We’ve come a long way from the days of slavery and Jim Crow, but the death of Martin reminds us all that we still have a long way to go.

Rest in power, Trayvon Martin. Happy birthday.

Here are��some moving tributes to Travyon’s memory posted on Twitter today:

Trayvon Martin
Killed at age 17
He loved aviation
Today would have been his 23rd bday
His legacy inspires today���s fight for racial justice pic.twitter.com/qnSCMh5ZrD

— Kristen Clarke (@KristenClarkeJD) February 5, 2018

 

https://twitter.com/Essence/status/96...

Today would���ve & should���ve been #TrayvonMartin���s 23rd birthday. Rest in power young brother. Happy birthday. #BHM #BlackHistoryMonth pic.twitter.com/7wuo6ytGop

— Khary Penebaker (@kharyp) February 5, 2018

Trayvon Martin would have turned 23 today. We honor and remember Trayvon and we send our love and prayers to his family and friends, in particular his mother, Ms. Sybrina Fulton. #BlackLivesMatter #BlackHistoryMonth #EndWhiteSupremacy pic.twitter.com/HXQLsSlEsb

— Sons & Brothers (@sonsandbros) February 5, 2018

On the job market, with autism

(Credit: Getty/anyaberkut)

On the first��Saturday of each month, the Bay Area Autism Job Club gathers at the ARC building, located at 11th and Howard in San Francisco���s South of Market area. Fifteen or so adults with autism are in attendance, ranging in age from early twenties to fifties, and even one member, James Ullrey, age 72.

It is not easy to see the Autism Job Club as the vanguard of change for workers with autism. At the meetings, club members will laugh inap��propriately or talk to themselves, go off topic, stare into space, wander around. Though many of the members have at least some college educa��tion���and a significant number have college degrees���they all are on the employment margins. Some are unemployed; most have part-time or contingent lower wage employment. The club meetings focus on relatively basic job search skills, r��sum�� skills, and interviewing skills.

Yet, the Autism Job Club, and hundreds of other local groups across the United States, are experimenting with new employment projects and structures for workers with autism and other neurodi��verse conditions���cerebral palsy, dyslexia, learning disabilities. It is an effort pushed forward by the unsustainable rise in costs of govern��ment disability programs, changing social views, and most of all, the fierce energy and extra-governmental efforts of families and friends of workers with neurodiverse conditions.

Autism: A True Spectrum

���If you���ve met one person with autism, you���ve met one person with autism,��� Temple Grandin responds when asked about the charac��teristics of persons with autism. Ms. Grandin, a professor of animal science and inventor who was diagnosed with autism as a child, has been a presence in the autism community nationwide since the early 1980s, with separate memoirs published in 1986 (“Emergence: Labeled Autistic”) and 1996 (“Thinking in Pictures”). She became known to a wider population in 2010 through the movie, “Temple Grandin,”��in which she was portrayed by actress Claire Danes.

Adults with autism span a wide range of skills, abilities, education levels, and interests. Much of the conventional wisdom regarding work skills and deficiencies of persons on the spectrum is wrong. Adults on the spectrum, for example, do not all excel in areas of math or science (most don���t) or are ���little geniuses.��� At the same time, adults on the spectrum are not all plagued by social isolation or difficulties/a lack of interest in workplace relations (many are very social).

So it is with the diversity of skills and abilities in our autism job club, as is clear from our first meetings. In early November 2011, the Autism Asperger Syndrome Coalition for Education Networking and Development (AASCEND), the volunteer group of adults with autism and their friends and families, posted a note to its members regarding the formation of a job club. At the first meeting, on Saturday, November 19, forty of us gathered in a small classroom at the City College campus in downtown San Francisco. As we went around the room, the participants described their job status and job searches, which varied widely. Here is how each participant described himself or herself at the time:

Paul, 54, has a handyman business in Stockton that he has been trying to build up. He has a BA degree in geography from Fresno State and has held a few jobs in the field that didn���t last long. This led him to self-employment.
Andrew, 32, completed two years of college and is working part-time with a recycling company while pursuing his sculpturing and design work.
Alex,��31, has a BA degree in child/adolescent education from San Francisco State University. His job history includes short-term stints as a courtesy clerk at a large supermarket, a busman at a coffee shop chain, and a four-month position in the technology department of a major hotel. He currently is volunteering at the ARC while he looks for a job.
Gabriel, 28, has some college credits and is doing short-term transcription gigs he finds through family contacts while he seeks a full-time job.
Mark, early forties, worked in the information technology field for fifteen years as a consultant. His business partner, who was responsible for business development, passed away four years ago, the company fell apart, and Mark has not worked steadily since.
Martha, late twenties, has a masters degree, but has been able only to find work twelve hours a week as a clerk in a small legal office. She seeks more steady work, perhaps in a job related to her library science degree.
Jim, 72, is the senior member of the group. He has college degrees in physics and chemistry and worked for Apple on a project basis a few years back. Mainly, though, he has worked in non-technology jobs: delivering pizza, doing yard work, super��vising an after-school program for youth. He is not working now, but at seventy-two, still in the market for work.

The Autism Job Club Comes Together and Branches Out

Since that first meeting in November 2011, a number of the original participants have stopped coming. Some have found jobs, others have drifted out. Meanwhile new members have joined the group. The club is a fluid one; members come for as long or short a time as they find value. Some participants are employed or in school but come to improve their job search skills for future employment.

We rely mainly on volunteers���counselors, parents, graduate students. Cindy Zoeller is a workforce career coach in Sacramento who heard about the job club and drove ninety miles to the organi��zational meeting. She volunteers as the club facilitator, preparing the agenda and handouts and leading each session. She is joined by John Comegys, a job coach from Dixon who comes to volunteer, along with four graduate students from San Francisco State University.

The meetings start with an update on our job searches and a sharing of job leads. Each meeting then focuses on a specific job-search tech��nique: using job boards, interviewing, preparing a r��sum��, getting in the door through part-time or contingent work, resolving issues that arise on the job. In between meeting dates, Ms. Zoeller keeps in touch with individual members to discuss their specific job situations and job searches.

Beyond the job placement activities, the club soon branched out in 2012 and early 2013 with other employment strategies. Brian Jacobs, a venture capitalist and job club volunteer, launched a LinkedIn site, Spectrum Employment Community by AASCEND. The site is an online discussion board for job club members, as well as an online job board and an online reference for employers. It is also a reference for parents and advocates seeking to keep up with latest information on employment for workers with autism.

In 2012, two club members, Luby and Andy Aczel, started a combination business/training agency, The Specialists Guild (Guild). The Guild is aimed at training persons with autism for employment in software testing���an occupation which the Aczels believe can be uniquely suited to persons with autism. The Aczels and other club members also built an autism technology employment network to promote hiring with Bay Area technology firms.

Laura Shumaker started a popular autism blog for the San Francisco Chronicle. She volunteered to research and report on autism employ��ment efforts elsewhere in California.

Our Collective Journey

The employment journeys of our job-club members, especially those of the older members, have been difficult ones. For them, getting a job rarely leads to employment stability. Our members may be slower than others to pick up tasks, behave in inappropriate manners, not appear on time, or lose jobs in the largely unforgiving job world.

Some job placement projects for adults with autism focus today on interviewing skills and improving eye contact, and making a positive presentation. All of these are valuable skills and our Autism Job Club seeks to teach them. Cindy Zoeller has sessions to videotape mock interviews and review them with our members.

Yet, the obstacles facing our members usually go way beyond eye contract. These obstacles may involve major cognitive gaps and infor��mation processing gaps. They may involve major gaps in judgment. They may involve a lack of executive skills���including knowing what to do and being able to act effectively if a job is lost.

The building of a better employment system for adults with autism will take the active efforts of all of us. It will involve pilot projects, experiments, and missteps. It will mean building on thousands of different efforts across the United States by adults with autism, parents, and advocates coming together.

The FRED conference in Los Angeles for ���special needs adults��� is one of the main annual national conferences involving the autism community. In March 2014, the panel on employment was the featured panel, and the conference lead, Ms. Mari-Anne Kehler, opened by stating, ���Nothing says purpose and living with meaning like employ��ment.��� Then followed several references by the panel moderator, an attorney in the San Gabriel Valley, to the ���incredible��� skills of our young adults with disabilities and the ���amazing��� employment projects they were involved in, that were paving the way to fuller employment.

The employment opportunities that the participants described, though, were very modest: a job at a small restaurant in Albuquerque; a micro-business in animation started by a college student with autism in Southern California; a series of small ventures in laundry service, premium candles, and office services by a non-profit autism agency in Chapel Hill. Looked at one way, the number of jobs generated was minuscule; the claims of fuller employment exaggerated.

Yet looked at another way, something unusual and noteworthy was going on in the conference room. The presenters and audience were not whining or complaining or presenting themselves as victims. Nor were they waiting for government to do something. Against all odds, they were trying to generate employment for themselves and others, to engage in mutual support, to work with government, but also outside of government.

The autism community���s efforts toward a better employment system are still in their very early stages. We are in a wilderness that we only partly understand, and on a road that is not clearly marked. We have much to discover.

Bernie Sanders supporters aren’t exactly getting what they were hoping for out of the DNC

Campaign rally for democratic socialist Bernie Sanders (Credit: AP/Stephen Brashear)

Like a slow-motion car crash, the Berniecrat wing of the Democratic Party appears to be heading toward a collision with the party���s leadership over adopting reforms that will guide the intricacies of 2020’s presidential nominating contest.

The reform slate, negotiated by a Unity Reform Commission [URC] created during the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, address the most glaring anti-democratic features of the party���s last presidential nominating contest.

These could be very significant reforms. They include cutting by 60 percent the number of superdelegates, the unpledged delegates who accounted for one-sixth of all the votes cast to nominate 2016���s candidate. (Almost all backed Hillary Clinton, despite Bernie Sanders winning 46 percent of delegates from primaries and caucuses). The reforms also would professionalize caucuses, including disclosing vote counts (which didn���t happen in Iowa and Nevada). They would reform primaries to include same-day voter registration and allow independents to participate (unlike New York). They would impose new standards for financial transparency and avoiding conflicts of interest.

The looming conflict concerns the pace and process for bringing these reforms before the entire Democratic National Committee, which would then vote to adopt or reject them. In short, the grassroots-led Berniecrat wing wants the reforms adopted as a package without further delay or modifications.

In contrast, longtime party officials say the package is moving through a standard process, where they will next be vetted by the party���s Rules and Bylaws Committee (RBC). That panel will decide whether to amend them, before presenting them to the full DNC for a vote. (Any changes by the Rules panel will go back to the Reform Commission, which can endorse them or bring its original proposal to the floor. In essence, that means there could be two competing proposals before the DNC when it meets later this year).

On Friday, Our Revolution, the campaign organization up by the Sanders��� campaign���s leaders, sent out an email launching a campaign and pushing for swift action to adopt them as-is.

���We���ve come a long way since the Unity Reform Commission was unanimously adopted by 4,500 Democratic convention delegates in Philadelphia,��� the e-mail said, signed by the eight Sanders-appointed members of the URC. ���Recently, DNC���s Rules and Bylaws Committee took up the URC���s final recommendations��� Our mandates are not aspirations. They have already been debated and negotiated. The DNC should adopt and implement these reforms.���

That tone was amplified by Norm Solomon, co-founder of 2016���s Bernie Delegates Network and the grassroots group Roots Action, who said the time for DNC ratification was past due.

���We reached a compromise. We���ve got a package. If there���s a successful effort to fracture this package, then it works to the disadvantage of everything,��� he said. ���At Roots Action, we���re working with other groups to raise hell from the grassroots. The trajectory that we are on right now is not good.”

One longtime party leader contacted by AlterNet rolled their eyes when hearing about the Berniecrats��� demands ��� saying the faction was impatient, did not understand the process and mistaken to turn this effort into an all-or-nothing equation. Another party leader said the Berniecrats were making incorrect assumptions about how several thousand DNC members were likely to vote on the reforms, because they want a party that can grow and win elections.

���The newer folks are looking for what I consider, in some cases, to be massive and difficult changes to make overnight, right?��� said Debbie Kozikowski, Massachusetts Party Vice-Chair and a longtime grassroots activist. ���Nothing happens overnight. The biggest problem we have with the new participants in ���16 is they didn���t understand the rules as they existed. You can���t change the rules by snapping your fingers. You have to know the rules so you can change them. I think the Democratic Party���s job, at this point, is to make sure the rules are public ��� but let���s make sure that people know them and understand them. Treat everything like a teachable moment, right?���

When told about the latest campaign to pressure the DNC, she was blunt.

���I think they are going to yell and scream, and that���s unfortunate because it doesn���t get you anywhere,��� Kozikowski said. ���Enough yelling and screaming. Figure out what the rules are and come back at it. It���s not over ��� right? If they don���t get everything they want now, it doesn���t mean the ballgame is over. It just means there���s an extended play time, right?���

���That���s the danger,��� countered Solomon. ���It���s the position of the people who are on the Unity Reform Commission ��� the Bernie 8 ��� that that would be really really bad. The whole concept was a [negotiated reform] package. Once they start breaking the package apart, they���re going to splice and dice and it���s going to be a friggin��� mess. It���s a very strong position of, ���Hey, this was already a compromise.��� It was dominated by Clinton [appointees] people, 13-to-8.���

What���s Really Going On?

Stepping back, it���s important to put the Unity Reform Commission���s work into a historic context. The commission was created after a very tense campaign where no one in the party���s power centers expected Sanders to seriously challenge Clinton. The thinking, as Kozikowski recounted in previous interviews, was state party chairs agreed to let him run as a Democrat because they thought it would boost the fall vote by a few points. They agreed to let Sanders run only after he agreed to endorse the 2016 nominee.

By the July 2016 convention, however, Sanders had won 46 percent of the delegates awarded in primaries and caucuses. Even though Sanders delegates in Philadelphia were aggrieved and disappointed, they overlooked much of what they had achieved in starting to revive the Democratic Party. No past presidential campaign in decades won as many changes in the party platform as their campaign did. And it obtained a DNC-sanctioned commission to address the anti-democratic features experienced in 2016 ��� from insider bias by DNC senior staffers; to a super delegate system that diluted the votes cast in primaries and caucuses; to miserably run caucuses where winners were announced but vote totals were not disclosed; to voter suppressing registration deadlines for some state primaries and closing those contests to participation by independent voters; and more.

In short, the Democratic Party hadn���t shone as large a spotlight on its deficiencies in decades. And its Unity Reform Commission, which had a majority of members appointed by the Clinton campaign and DNC Chair Tom Perez, put forth a slate of reforms that validated the cultural and structural grievances raised by the Sanders team. The process and path to ratification, nonetheless, is slower than the Berniecrats like.

���Let me tell you where we are in this process,��� said James Roosevelt, Jr., who was a member of the Reform Commission and co-chairs the DNC���s Rules and Bylaws Committee.

���If you have the Unity Reform Commission report, that is the place it starts,��� he said. ���By the terms of the convention resolution, that report then comes to the Rules and Bylaws Committee. The RBC will decide what portions of the recommendations, all or various portions, it feels should be recommended to the full DNC. If the RBC does not recommend the provisions of the Unity Reform Commission in total, the URC then gets that back before it goes to the full DNC and they can request that the whole thing go as a package to the full DNC, to be considered simultaneously with the recommendations from the RBC.���

Starting in late January, the Rules and Bylaws Committee has been meeting to go through the reform proposals, Roosevelt said, saying this is ongoing work and will not be finished before the full DNC next meets in early March.

���Two weekends ago, we had two days ��� one full day and one partial day ��� where we presented the Unity Reform Commission report to the full RBC, because out of the 32 or so members on the RBC, only about six are on the URC,��� he said. ���We had the chair, Jennifer O���Malley Dillon and the vice chair, Larry Cohen, from Our Revolution, there all day for the full day. And Jen there for the partial day, answering questions about ���Why did you recommend this?��� ���What about that?��� ���How did you think this would work?��� and so on. So that���s what we have done so far, which is educate the committee about what the URC recommended.���

The initial meetings have focused on the two highest-profile issues: the super delegates and caucuses, Roosevelt said.

While the Berniecrats see super delegate reforms as their top issue, that���s not what many state party chairs are focusing on, Kozikowski said. She said the reform commission���s failure to make a strong statement to move away from caucuses, which are more poorly run and poorly attended than primaries, was causing the most consternation. Kozikowski has long said she does not expect the full DNC to vote themselves out of power ��� by taking away the perk of being a super delegate after working in the trenches between presidential elections. While that prediction confirms the fears raised by Berniecrats like Norm Solomon, Roosevelt suggested that wasn���t set in stone. He emphasized that the Unity Reform Commission���s recommendations came from a body where Berniecrats were a minority of members.

Here���s what Roosevelt told AlterNet in an interview last week:

���The Unity Reform Commission report is the product of that group. So already you have people who are not Bernie���s people supporting the Unity Reform Commission report. And I think what the Bernie people tend to forget is, it���s true, this is a tough vote for members of the full DNC, because you are asking them to take away one of their own functions in the presidential nominating process. However, these are people who have spent their politics careers working and believing that a political party is useful in achieving the right functioning of government. They are therefore also people who believe that maintaining a unified Democratic Party, and keeping people in the tent, is an important value. I would say to the Norm Solomons of the world, step back and think about what really matters to these people [full DNC members]. And realize that they will not just react the way you think of; you think they are like a legislature, they are not. They are believers in a political party as a positive force in the process of government.���

Roosevelt made other points that suggested the road to reforming Democratic Party���s presidential nominating process was going to long ��� longer than whatever is the outcome of a vote by the full DNC as early as next fall.

For example, the party could open up primaries to same-day voter registration, participation by independents, and other inclusionary details. If those options were in place in New York in 2016, arguably thousands of people who saw Sanders speak at rallies could have voted for him. New York���s primary rules prevented that. However, many states��� legislatures would have to update their laws to allow these reform to be implemented, Roosevelt said.

���But there is a pretty good body of law that says state parties can operate primaries under the right of association in the First Amendment the way they decide to run them,” he said. “Now if that runs into a conflict with state law, it may end up in court. But there is law that permits that.���

Roosevelt also said there were cultural barriers around reforming caucuses, even if the reform commission agreed that they needed to be professionalized and transparent. Again, no matter what the DNC eventually decides, progress will be made state by state.

���For some states, it���s just a matter of practicality, because their legislature won���t fund the primary and things like that,��� he said. ���But for some states like Iowa, it���s definitely cultural. The language of the Unity Reform Commission is probably broad enough to say they have to make public the tallies at the initial levels, and then those have to be the ones that determine the outcome of the delegate selection process. So I think that even in the places where it���s cultural [to keep them], and there���s really a strong push to maintain the caucuses, there can be processes and protections around that.���

In a half-hour interview that delved into some of the nuts and bolts that could make the party’s elections more open and transparent, it was clear that Roosevelt was trying to fair-minded and respectful of the Unity Commission report. That said, he noted there were some items that had been flagged for scrutiny ��� such as adding mail-in absentee ballots to the caucus process. (That���s potentially problematic because caucuses almost never decide their winners on opening votes, prompting participants to regroup. Adding mail-in ballots to an already complicated mix could invite chaos and vote-counting disputes).

Roosevelt left the clear impression that the Rules and Bylaws Committee would break down the reform package and decide on what pieces to keep, modify or omit. It would then return that assessment to the Unity Reform Commission to decide whether they wanted to present that to the full DNC, or whether to present its original report ��� suggesting there could be two proposals before the full DNC when this comes up.

However, Roosevelt did not think the reforms were going to be presented in a ���take it or leave it manner,��� where, for example, super delegate reform would have to accompany caucus and primary reforms ��� or else nothing would be done. He also emphasized the full DNC���s charge when it created the reform commission was to reduce the super delegate representation.

���I think it can be split into parts if that���s what the full DNC wants to do,��� he said. ���I do think the convention mandate is pretty clear about automatic [super] delegates��� it was a significant reduction in their voting power.���

Back to the Berniecrats

The latest messaging from Our Revolution and other Berniecrats does not discuss the DNC reform process at this level of detail.

Friday���s email from Our Revolution said, for example, ���We���re working with progressive partners across the country to push these changes over the finish line. Join us in taking the first step by signing the petition to your state���s DNC members today and tell them to support the URC recommendation.���

Larry Cohen, who led the Sanders delegation on the reform commission and helps lead Our Revolution, did not reply to Alternet���s request seeking comment on their strategy.

It may be that Berniecrats feel they need to keep up the pressure throughout the rest of the DNC reform process, no matter how long it takes. But at the very least, right now it appears their expectation of fast action is only likely will cause more strife.

Berniecrats are telling their ranks that they expect the Rules and Bylaws Committee to swiftly rubber stamp the reform commission���s proposals. Meanwhile, the co-chair of the panel and other longtime party members are saying that���s not how the process works, and its not a zero-sum, take-it-or-leave-it game.

In other words, this pressure and posturing is pointing toward more confrontation between the Berniecrats and the political party they are seeking to change.

 

Martin Luther King Jr. in dialogue with the ancient Greeks

(Credit: AP Photo, File)

In ���I���ve Been to the Mountaintop,��� the soaring and chilling speech he delivered the day before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. ponders the thought of life in other places and times.

Among other eras in history, he considers the prime of classical Athens, when he could have enjoyed the company of luminaries ���around the Parthenon as they discussed the great and eternal issues of reality,��� along with ���the great heyday of the Roman Empire.���

These considerations of ancient Greece and Rome, in what would be King���s final speech, speak to his close engagement with the Classics throughout his writings.

As one whose courses consider how classical ideas have contributed to public dialogue in the 20th and 21st centuries, I want to address here two particular points of contact with ancient Greece that loom large in King���s thinking and teaching.

The first, King���s advocacy of the Greek concept of agape, transcendent love for others, is critical to his message. The second, his embrace of Socrates as a model of civil disobedience, is revealing of his method.

More than ���love���

At the core of King���s social teaching lies the necessity for human beings to embrace an all-encompassing love for one another.

But the English word ���love,��� with its abundance of associations, was too imprecise for what he wanted to convey. In order to express more clearly the type of transcendent love for humanity he was advocating, King turned frequently in his speeches to the ancient Greek he had studied at Crozer Theological Seminary and Boston University.

Building on the work of contemporary theologians ��� the American Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878-1969), the Swede Anders Nygren (1890-1978) and the German Paul Tillich (1886-1965) ��� King underscored the distinctions between the Greek words eros (romantic love), philia (the love of personal friendship) and agape (pronounced ���a-g��h-pay���).

In his 1957 speech ���The Christian Way of Life in Human Relations,��� King defines agape as

understanding, creative, redeeming goodwill for all men. It is an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return��� It is purely spontaneous, unmotivated, groundless, and creative. It is the love of God operating in the human heart.

This expansive, transcendent understanding of agape is not found in the literature of classical Athens but in the Christian scripture from 400-500 years later, most prominently in Paul���s letters.

In Athenian authors such as Euripides and Plato, the related verb agapao commonly means ���to have affection for.��� Paul and other early Christian authors elevate agape to something greater.

Its most elaborate and celebrated articulation comes in the first letter to the Corinthians, where Paul writes that agape

does not seek things for itself ��� [it] sustains all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things���[and] never falls. (1 Cor. 13.5, 7-8).

Just as Paul and others had expanded the understanding of agape to make it all-encompassing, King in his teaching builds upon Paul and brings out agape���s creativity ��� its capacity to create togetherness and community.

The pestering but important gadfly

King���s medium for enacting his teaching, civil disobedience, was also informed by the Greeks ��� or, rather, one Greek in particular.

Three times in his 1963 ���Letter from Birmingham Jail,��� King evokes Socrates (469-399 B.C.), the philosopher who famously made the public streets and squares of Athens his classroom.

King���s letter is addressed to fellow clergymen who had discouraged his practice of nonviolent resistance, on the grounds that it was ���unwise and untimely��� and could incite civil disturbances.

In making the case for the importance of civil disobedience, King introduces Socrates as one of its early practitioners:

Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.

The image of a gadfly is drawn from the Apology, a speech attributed to Socrates and related by his student Plato, in which he responds to the charge that he is corrupting Athens��� young citizens with his unconventional and provocative teaching.

Socrates compares the lazy, inert Athenian state to a tired old steed and his own interrogation and urging of Athenian citizens to the buzzing of a gadfly.

Like the fly, he may be annoying, but ��� Socrates argued ��� Athenian citizens needed such pestering in order to be stirred into action and improve their lives.

This was precisely King���s point in his letter to opponents of his methods: progress towards social justice can only be achieved through peaceful actions that annoy the status quo, that is, through nonviolent gadflies and the productive tension they create.

Persistent and irritating activism requires courage and significant risk. Socrates and King alike lost their lives for their causes, but both saw peaceful agitation as essential to their identity and work.

Applying the Classics to the 20th century

And so, just as the term agape was able to capture King���s concept of transcendent love in a way no English word could, his evocation of Socrates, the pestering yet productive gadfly, could inform our understanding of the aims of civil disobedience in a uniquely memorable way.

In the speech ���I���ve Been to the Mountaintop,��� King passes on the fantasy of living in ancient Greece or Rome. Ultimately, he declares his preference for life in the ���now��� of 1968.

But his lived engagement with the Classics bridges these eras, showing his listeners and readers how classical ideas can speak to us today.

Timothy Joseph, Associate Professor of Classics, College of the Holy Cross

Trump silent on today’s record-breaking Dow drop

(Credit: Getty/Mandel Ngan/Shutterstock/Salon)

As the Dow Jones suffered its biggest single-day drop in history, President Trump was mute on the bad economic news. To the contrary����� the president was out celebrating the American economy. ���Thanks to the historic TAX CUTS that I signed into law, your paychecks are going way UP, your taxes are going way DOWN, and America is once again OPEN FOR BUSINESS!��� the president wrote on Twitter.

Thanks to the historic TAX CUTS that I signed into law, your paychecks are going way UP, your taxes are going way DOWN, and America is once again OPEN FOR BUSINESS! pic.twitter.com/GISFbDDGXX

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 5, 2018

The markets disagreed with his assessment. Today, Monday, February 5th, the Dow Jones had its worst one-day fall ever, at least in terms of points ��� falling 1,175 points, from 25,338 to 23,924, and in the process shedding 4.6 percent of its total value. Meanwhile, the president spent the day in Greater Cincinnati, where he gave what amounted to a campaign rally at a factory while heralding the amazing economy that he believes he has precipitated.

���America is once again open for business,��� the president told a cheering crowd, echoing his tweet, as Cincinnati.com reported. “It’s amazing what people with good ideas can do ��� Wait til you see GDP over the next few years. Wait til you see what we’re going to do,��� he continued.

Since last week, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, a stock index that is considered a bellwether on the greater state of the economy, has fallen precipitously. On January 29, 2018, the Dow opened at 26,584 points. It has��dropped 10 percent in eight days.

Granted, the economy is not the stock market, and vice versa, as economists and analysts remind us. However, many Americans, even those of��few means, have skin in the game in the day-to-day machinations of the trading floor ��� often by virtue of pension funds or retirement plans tied to the stock market.

Indeed, as the stock market roared over the past��decade����� from a nadir of 6,443.27 in 2009 to its��zenith last month of 26,616.71��� income inequality in the United States also soared to new heights. As Jonathan J.B. Mijs writes in The Conversation:

The top 10 percent today take home 30 percent of all income, and control over three-quarters of all wealth. We have returned to the level of income inequality that marked the Great Depression of the 1920s and 1930s.

From 1973 to today, the gap between productivity and wages veered open even wider. That means we as we workers have gotten more productive in terms of making money for our employers, we���re not seeing any gains from that productivity. As the Economic Policy Institute explains:

From 1973 to 2016, net productivity rose 73.7 percent, while the hourly pay of typical workers essentially stagnated���increasing only 12.5 percent over 43 years (after adjusting for inflation). This means that although Americans are working more productively than ever, the fruits of their labors have primarily accrued to those at the top and to corporate profits, especially in recent years.

So yes, the economy isn���t the stock market, and the rising tide of the stock market hasn���t lifted all boats. Far from it. But the market���s dips have the potential to hurt everyday workers, too.

Internal chaos after Newsweek fires staffers who reported on ownership’s financial dealings

(Credit: Getty/Nicholas Kamm)

After a tumultuous��month��that saw the resignation of its parent company’s��co-owner, several key editorial staff members from Newsweek were laid off Monday morning, according to multiple sources.

CNN Money reached��editor-in-chief Bob Roe, who said, “Can confirm I was fired. I know nothing else. Can say nothing else yet.”��Sources inside the Newsweek newsroom also confirmed to Salon��that executive editor Ken Li was also laid off.

Moreover, those sources confirmed the��dismissals of staff writers Celeste Katz and Josh Saul, reporters who had written several articles on the magazine’s financial dealings and the ongoing investigation into the publication’s parent company, Newsweek Media Group, by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office. Josh Keefe ��� an editor for International Business Times, another Newsweek Media Group property ��� was also fired.

Katz and��Saul��both have bylines on an article reporting on the D.A.’s raid of the Newsweek offices, a raid that saw several company servers taken into custody late last month. They reported on other aspects of that financial probe together with Keefe.��Katz is the sole byline on a piece on��the leave of absence of��Newsweek chief content officer and IBT global editor in chief Dayan Candappa following sexual harassment allegations against him.��It��was confirmed��that Roe and Li had edited those articles.

Similarly, all three contributed to an article reporting that��Etienne Uzac, co-owner and founder of Newsweek Media Group, would be stepping down along��along with the company���s finance director and Uzac’s wife, Marion Kim,��amid the investigation.

Sources tell Salon that Roe and Li both threatened to resign during a meeting last week if Katz, Keefe and Saul were fired. They also confirmed that after the editorial staff were told��of the terminations,�� all staffers��were allowed to cease work and go home; instead, the editorial staff remained in the newsroom, drinking alcohol and discussing the news. One source tells Salon that junior members of the staff were in tears.��Another reports��that, after being fired, Katz��left��the offices to a standing ovation from her now-former colleagues.

Employees for IBT and Newsweek were due to be paid Monday, but that has yet to materialize according to those on staff.��One source reported that most��employees are not optimistic they will receive their paychecks.

Over the last 17 months, the��Major Economic Crimes unit at the Manhattan D.A.’s office has conducted an ongoing probe into the Newsweek Media Group, focusing on��Uzac’s business dealings. Among other things, the company has been accused of “fraudulent online traffic practices” ��� that is, buying fake reader views in order to boost its readership numbers and thus put itself in a position to charge more for ads.

Moreover, there are suggestions that the company may have been involved in a money-laundering scheme with Olivet University, an institution founded by a Christian fundamentalist church that several members of Newsweek Media Group���s leadership have connections to. The IRS enforced a��$400,000 lien against the company in 2017 for failure to pay back taxes. These and other aspects of Newsweek’s troubled financial management were reported on by the staff members dismissed today.

Serving as acting editor after the dismissal of Roe and Li will be Nancy Cooper, the current managing editor of IBT. Jonathan Davis will return as chief content officer in��Candappa’s stead. “Davis is a cult guy and it���s embarrassing,” said one anonymous staffer, referring to the executive’s connections to Olivet University. “It���s going to damage us to no end.”

The staffer said, “There are great reporters on this staff that have put themselves through hell to do a service for people, and time and time again we have been sabotaged by ownership.” The source added, “They apparently only give a shit about their fucking stupid cult.”

Why I teach a course called “White Racism”

(Credit: Getty/Maddie Meyer)

The need for students to learn about racism in American society existed long before I began teaching a course called ���White Racism��� at Florida Gulf Coast University earlier this year.

I chose to title my course ���White Racism��� because I thought it was scholarly and succinct, precise and powerful.

But others saw it differently. Many white Americans (and some people of color) became upset when they learned about this course.

Thousands took to social media and far right news sites and racist blogs to attack the course and me personally.

Some 150 of these individuals sent me hateful and threatening messages.

It might be tempting to blame the hostility to my course on the current political climate in which the president of the United States routinely makes overtly racist statements and receives some of his strongest support from members of white racist hate groups. But I cannot recall a time when scholarly critiques of white supremacy in the United States have not been met with scorn.

For instance, an identically titled course taught at the University of Connecticut also ignited controversy when it made its debut in the 1990s.

���White racism��� is nothing new

Whether a course is titled ���White Racism,���or ���The Problem of Whiteness,��� or any other appropriate term, in no way diminishes the academic legitimacy of the course. Scholars��have used the term for decades.

I���ve taught courses on racial stratification in the U.S. for nearly a decade myself. The course, and others like it, are all anchored in a damning body of historical and contemporary scholarship. That scholarship shows that Europeans and their white descendants colonized what would become the United States as well as other places around the globe. They practiced all manner of inhumanity against non-whites. This has included genocide, slavery, murder, rape, torture, theft, chicanery, segregation, discrimination, intimidation, internment, humiliation and marginalization. This is inarguable.

Most Americans may have a general awareness of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Jim Crow laws, lynchings, housing and labor market discrimination, and police brutality. Where we differ is about the gravity and scope of these white racist practices and the extent to which their effects continue to this day.

This disagreement is due in large part to many white Americans (and more than a few folks of color) subscribing to what I and others refer to as the myth of a colorblind society.

This myth holds that the United States is a ���post-racial��� society where race is no longer related to individuals��� life chances. Some buy into this myth to the point where it prevents them from recognizing the everyday realities that show the United States is white supremacist in nature.

But the myth of a colorblind society crumbles underneath a substantial body of social science research that documents how race still matters in numerous areas of American life. For instance, the evidence shows that race still matters in the labor market and workplace, education, and even in access to clean water. Race matters in health care, the criminal justice system, and even everyday retail and dining experiences.

Still, many refuse to believe that racism persists. They point to the civil rights legislation of the 1960s or, more recently, the election of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States, as evidence of the ���end of racism��� or at least the ���declining significance of race.���

Some might suggest that it would be easier to talk about white racism if it were done in less inflammatory or offensive ways. Perhaps this delicate approach ��� one that takes into account what author Robin DiAngelo refers to in her forthcoming book as ���white fragility��� ��� might be desirable or necessary for those who are fearful of the consequences of speaking unvarnished truth on racial matters. But when it comes to professors who deal with racial stratification, we should not be whitewashing reality.

Can there be ���black racism���?

The most common complaint about my course that I���ve encountered thus far is that anybody can be racist. They ask indignantly: What about ���black racism���? Or what about other forms of racism they believe exist on the part of Latinos, Asian Americans and Native peoples. My answer is: There is no such thing as black racism.

I am in no way the only one who holds this view. As Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, president of the American Sociological Association, said here at FGCU recently when asked if it would be fair to have classes such as ���Asian Racism��� or ���Latino Racism���: ���We can all be prejudiced, yeah? So, black people can be anti-white, but there is a big difference between having prejudiced views about other people and having a system that gives systemic privilege to some groups.���

Indeed, blacks did not develop and benefit from a centuries-old comprehensive system of racial oppression comprised of laws, policies, practices, traditions and an accompanying ideology ��� one that promotes the biological, intellectual and cultural superiority of whites to dominate other groups. Europeans and their white descendants, however, did. This is systemic racism. And students in courses such as mine are introduced to the scholarship that attests to this reality, past and present.

For instance, students will read and discuss pieces by and about W.E.B. Du Bois, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Joe Feagin, Kimberl�� Crenshaw, Charles Mills, Paul Butler, Nikki Khanna, and Derrick Bell, among many others. They will also do work that will strengthen their ability to identify and confront colorblind racist statements.

Public money for a public problem

Some detractors of my course have suggested that students stand a better shot at getting a good grade in my course if their racial politics align with my own. This is nonsense. If a student finds peer-reviewed empirical evidence counter to that covered in the course, I would welcome the opportunity to review it.

Agreeing with my take on racial matters doesn���t impact a student���s grade. Whether a student earns an ���A��� in any of my courses is entirely dependent on the quality of the work they produce.

Another criticism I���ve heard is that I am teaching a course titled ���White Racism��� at a public university at taxpayer expense. Not only should my course and others like it be taught at public colleges and universities, they must be taught at such institutions.

Florida Gulf Coast University President Michael Martin has strongly and publicly supported my academic freedom to teach my ���White Racism��� course.

���Reviewing the course content is much more instructive than passing judgment based on a two-word title,��� he said in a statement. ���At FGCU, as at all great universities, we teach our students critical thinking skills by challenging them to think independently and critically about important, even if controversial, issues of our times.���

Indeed, white supremacy and white racism remain terrible and intractable features of American society. It is in the public interest that students be provided with not only an opportunity to learn about the origin, logic and consequences of white racial domination but also how to challenge and dismantle it. The public university classroom is among the best places for this to occur.

Ted Thornhill, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Florida Gulf Coast University