Promising the Impossible: Blinken’s Out of Tune Performance in Kyiv

by Binoy Kampmark / May 17th, 2024

Things are looking dire for the Ukrainian war effort.  Promises of victory are becoming even hollower than they were last summer, when US President Joe Biden could state with breathtaking obliviousness that Russia had “already lost the war”.   The worst offender in this regard remains the United States, which has been the most vocal proponent of fanciful victory over Russia, a message which reads increasingly as one of fighting to the last Ukrainian.

Such a victory is nigh fantasy, almost impossible to envisage.  For one thing, domestic considerations about continued support for Kyiv have played a stalling part.  In the US Congress, a large military aid package was stalled for six months.  Among some Republicans, in particular, Ukraine was not a freedom loving despoiled figure needing props and crutches.  “From our perspective,” opines Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul, “Ukraine should not and cannot be our problem to solve.  It is not our place to defend them in a struggle with their longtime adversary, Russia.”  The assessment, in this regard, was a matter of some clarity for Paul.  “There is no national security interest for the United States.”

Despite this, the Washington foreign policy and military elite continue to make siren calls of seduction in Kyiv’s direction.  On April 23, the Senate finally approved a $US95.3 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, with the lion’s share – some US$61 billion – intended for Ukraine’s war effort.

On April 24, a press release from US Secretary State Antony Blinken announced a further US$1 billion package packed with “urgently needed capabilities including air defense missiles, munitions for HIMARS, artillery rounds, armored vehicles, precision aerial munitions, anti-armor weapons, and small arms, equipment, and spare parts to help Ukraine defend its territory and protect its people.”

On May 14, in his address to the Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, Blinken described what could only be reasoned as a vast mirage.  “Today, I’m here in Kyiv to speak about Ukraine’s strategic success.  And to set out how, with our support, the Ukrainian people can and will achieve their vision for the near future: a free, prosperous, secure democracy – fully integrated into the Euro-Atlantic community – and fully in control of its own destiny.”  This astonishingly irresponsible statement makes Washington’s security agenda clear and Kyiv’s fate bleak: Ukraine is to become a pro-US, anti-Russian bastion, with an open cheque book at the ready.

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has made the prevention of that vision an article of faith.  While Russian forces, in men and material, have suffered horrendous losses, the attritive nature of the conflict is starting to tell. While Blinken was gulling his audience, the military realities show significant Russian advances, including a threatening push towards Kharkiv, reversing Ukrainian gains made in 2022.

There are also wounding advances being made in other areas of the conflict.  US and NATO artillery and drones supplied to Ukraine’s military forces have been countered by Russian electronic warfare methods.  GPS receivers, for instance, have been sufficiently deceived to misdirect missiles shot from HIMARS launchers.  In a number of cases, the Russian forces have also identified and destroyed the launchers.

Russian air power has been brought to bear on critical infrastructure.  Radar defying glide bombs have been used with considerable effect.  On the production and deployment front, Colonel Ivan Pavlenko, chief of EW and cyber warfare at Ukraine’s general staff, lamented in February that Russia’s use of drones was also “becoming a huge threat”.  Depleted stocks of weaponry are being replenished, and more soldiers are being called to the front.

Despite concerns, one need not scour far to find pundits who insist that such advances and gains can be neutralised.  Michael Kofman of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace admits to current Russian “material advantage” and holding “the strategic initiative,” though goes on to speculate that this “may not prove decisive”.

The gong of deceit and delusion must, however, go to Blinken.  Americans, he claimed, understood “that our support for Ukraine strengthens the security of the United States and our allies.”  Were Putin to win – and here, that old nag of appeasement makes an undesirable appearance – “he won’t stop with Ukraine; he’ll keep going.  For when in history has an autocrat been satisfied with carving off just part, or even all, of a single country?”

Towards that end, “we do have a plan,” he coyly insisted.  This entailed ensuring Ukraine had “the military that it needs to succeed on the battlefield”.  Biden was encouraged by Ukrainian mobilisation efforts, skipping around the logistical delays that had marred it.  Washington’s “joint task” was to “secure Ukraine’s sustained and permanent strategic advantage”, enabling it to win the current battles and “defend against future attacks.  As President Biden said, we want Ukraine to win – and we’re committed to helping you do it.”

Even by the standards of US Secretaries of States, Blinken’s conduct in Kyiv proved brazen and shameless.  A perfect illustration of this came with his musical effort alongside local band, 19.99, involving a rendition of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World.”

Local indignation was quick to follow.  “Six months of waiting for the decision of the American Congress” had, fumed Bohdan Yaremenko, legislator and former diplomat with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s party, “taken the lives of very, very many defenders of the free world”.  What the US was performing “for the free world is not rock ’n’ roll, but some other music similar to Russian chanson.”

As for the performance itself, the crowd at Barman Dictat witnessed yet another misreading – naturally by a US politician – of an anthem intended to excoriate American failings, from homelessness to “a kinder, gentler machine gun hand”.  Appropriately, the guitar, much like the performer, was out of tune.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com. Read other articles by Binoy.

The Dignity Deficit of Rocking Out in Kiev

by James Carden Posted onMay 17, 2024

The first thought that came to mind while watching, albeit very reluctantly, a video of Secretary of State Antony Blinken “rocking out” on his guitar in a bar in Kiev was: What is wrong with these people?

A friend and fellow journalist who I forwarded the video to responded with a one word email: “Gross.”

“There’s colors on the street; Red, white and blue; People shufflin’ their feet; People sleepin’ in their shoes…”

Blinken was playing along to Neil Young’s cynical anthem of post-Reagan America, Rockin’ in the Free World, in which Young surveys the American scene and finds, beneath all the self-congratulation on our much touted “victory” in the Cold War, a kind of Hell-scape of poverty, drug abuse and despair: Think Sir Angus Deaton Deaths of Despair but as a pretty good – but by Young’s standards, not that good – rock song.

The irony of Blinken, whose career is – if nothing else – a monument to the neoliberalism that Young skewers, performing such a song hard to miss.

Obtuse? Sure.

But what makes it morally offensive is that Blinken was more or less partying on a pile of corpses – corpses from a war he himself played no small role in helping to bring about.

Our Boomer overlords (as The American Conservative’s Jude Russo pointed out yesterday) suffer from, among other maladies, a surfeit of self-importance. More striking still is what we might call a dignity deficit – particularly compared with the generation of Americans who once governed and who are now passing from the scene.

But this is true everywhere you look among the governing elite – and not just among Boomers.  Whose idea was it, for instance, to make a vacuous millennial  like Vendant Patel or, before him, a sneering imbecile like Ned Price, the face of the State Department ? Why did that staffer think it was appropriate to attend a meeting with the US Secretary of State and the Chinese Foreign Minister with purple hair?

Time was when there was a generation in power that expected certain things of themselves and of others. They behaved a certain way. They believed in certain things—as de Gaulle with France, they had a certain idea of America. Service in the national interest wasn’t simply another notch on the resume—a mere way station to a seven figure job at Google or Netflix.

Here’s an anecdote that helps reveal the distance our elites have traveled in a relatively short period of time.

As part of an oral history project for the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, former US Ambassador Thomas Miller recalled that when George Shultz was Secretary of State, he would invite new ambassadors to his office for a quick chat.

As Miller recalls it: 

And he’d say, “OK, Mr. Ambassador or Madame Ambassador, you’ve passed all the tests. You’ve been confirmed by the Senate and you’ve passed your security investigation. You’ve done all the things to get the position of ambassador, but you have to pass my test. I have one more for you.” And he’d take them over in the Secretary’s office to where there was this massive globe, and he’d say, “I’m going to spin the globe and I want you to put your hand on your country.” 

Shultz would tell this story, and he said, “Every single one of them failed. But I let them go anyway.” Because whenever he spun the globe and he’d say, “I want you to put your hand on your country,” they’d always put their hand on the country that they were going out to. His point was your country is the United States.

Ask yourself: Do you think guitar hero Tony Blinken does that with newly minted Ambassadors?

Back then, there was an expectation of a certain kind of comportment – some semblance of dignity among high government officials.

Today, we get Tony and his guitar.

James W. Carden is a columnist and former adviser to the US-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission at the U.S. Department of State. His articles and essays have appeared in a wide variety of publications including The Nation, The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, The Spectator, UnHerd, The National Interest, Quartz, The Los Angeles Times, and American Affairs.

Viral ‘courtesy’ letter American Airlines gives flight attendants shows how little they make


CNN Business· Scott Olson/Getty Images


Nathaniel Meyersohn

CNN
Fri, May 17, 2024

America’s cost of living crisis has stung new flight attendants, many of whom haven’t had an opportunity to renegotiate their contracts since the inflation spiral began several years ago.

An employment verification letter American Airlines gives to some newly hired flight attendants documenting their salary has been circulating on Reddit, drawing attention to their low wages.

The letter states that a new American Airlines flight attendant will have a “projected annual salary [of] $27,315 per year before incentives and taxes” and concludes, “Any courtesy you can provide would be appreciated.”

The union representing American Airlines workers, the Association of Professional Flight Attendants (APFA), verified the authenticity of the letter, which is given to potential landlords or for other services where attendants need to verify their employment and income. The union represents 28,000 American Airlines flight attendants, and it is working on their first new contract in five years – a deal that stretches back before the pandemic and the inflation crisis.

American Airlines did not respond to CNN’s requests for comment.

Even as price increases are slowing down, the letter shows how, for some Americans, a little inflation relief isn’t nearly enough. The low wages for starting flight attendants – a job once seen as glitzy – underscores how many people are still struggling, despite what on paper looks like a strong economy and job market.

This salary is above the federal poverty line of $15,060 for a single-person household. But that’s a national level and doesn’t take into account regional price differences, including in major metro areas where the cost of living can be significantly higher.

In some states, such as Massachusetts, new flight attendants would qualify for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, commonly referred to as food stamps. For a single-person household, Massachusetts residents earning less than $30,120 a year are eligible for SNAP benefits.

The union says that flight attendants’ low salaries compared to top airline executives is a prime example of “corporate greed.”

New flight attendants at American Airlines start at $27,000 per year. Robert Isom, the CEO of American Airlines, earned $31.4 million last year — 1,162 times more than a new attendant.

“We have flight attendants who are sleeping in their cars,” APFA communications director Paul Hartshorn told CNN.

American Airlines flight attendants have not gotten a raise since 2019, and the union is escalating its push for a new contract to raise wages.

Flight attendants for United Airlines, Alaska Airlines and other carriers are also pushing for new contracts to raise wages. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the mean annual wage for flight attendants in 2023 was $71,000.

While being a flight attendant is a full-time job, many flight attendants only get about 75 hours of hourly pay a month. For many flight attendants, hourly pay basically begins when the plane’s door closes. They do not get paid for the hours they need to be at the airport or on the plane during boarding and deplaning.

APFA is proposing a 33% pay increase to top out at $91 an hour during the first year of a new contract and increases of 5%, 4% and 4% for the remaining years of a four-year agreement. The union is also calling for full retroactive pay raises based on how much attendants flew during five years of negotiations.

Under federal law, flight attendants cannot go on strike without permission from the government. The law, which is known as the Railway Labor Act, requires union members at airlines, among other certain industries, to remain on the job until after federal mediators declare an impasse in talks.

But the union is calling on President Joe Biden and congressional leaders to urge the National Mediation Board to allow the union to pursue a potential strike. The National Mediation Board is a federal agency that oversees labor-management relations in the US railroad and airline industries.

“American Airlines is not going to come to the table with an economic proposal that meets our needs unless they have the threat of a strike,” Hartshorn said. “Management needs the threat of a strike to move in the direction we need them to.”

Flight attendants at Southwest Airlines last month ratified a new contract that includes pay raises totaling more than 33% over four years.

“We expect to be compensated along the lines of Southwest,” he said.

A different way to address student encampments

The Conversation Canada
Thu, May 16, 2024

Last week, police descended on the University of Calgary campus with riot gear like shields, tear gas, batons and rubber bullets to forcibly remove protesters from an encampment set up on campus. According to the University of Calgary, the community has the right to free speech and protest, but temporary structures and “overnight protests are not permitted” due to safety concerns. The university said students were given a written trespass warning.

The encampment was one of many that have sprung up on university campuses across North America (and globally), as student protesters demand action from their governments and universities on the atrocities in Gaza.

Their demands include calling on their institutions to financially divest assets tied to Israel or connected to companies supplying weapons and technology to Israel’s government.

Collectively, they are one of the largest mass protests in recent history.

At the heart of it is: 1,200 Israelis killed by Hamas and 250 taken hostage on Oct. 7 and the subsequent and ongoing attack on Gaza by Israel. According to the United Nations, that onslaught has resulted in the killing of 35,000 Palestinians and famine conditions for the majority of Gaza.

What we’re seeing across the country are thousands of students risking their future, refusing to stop speaking their minds and demanding more ethical actions from their governments and universities.

In many cases — including at the University of Calgary, as well as Columbia University in New York City, the University of Pennsylvania and MIT in Cambridge — we’ve watched police descend, sometimes using violence to disperse demonstrators.

It’s been hard to watch for a lot of us. But Pratim Sengupta didn’t just watch it — he lived it. He is a professor of learning sciences at the University of Calgary, where he says social justice is at the centre of every project he works on. Last week, as police descended on his campus, Sengupta was there. He’s one of our guests on today’s Don’t Call Me Resilient podcast.

Book cover for ‘Are You Calling Me a Racist?’ NYU Press

Our other guest is a university leader who has been watching what’s been happening at University of Calgary and other campuses from afar. She’s my sister, Sarita Srivastava. She is currently Dean of the faculty of arts at the Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCADU). She has also just finished a run as Provost, the top academic officer of the school. Srivastava is also a scholar in sociology with a focus on race and social movements, a longtime activist herself and author of the recently published book, Are you Calling Me a Racist? Why We Need to Stop Talking about Race and Start Making Real Antiracist Change.

Together, we look at what’s been happening on campuses across North America — and another way forward than the one we’ve been witnessing.
Resources

“Encampments at Canadian university campuses” (CBC)

“Quebec Superior Court judge rejects McGill injunction request to remove encampment” (CBC)

An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 2013)

“U.S. Student Pro-Palestine Demonstrations Remain Overwhelmingly Peaceful” – Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED)

“Anti-Palestinian racism, antisemitism, and solidarity: considerations towards an analytic of praxis” (Studies in Political Economy, May 2024 by Abigail B. Bakan and Yasmeen Abu-Laban)
Go deeper

Read more: Divesting university endowments: Easier demanded than done

Read more: What students protesting Israel's Gaza siege want — and how their demands on divestment fit into the BDS movement
Listen and follow

You can listen to or follow Don’t Call Me Resilient on Apple Podcasts (transcripts available), Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen to your favourite podcasts.

We’d love to hear from you, including any ideas for future episodes.

Join the Conversation on Instagram, X, LinkedIn and use #DontCallMeResilient.

Don’t Call Me Resilient is produced by a team that includes Ateqah Khaki (associate producer), Jennifer Moroz (consulting producer) and Krish Dineshkumar (sound designer).

President tells Gaza protesters that University of B.C. must remain neutral

The Canadian Press
Fri, May 17, 2024 

VANCOUVER — The president of the University of British Columbia has told pro-Palestinian protesters that the school must remain neutral on the Gaza conflict.

Benoit-Antoine Bacon says in response to demands by the organizers of a protest encampment on the Vancouver campus that professors and students hold a broad range of opinions and the university can't "presume to speak for everyone."

Bacon says if the university took a position, it would undermine the rights of people who hold different views to express themselves.

He says the university isn't engaging in "moral relativism," and it hopes for a ceasefire and a lasting peace in the Middle East.

A handwritten set of the protesters' demands shared by Bacon says they want UBC to "condemn and demand an end" to what they call "the genocide in Gaza."

Other demands include the university divesting from companies associated with Israel and its actions in Gaza, a boycott of Israeli institutions, a ban on the RCMP on campus, and an affirmation of "Palestinians' right to resist."

Bacon says that UBC is willing to engage on divestment, but its endowment fund does not directly own stocks in companies identified by the movement.

On the matter of a boycott, he says the university respects faculty members who want to engage in academic partnerships.

He says UBC has been "measured and restrained" on the issue of police at protests, and he wants to "better understand" the demand about affirming Palestinian rights.

Dozens of tents have been pitched at the university's MacInnes Field since April 29 when the protest encampment began.

It is among encampments at multiple universities across Canada and elsewhere protesting the actions of Israel in the Gaza conflict.

New York City said 'no injuries' at Columbia arrests; students' medical records say otherwise

Updated Fri, May 17, 2024 

By Jonathan Allen

NEW YORK (Reuters) -After the arrests of pro-Palestine student protesters occupying a Columbia University building last month, New York Mayor Eric Adams and senior police officials repeatedly said there were "no injuries," no "violent clashes" and minimal force used.

But at least nine of the 46 protesters arrested inside the barricaded Hamilton Hall on April 30 sustained injuries beyond minor scrapes and bruises, according to medical records, photographs shared by protesters, and interviews. The documented injuries included a fractured eye socket, concussions, an ankle sprain, cuts, and injured wrists and hands from tight plastic flexicuffs.

All of the 46 protesters arrested inside Hamilton were charged with third-degree trespass, a misdemeanor.

The arrests came after Columbia President Minouche Shafik, in a hotly debated decision, called in police hours into the occupation at the epicenter of a student protest movement that has spread to campuses around the world. Other university officials across the country also have called in police to quell pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel protest camps.

Reuters shared details of the protesters' injuries and accounts with the mayor's office, New York police and Columbia. None disputed the injuries. The mayor's office and the police said officers acted professionally.

At least three injured protesters arrested inside Hamilton were taken by police to hospitals that night while still in custody, time-stamped hospital records show.

Other protesters, who are demanding Columbia divest from arms makers and other companies that support Israel's government, had their injuries documented by volunteer doctors who provide support to people arrested by police and met them outside moments after their release from custody on May 2. Some then sought medical attention at clinics.

"I was slammed downward to the ground and, when I turned my head to see if there were any comrades who needed assistance, an officer kicked me in the eye and I went straight down, and there was that buzzing and sharp ringing in the ears," said Christopher Holmes, a 25-year-old graduate student at the Columbia affiliate college Union Theological Seminary.

Moments later, an officer slammed the left side of his forehead into the floor of Hamilton Hall, Holmes said.

His eye still swollen days after his release, Holmes, also known as Iam, was taken by a friend to a Manhattan hospital. Hospital records show doctors determined his eye socket was fractured and that he was concussed.

'WE ARE UNARMED!'

Kayla Mamelak, a spokesperson for the mayor, declined to say when the mayor first learned that protesters had been injured. At a May 1 press conference with police leaders, Adams said the arrests were "organized, calm, and that there were no injuries."

Mamelak wrote in an email that the arrests, which involved hundreds of armed officers in riot gear, were "a complicated operation" handled "with professionalism and respect."

A police spokesperson, who declined to give their name, also did not dispute the protesters' injuries, writing in an email that officers responded "swiftly, professionally, and effectively."

Both spokespeople declined to provide unedited videos from officers' body-worn cameras and use-of-force and injuries reports from the arrests. That night, police ordered students outside Hamilton into dormitories and forced journalists off campus.

Columbia spokesperson Ben Chang did not respond to queries after a promising a response by May 10. In an email after this report was published, he wrote that Columbia thanks the police department "for their support of our community and neighborhood throughout this challenging time."

He added that the university "would take seriously any complaints of inappropriate behavior and would investigate them."

As police used electric saws to cut through barricades of heavy furniture and bike chains, several protesters said they sat on the floor in Hamilton's lobby, hands raised. Police threw in a flash-bang grenade, setting off disorienting loud bangs and bursts of light, before rushing through the doors.

Gabriel Yancy, a 24-year-old research assistant who has since been fired from his job in a Columbia neuroscience laboratory, said he watched officers throw some protesters to the ground, step on at least three protesters, and kick at least one in the torso.

Aidan Parisi, a 27-year-old student in Columbia's social work department, recalled police "stepping on top of people, throwing people," and said that several protesters yelled, "We are unarmed!"

Several students said officers knelt forcefully on their backs. New York City passed a law in 2020 prohibiting police from using knee restraints that compress the diaphragm.

Gideon Oliver, a civil rights lawyer who now represents some of the arrested students, was involved in a reform agreement that the New York state attorney general reached with the New York Police Department last year to end its "pattern of excessive force" against protesters.

"Now is the time for the city and for the police department to deescalate and to stop engaging in tactics on the streets that appear designed to chill protests," Oliver said.

(Reporting by Jonathan Allen; Editing by Leslie Adler and Bill Berkrot)

CAPITALI$M 101

Bill Gates-Backed Battery Tech Company Files For Bankruptcy Amid 9% Decline In Energy Sector Investments In 2023


Caleb Naysmith
Thu, 16 May 2024 

Bill Gates-Backed Battery Tech Company Files For Bankruptcy Amid 9% Decline In Energy Sector Investments In 2023

Ambri Inc., a Massachusetts-based company specializing in battery technology and supported by prominent investors such as Bill Gates through his company, Gates Frontier, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

The company, under a stalking horse purchase agreement, aims to secure higher bids to fund its operations during the sale process, expected to conclude by July 2024.

"Ambri continues to make progress on advancing cell technology into its 3rd generation and moving towards its objective of establishing a commercial business," said Dan Leff, Executive Chair and President of Ambri. "We are taking steps to build on this progress by strengthening our financial position and working with our lenders to support our future success."

The decision to declare bankruptcy was made during a special board meeting on May 3, with the official filing occurring on May 5 in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware.

Ambri was "founded with seed money from Bill Gates," after Gates saw the Leff's online lectures at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2009 and "mentioned if there were a startup company based on the liquid metal battery research, he would be interested in helping fund the company," according to their website.

In addition to Gates's company, who invested via his $40 billion investment firm fund, Gates Frontier, Ambri also attracted investments from firms such as Paulson Partners, and Reliance New Energy. The company raised $211 Million, according to Crunchbase.

Despite raising such substantial amounts from investors since they were founded, Ambri faced difficulties securing additional funding in 2023 for its Series F round. Their attempt to raise $50 million in financing fell through when a potential $8 million investment was withdrawn, leading the company into financial distress.

Ambri’s technology, which revolves around patented liquid metal battery innovations with over 103 issued and pending patents, represents a significant advancement in energy storage solutions. However, the company struggled to transition from research and development to market viability.

According to Global Ventures, Energy startups saw a 9% decline in corporate-backed investments in 2023 compared with 2022. This trend reflects a broader cautious approach among investors due to uncertain market conditions.

"In 2023, we have really slowed down our investments, waiting for the markets in cleantech to follow the rest of the VC sectors, but suspect it still has some way to go (down). I do believe investment from us might pick up again by H2 of 2024," says Geert van de Wouw, the head of Shell Ventures.

CRITICAL RACE THEORY IN PRACTICE

Civil rights groups accuse conservatives of recasting landmark Brown v. Board ruling on 70th anniversary

John Fritze, CNN
Fri, 17 May 2024 

Seventy years after the Supreme Court acknowledged that “separate but equal” had no place in the United States, one of history’s most celebrated legal opinions is being used by conservative groups to challenge race-related policies in schools across the country.

In a remarkable demonstration of the Supreme Court’s power to shape American life, the 1954 unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education required the integration of public schools – a landmark victory for the civil rights movement. The high court handed down its decision 70 years ago Friday.

Speaking in Texas last week, conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh described the decision as one of several that are now part of the “fabric of America.”

But a conflict over the decision’s meaning is playing out in a series of lawsuits challenging efforts to foster classroom diversity, in which conservative groups are arguing that Brown requires schools and government programs to be totally colorblind.

Civil rights groups say that recasts a decision that was intended to rectify the nation’s history with racism.

“Brown is being weaponized against the very people it was intended to directly serve,” Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, told CNN. “And that is largely a result of the Supreme Court never giving the 14th Amendment the full and robust interpretation that is required to sustain a multiracial democracy.”

Meanwhile, experts note that many of the nation’s schools remain deeply segregated.

“Not only has Brown failed to deliver on its promise, right-wing groups have co-opted Brown and turned it into a sword to discredit efforts to integrate our schools,” said Jonathan Feingold, a Boston University law professor and expert on affirmative action and antidiscrimination law. “As a country, we seem to have accepted a status quo in which Black and brown students, and many Asian American students, do not receive equal educational opportunities.”
Conservative groups push a ‘colorblind’ reading

The current Supreme Court reenergized that debate last year with a blockbuster decision ending affirmative action in college admissions at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. The meaning of Brown was hotly contested in that case, and the Supreme Court’s conservative majority said in its decision that the precedent stood for all but eliminating the consideration of race.

“The conclusion reached by the Brown Court was thus unmistakably clear: the right to a public education ‘must be made available to all on equal terms,’” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the 6-3 majority in the UNC opinion. “The time for making distinctions based on race had passed.”

Led by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the court’s liberal wing disputed that reading.

“In Brown v. Board of Education, the court recognized the constitutional necessity of racially integrated schools in light of the harm inflicted by segregation,” Sotomayor wrote in a scathing dissent. “Today, this court stands in the way and rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress.”

Inside a classroom at Monroe Elementary School in Topeka, Kansas in March 1953. Among the students are Linda Brown, bottom right, and her sister Terry Lynn, far left row, second from front, who, with their parents, initiated the Brown v. Board of Education. - Carl Iwasaki/Getty Images

Though the fight over race-conscious admissions was settled, the court’s decision in the Harvard case and the debate over color-blind versus race-conscience policies have emerged in a series of other lawsuits, such as challenges to workplace diversity programs and recent fights over redistricting. Schools and conservative groups, meanwhile, are also sparring in court over policies that promote student diversity without relying directly on race.

Students for Fair Admissions, the group that successfully sued over admissions at Harvard and UNC, is now challenging the University of Texas at Austin for its policy of collecting racial data of applicants. In a filing earlier this year, the group claimed the Supreme Court’s decision last year on college admissions “built on Brown’s legacy” and required courts to view the Constitution as requiring a “color-blind” approach.

“Brown v. Board was perhaps the most consequential Supreme Court opinion in the last one-hundred years,” the group’s president, Edward Blum, told CNN in a statement. “For a significant majority of Americans of all races, this case established the doctrine of ‘colorblind’ public policies to which all levels of government must adhere.”

The university has said it doesn’t use the racial data to make decisions about applicants.

The libertarian Pacific Legal Foundation has challenged an elite Virginia high school’s proposal to accept a set number of students from each of the county’s middle schools. Parents represented by the group sued the Fairfax County, Virginia, school board in 2021, alleging its policy violated the Constitution by seeking to balance the student body’s racial makeup at the expense of Asian Americans.

A federal appeals court in Richmond disagreed. The Supreme Court in February declined to hear that case.

But similar cases are already on the way.

The group has another appeal challenging admissions practices at three selective public schools in Boston that currently is pending at the Supreme Court. That appeal cites Brown v. Board in a footnote, asserting that the justices have “struggled with cases involving racial discrimination in education” for more than a century.
School segregation up in large districts, study finds

Anastasia Boden, a senior attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation, said that Brown was an important step in ensuring that Americans aren’t treated differently based on their race.

“Fulfilling Brown’s promise means ending discrimination in all of its forms, including modern forms, whereby schools pass new admissions policy for the explicit purpose of ‘racial balancing,’” she said. “The consequence of racial balancing in schools is excluding some students – usually Asian students – solely because of their race.”

But the goal of Brown was never “equal representation,” she said. “It was equal treatment based on race and the elimination of racial discrimination in the law.”

Civil rights groups say that argument misreads the history and meaning of the seminal decision.

David Hinojosa, an attorney with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, argued in favor of affirmative action in the UNC case before the Supreme Court in 2022. Hinojosa, who represented students and alumni, described Brown as an attempt to “shut down this nation’s terrible caste system,” not turn a blind eye toward it.

Proponents for affirmative action in higher education rally in front of the US Supreme Court before oral arguments in Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina on October 31, 2022 in Washington, DC. - Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesMore

“I didn’t think the Supreme Court would go as far as it did,” Hinojosa said, referring to the college admissions case. “For a majority to suggest that Brown v. Board supports the exclusion of highly qualified brown and Black students … is a travesty.”

A product of Chief Justice Earl Warren’s court, both sides agree Brown v. Board was a monumentally important win for civil rights – though it took years, subsequent appeals and military intervention by President Dwight Eisenhower to begin to carry it out.

During confirmation hearings for both Kavanaugh and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, senators needled the then-nominees about whether Brown is settled law. They did so in an effort to highlight distinctions between how former President Donald Trump’s nominees described Brown compared with Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that established a constitutional right to abortion and that the court overturned in 2022.

Kavanaugh, during his 2018 hearings, repeatedly described Brown as the “greatest moment in Supreme Court history.” Barrett noted that she had previously said in writing that Brown “was correct as an original matter.”

And yet the Brown ruling also underscored the limits of the Supreme Court’s power. Though public schools are no longer segregated by law, they have also never been fully integrated. Racial segregation has increased 64% since 1988 in the nation’s 100 largest school districts, according to a study this month from Stanford University and the University of Southern California. The study’s authors pinned the increase on school districts that have been released from court-ordered desegregation plans and an increase in school choice programs.

Advocates such as Hinojosa say the numbers reflect precisely what Brown sought to avoid.

Now, Hinojosa said, the decision is being used by “anti-civil rights groups to further segregate schools.”


Biden commemorates 70th anniversary of Brown v Board with continued appeal to Black voters

Associated Press Videos
Updated Fri, 17 May 2024



President Biden on Friday commemorated the 70th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court ruling that ended segregation in public schools.

“Seventy years ago, when the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, a prayer was answered in the long struggle for freedom,” said Biden, speaking from the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.

He reflected on meeting Thursday with members of the Little Rock Nine and how what they endured in 1957 wasn’t all that long ago, pointing out there is still room for progress.

“We have a whole group of people out there trying to rewrite history, trying to erase history,” Biden said.

Since 2021, at least 18 states have imposed bans or restrictions on teaching topics of race and gender, according to a report by Education Week.

During the 2022-23 school year, 153 districts across 33 states banned books, according to a report by PEN America, many of which were written by authors of color and delve into topics including race and racism.

The Biden-Harris administration this week announced new steps toward achieving educational equity, including investing $20 million in new awards for school districts in Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, North Carolina and Texas to establish magnet programs.

The administration is also launching an interagency process to preserve African American history.

“The Brown decision proves a simple idea: We learn better when we learn together,” Biden said.

After he spoke, members of the Little Rock Nine addressed the crowd with Sheryl Ralph Lee.

They shared what it was like to attend school, escorted by the U.S. National Guard, as mobs of white demonstrators screamed epithets and hung effigies as they walked past.

“They intended to hurt us,” Elizabeth Eckford said.

Racism, added Minnijean Brown Trickey, is designed to make the marginalized hurt. But because they persevered, she said, things were able to change.

“Kids can make presidents act,” Brown Trickey said. “In the end, it was our persistence that made it possible for everyone to have to advocate on our behalf.”

1 in 3 Black Americans says integration hasn’t helped Black students: Survey

Cheyanne M. Daniels
Fri, 17 May 2024 


Seventy years after the landmark Supreme Court decision to end segregation in schools, a majority of Americans believe more should be done to racially integrate schools.

A new Washington Post-Ipsos survey found that 86 percent of U.S. adults support the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, which outlawed racial segregation in public schools. Though 90 percent of White Americans support the decision, only 80 percent of Black Americans said the same.

And while Brown v. Board led to the integration of schools, a third of Black Americans say integration has not improved the quality of education for Black students.

In fact, segregation of schools remains an issue today, though 56 percent of U.S. adults believe schools are now less racially segregated than they were 30 years ago. Thirty percent of Black Americans said there has been no change over the past 30 years.

Jalisa Evans, chief executive officer and founder of the Black Educator Advocates Network, told The Hill that as white students fled school districts to avoid integration, redlining continued to create segregated schools through housing.

“Today, schools with large numbers of Black students are underfunded,” she explained.

In December 2022, the Education Trust found that districts with the most Black, Latino, and Native American students receive significantly less state and local funding than districts with the fewest students of color.

Districts with predominantly nonwhite students, the report found, receive more than $2,000 per student less than predominantly white districts. In a district with 5,000 students, the report concluded, this would equate to $13.5 million in missing resources.

The Washington Post-Ipsos survey found that nearly 68 percent of Americans say more should be done to integrate schools. Nearly two in three White Americans say more needs to be done to integrate schools.

Though a majority of Black Americans support various proposals to reduce segregation in schools, including 79 percent who favor creating more magnet schools and 73 percent who favor redrawing school boundaries to create more diverse school districts, nearly 80 percent of white people say they support “letting students go to the local school in their community, even if it means that most of the students would be of the same race.”

Black Americans are more split, with 51 percent saying students should go to the local school even if most students would be the same race, while 45 percent said transferring students to other schools for more integration is better, even if it means travel.

NATO CONSPIRACY THEORY

Putin seeking to weaponise threat of mass migration, warns Estonian PM

Patrick Wintour in Tallinn
Fri, 17 May 2024 

Kaja Kallas: ‘The lesson from 1938 and 1939 is that if aggression pays off somewhere, it will be taken up elsewhere.’  

Photograph: Gints Ivuskans/AFP/Getty Images

Vladimir Putin is seeking to weaponise the threat of mass migration to divide and weaken Europe as supporters of Ukraine struggle to maintain unity to defeat Russia, Kaja Kallas, the Estonian prime minister, says.

“What our adversaries know is migration is our vulnerability,” she said. “The aim is to make life really impossible in Ukraine so that there would be migration pressure to Europe, and this is what they are doing.”

Speaking in Tallinn on Friday, she said Russia had already created the migration pressure through disruption in Syria and in Africa via the Wagner group.

“I think we have to understand that Russia is weaponising migration. Our adversaries are weaponising migration.

“They push the migrants over the border, and they create problems for the Europeans because they weaponise this since with human rights, you have to accept those people. And that is, of course, water to the mill of the far right.”

Kallas admitted the plight of the Ukrainians on the front was “very serious” and European promises of extra weapons had not been delivered, something that could be rectified if Nato took charge of coordinating weapons delivery. “The problem is that our promises do not save lives,” she said.

Kallas is one of many European politicians trying to spell out the many negative consequences to Europe of a Ukrainian defeat, and rebut those who claim such a reverse could be contained.

She was speaking the day after the former Estonian president Toomas Ilves predicted that if Ukraine fell to Russia as many as 30 million Ukrainians would seek to flee. “That is the threat we face due to our inaction,” he said, adding that Europe had a “complete meltdown” when faced with 2 million refugees from the Middle East in 2015.

A pamphlet produced by pro-Ukrainian NGOs has detailed how Russian shelling between October 2022 and January 2023 had increased migration out of Ukraine by a quarter compared with the previous year.

The recent round of attacks has targeted electricity generation rather than transmission. Olena Halushka, board head at the international centre for a Ukrainian Victory, said: “Right now they are trying to bomb Ukraine into the stone age,” adding that in the past two months more damage had been inflicted than the whole of the winter of 2023.

She said: “Europe needs to think about Kharkiv, a city the size of Munich without energy this winter and then think about the financial implications of tens of millions of Ukrainians fleeing the war due to fear of occupation”.

Kallas said Russian assaults were now targeting Ukrainian cities every day and night.

She conceded that, based on geography and history, some countries in Europe did not see the threat of a Ukrainian defeat in the same way. “They don’t see and they don’t believe that if Ukraine falls Europe is in danger, the whole of Europe, maybe some countries, but not the whole of Europe”.

She said she feared a mistake was being made similar to the late 1930s, when linked conflicts were seen as isolated events. Kallas, tipped as a possible successor to Josep Borrell as EU high commissioner for foreign policy, cited links between the conflicts in Azerbaijan and Armenia, the Middle East, and the South China Sea. She said the same error was made in the 1930s about the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, the German occupation of Austria and the Sino-Japanese war.

“The lesson from 1938 and 1939 is that if aggression pays off somewhere, it will be taken up elsewhere. Ukraine’s defeat is something all aggressors will learn from. They will learn that in 2024, bluntly, you can just colonise another country and nothing happens to you.”

She pointed to what she described as baby steps to strengthening the European defence architecture, including a European defence fund, the increase in individual nation state defence spending, and the proposal for a shared defence debt bond to boost spending. She denied Estonia had had any serious discussions about sending troops to Ukraine, while arguing at the same time it was better to keep Putin guessing about Europe’s plans.

She said it was also a valid criticism that Ukraine was not moving fast enough to mobilise more troops.

Meanwhile, Russia’s foreign ministry warned the west it was playing with fire by allowing Ukraine to use western missiles and weapons to strike Russia, and said it would not leave such actions unanswered.

The foreign ministry said in a statement that it saw the hand of the US and Britain behind a recent spate of attacks, and blamed Washington and London for escalating the conflict by authorising Ukraine to use long-range rockets and heavy weapons they had supplied against Russian targets.

“Once again, we should like to unequivocally warn Washington, London, Brussels and other western capitals, as well as Kyiv, which is under their control, that they are playing with fire. Russia will not leave such encroachments on its territory unanswered,” the ministry said.

Reuters contributed to this report

CHURCH & STATE

‘Georgia is now governed by Russia’: how the dream of freedom unravelled

Daniel Boffey in Tbilisi
Fri, 17 May 2024 

Protesters Ekaterine Burkadze and her nephew Paata Kaloiani: ‘We have to protect our republic and our peaceful future in the EU.’Photograph: Daniel Boffey/The Guardian


The army of riot police had finally retreated from Rustaveli Avenue, the broad thoroughfare in front of the parliament building, back into the barricaded parliamentary estate.

The last hour on the streets of the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, had been violent. Snatch squads had grabbed protesters as officers, beating their shields with truncheons, surged forward to push the chanting crowds away from the graffiti-scrawled, imposing parliament building.

It was Tuesday afternoon and the MPs inside needed to get out after passing the hated “foreign agents” law – which they did. But the police retreat, under a light shower of plastic bottles and eggs, was raucously cheered nonetheless. Then the crowd started to sing: “So praise be to freedom, to freedom be praise.”

It was the Georgian national anthem, Tavisupleba, or Freedom, a bitter sweet reminder to some of the older protesters of a time of great promise – and disappointment.

Tavisupleba, composed by Zacharia Paliashvili, was adopted in May 2004, along with Georgia’s new national flag and coat of arms. They were symbols of a new era after the non-violent Rose revolution swept away the corrupt Soviet hang-over administration of President Eduard Shevardnadze, a former Soviet minister of foreign affairs.

If then there was hope, now there is anger. The significance of the “foreign agents” law may seem arcane to those outside Georgia, but for those on the streets it is an attempt to smear dissenting western voices as traitors.

Civil society organisations and media receiving more than 20% of their revenues from abroad will have to register as “organisations serving the interests of a foreign power”.

The legislation is said to be part of an unravelling of all that has been achieved, albeit in fits and starts, since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

“Georgia has been protesting for 30 years,” said Ekaterine Burkadze, 45, as protesters’ horns sounded in the background and the rain fell. “But in the beginning they all seem more or less acceptable.”

Two decades ago it had been Mikheil Saakashvili, a US-educated and media-friendly ally of the west, leading the revolution. He became president with 96% of the vote but the support was genuine.

In his first term, his anti-corruption zeal and determination to bring Georgia closer to Nato and the EU won him accolades at home and abroad, and impressive economic growth.

By the second term, however, international monitors and domestic NGOs were warning of the growth of a kleptocracy and creeping authoritarianism. Saakashvili’s zeal and purpose, which had been so attractive, started to wear thin.

“The reforms were very top-down and they had to be fast,” said Ghia Nodia, who served as the minister of education and science in Saakashvili’s cabinet in 2008. “The idea was we don’t have too much time. There was a concentration of power and, of course, Saakashvili is a power junkie, if you will, and there was really no opposition.”

Related: The ‘foreign agents’ law that has set off mass protests in Georgia - podcast

Well-intended policies were executed in a manner that would store up long-term political problems.

Saakashvili wanted to reform Georgia’s universities, which were “rotting and corrupt”, said Nodia. Rectors were appointed by the ministry of education, academics forced to reapply for their jobs and institutions merged, all in a two-year frenzy.

The universities’ autonomy was restored but many intellectuals and opinion makers had been thoroughly disillusioned.

Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008, after a confrontation between Tbilisi and Moscow over the breakaway region of South Ossetia, appeared on the face of it to replenish Saakashvili’s political stock.

When he announced a ceasefire after five days of conflict he was cheered by those who, a year earlier, had taken to the streets calling for his resignation.

But Russia continued to occupy 20% of Georgia. Saakashvili’s apparent disregard for upsetting Moscow would come to be portrayed by the opposition Georgian Dream party as reckless.

Then there was a major domestic scandal. Video footage emerged on the eve of the 2012 election, broadcast by the opposition-supporting channel TV9, that appeared to show a half-naked prisoner weeping and begging for mercy as two guards kicked and slapped him, before raping him with a broomstick.

Saakashvili called the incident “a horrific affront to human rights and dignity” and vowed to bring the guilty to justice.

Related: ‘We are very strong’: Georgia’s gen Z drives protests against return to past

The scandal spoke to a perception in Georgia that what had started as a “zero tolerance” approach to crime had warped into something far more sinister.

The mysterious billionaire and leader of Georgian Dream, Bidzina Ivanishvili, who had made his fortune in Russia in the 1990s, issued a statement condemning “these acts of torture by the Georgian government”.

In the election, Ivanishvili’s party swept to victory on a platform that promised to restore civil rights and reset relations with Moscow while pursuing EU membership.

Saakashvili accepted the voters’ decision, in the first peaceful democratic transition of power in Georgian history.

More ominously, the Kremlin welcomed the result. Few saw the creeping danger.

David Katsarava, 46, is in hospital requiring surgery for fractured cheek bones after a brutal beating by riot police during the violent hour on Tuesday before the national anthem was sung.

He is well known in Georgia for his work monitoring the “line of occupation” between Georgian-held territory and where Russian troops now sit.

Katsarava supported Georgian Dream in 2012. “We thought that with the changing of this government we can come back again in the right direction,” he said. “This was a big, big mistake. Nowadays, we see that Georgia is governed by Russian government.”

The story of the past 12 years has been of Georgia talking up its prospective membership of the EU while pursuing incompatible policies – and getting away with it, he said.

Nodia, who today runs a thinktank, said it was after 2018 – when it had briefly appeared that Georgian Dream’s preferred presidential candidate, and eventual winner, Salome Zourabichvili, might lose – that the Georgian government turned.

“I think Ivanishvili believed that the west was behind it,” Nodia said. “Ultimately, he wants to stay in power.”

Anti-western groups, some on the far right and not formally associated with Georgian Dream, started targeting the government’s critics in the streets or at protests.

Saakashvili, who had left Georgia shortly after the election, was convicted in absentia in 2018 for abuse of office and sentenced to six years in prison. He was arrested on his return three years ago and remains in detention.

Giorgi Kandelaki, who was an MP in Saakashvili’s United National Movement party, said the reset in US-Russian relations under the then US president Barack Obama provided the context for what has happened, with the west willing to accept Georgian alignment with Moscow – all the way up to the Ukraine war.

“Ivanishvili had been saying all these things for years, but no one wanted to listen,” Kandelaki said.

It was only when Russia invaded Ukraine that the Georgian government had to pick a side – declining to join the west in imposing sanctions. Even then, it was granted EU candidate status in December.

Gabrielius Landsbergis, Lithuania’s foreign minister, who was in Tbilisi this week, conceded the EU was culpable in “managing the decline”.

“I’ve been here before,” Landsbergis said. “We were saying the same things about electoral law, about the way judges are appointed, about so many things, and no steps were taken. It was escalating and we didn’t meet that escalation.”

Back among the protesters, Burkadze and her 21-year-old nephew Paata Kaloiani are facing many more days and nights on the streets. “We protested at the Rose revolution, we protested against Saakashvili. Now we are here,” she said. “We have to protect our republic and our peaceful future in the European Union”.



VIPER AT THE NATION'S NECK

Thousands mark Family Purity in Georgia as anti-govt protests simmer

Reuters
Fri, 17 May 2024 





People mark Day of Family Purity in Tbilisi


TBILISI (Reuters) - Thousands of Georgians led by Orthodox Christian clerics marked "Family Purity Day" on Friday, marching down the same central avenue in Tbilisi that has been the scene of some of the fiercest anti-government protests in the country's history.

The contrasting groups staging the marches - pro-Orthodox and conservative on one side and pro-European on the other - spotlight the deep divisions within Georgian society as it grapples with an unprecedented political crisis.

For over a month, thousands of protesters, many of them young people, have filled Tbilisi's streets on a near-nightly basis to voice their opposition to a draft law on "foreign agents" they condemn as authoritarian and Russian-inspired.

The United States and the European Union have repeatedly warned the ruling Georgian Dream party to drop the bill, which protesters fear will harm the South Caucasus country's bid to join the European Union.

Dozens of rallygoers have been arrested or hospitalised since mid-April after police deployed water cannon and fired tear gas canisters and stun grenades to disperse the crowds.

By contrast, Friday's march received the tacit support of Georgian Dream, whose leading members including Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze took part.

Declared an official government holiday this year, the "Day of Family Purity and Respect for Parents" celebrates what the Georgian Orthodox Church calls the country's "family values" of marriage between a man and a woman.

LGBTQ rights are a contentious topic in Georgia, a traditionally Orthodox Christian country of 3.7 million.

Georgian Dream introduced a bill in March that would ban sex changes and adoption by same-sex couples, among other restrictions, a move seen by opponents as an attempt to boost its popularity ahead of elections later this year.

The Church began marking "Family Purity Day" in 2014, one year after an LGBTQ rights rally in Tbilisi was violently dispersed by crowds led by priests and conservative groups. May 17 is commemorated in many countries as the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia.

On Friday, throngs of mostly families and elderly people paraded down Tbilisi's streets, brandishing Orthodox icons and Georgian flags.

Outside parliament, where just a few days ago protesters were led away by police, people queued for their turn to kiss a large icon held aloft by a priest clad in black robes.

"Today is a great day," said marcher Zviad Sekhniashvili, dressed in the traditional garb of Caucasian highlanders.

"Family is our fortress... That's why God created man and woman: to have a family, to have kids."

Other holidaymakers said they saw family as linked to the concept of the Georgian nation.

"Family is like a little state," a woman who gave her name as Mariam said. "If our family is good, it's good for the country."

(Reporting by Reuters in Tbilisi; Writing by Lucy Papachristou in London; Editing by Nick Macfie)