Monday, June 01, 2020

The Coronavirus Was an Emergency Until Trump Found Out Who Was Dying

The pandemic has exposed the bitter terms of our racial contract, which deems certain lives of greater value than others.

MAY 8, 2020

Adam Serwer
ARSH RAZIUDDIN / THE ATLANTIC

 May 9, 2020.

Six weeks ago, ahmaud arbery went out and never came home. Gregory and Travis McMichael, who saw Arbery running through their neighborhood just outside of Brunswick, Georgia, and who told authorities they thought he was a burglary suspect, armed themselves, pursued Arbery, and then shot him dead.

The local prosecutor, George E. Barnhill, concluded that no crime had been committed. Arbery had tried to wrest a shotgun from Travis McMichael before being shot, Barnhill wrote in a letter to the police chief. The two men who had seen a stranger running, and decided to pick up their firearms and chase him, had therefore acted in self-defense when they confronted and shot him, Barnhill concluded. On Tuesday, as video of the shooting emerged on social media, a different Georgia prosecutor announced that the case would be put to a grand jury; the two men were arrested and charged with murder yesterday evening after video of the incident sparked national outrage across the political spectrum.

To see the sequence of events that led to Arbery’s death as benign requires a cascade of assumptions. One must assume that two men arming themselves and chasing down a stranger running through their neighborhood is a normal occurrence. One must assume that the two armed white men had a right to self-defense, and that the black man suddenly confronted by armed strangers did not. One must assume that state laws are meant to justify an encounter in which two people can decide of their own volition to chase, confront, and kill a person they’ve never met.

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Ibram X. Kendi: Ahmaud Arbery could have been me

But Barnhill’s leniency is selective—as The Appeal’s Josie Duffy Rice notes, Barnhill attempted to prosecute Olivia Pearson, a black woman, for helping another black voter use an electronic voting machine. A crime does not occur when white men stalk and kill a black stranger. A crime does occur when black people vote.

The underlying assumptions of white innocence and black guilt are all part of what the philosopher Charles Mills calls the “racial contract.” If the social contract is the implicit agreement among members of a society to follow the rules—for example, acting lawfully, adhering to the results of elections, and contesting the agreed-upon rules by nonviolent means—then the racial contract is a codicil rendered in invisible ink, one stating that the rules as written do not apply to nonwhite people in the same way. The Declaration of Independence states that all men are created equal; the racial contract limits this to white men with property. The law says murder is illegal; the racial contract says it’s fine for white people to chase and murder black people if they have decided that those black people scare them. “The terms of the Racial Contract,” Mills wrote, “mean that nonwhite subpersonhood is enshrined simultaneously with white personhood.”

The racial contract is not partisan—it guides staunch conservatives and sensitive liberals alike—but it works most effectively when it remains imperceptible to its beneficiaries. As long as it is invisible, members of society can proceed as though the provisions of the social contract apply equally to everyone. But when an injustice pushes the racial contract into the open, it forces people to choose whether to embrace, contest, or deny its existence. Video evidence of unjustified shootings of black people is so jarring in part because it exposes the terms of the racial contract so vividly. But as the process in the Arbery case shows, the racial contract most often operates unnoticed, relying on Americans to have an implicit understanding of who is bound by the rules, and who is exempt from them.

The implied terms of the racial contract are visible everywhere for those willing to see them. A 12-year-old with a toy gun is a dangerous threat who must be met with lethal force; armed militias drawing beads on federal agents are heroes of liberty. Struggling white farmers in Iowa taking billions in federal assistance are hardworking Americans down on their luck; struggling single parents in cities using food stamps are welfare queens. Black Americans struggling in the cocaine epidemic are a “bio-underclass” created by a pathological culture; white Americans struggling with opioid addiction are a national tragedy. Poor European immigrants who flocked to an America with virtually no immigration restrictions came “the right way”; poor Central American immigrants evading a baroque and unforgiving system are gang members and terrorists.

The coronavirus epidemic has rendered the racial contract visible in multiple ways. Once the disproportionate impact of the epidemic was revealed to the American political and financial elite, many began to regard the rising death toll less as a national emergency than as an inconvenience. Temporary measures meant to prevent the spread of the disease by restricting movement, mandating the wearing of masks, or barring large social gatherings have become the foulest tyranny. The lives of workers at the front lines of the pandemic—such as meatpackers, transportation workers, and grocery clerks—have been deemed so worthless that legislators want to immunize their employers from liability even as they force them to work under unsafe conditions. In East New York, police assault black residents for violating social-distancing rules; in Lower Manhattan, they dole out masks and smiles to white pedestrians.

Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign, with its vows to enforce state violence against Mexican immigrants, Muslims, and black Americans, was built on a promise to enforce terms of the racial contract that Barack Obama had ostensibly neglected, or violated by his presence. Trump’s administration, in carrying out an explicitly discriminatory agenda that valorizes cruelty, war crimes, and the entrenchment of white political power, represents a revitalized commitment to the racial contract.

Adam Serwer: White nationalism’s deep American roots

But the pandemic has introduced a new clause to the racial contract. The lives of disproportionately black and brown workers are being sacrificed to fuel the engine of a faltering economy, by a president who disdains them. This is the COVID contract.

As the first cases of the coronavirus were diagnosed in the United States, in late January and early February, the Trump administration and Fox News were eager to play down the risk it posed. But those early cases, tied to international travel, ensnared many members of the global elite: American celebrities, world leaders, and those with close ties to Trump himself. By March 16, the president had reversed course, declaring a national emergency and asking Americans to avoid social gatherings.

The purpose of the restrictions was to flatten the curve of infections, to keep the spread of the virus from overwhelming the nation’s medical infrastructure, and to allow the federal government time to build a system of testing and tracing that could contain the outbreak. Although testing capacity is improving, the president has very publicly resisted investing the necessary resources, because testing would reveal more infections; in his words, “by doing all of this testing, we make ourselves look bad.”

Over the weeks that followed the declaration of an emergency, the pandemic worsened and the death toll mounted. Yet by mid-April, conservative broadcasters were decrying the restrictions, small bands of armed protesters were descending on state capitols, and the president was pressing to lift the constraints.

In the interim, data about the demographics of COVID-19 victims began to trickle out. On April 7, major outlets began reporting that preliminary data showed that black and Latino Americans were being disproportionately felled by the coronavirus. That afternoon, Rush Limbaugh complained, “If you dare criticize the mobilization to deal with this, you’re going to be immediately tagged as a racist.” That night, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson announced, “It hasn’t been the disaster that we feared.” His colleague Brit Hume mused that “the disease turned out not to be quite as dangerous as we thought.” The nationwide death toll that day was just 13,000 people; it now stands above 70,000, a mere month later.

As Matt Gertz writes, some of these premature celebrations may have been an overreaction to the changes in the prominent coronavirus model designed by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, which had recently revised its estimates down to about 60,000 deaths by August. But even as the mounting death toll proved that estimate wildly optimistic, the chorus of right-wing elites demanding that the economy reopen grew louder. By April 16, the day the first anti-lockdown protests began, deaths had more than doubled, to more than 30,000.

That more and more Americans were dying was less important than who was dying.

The disease is now “infecting people who cannot afford to miss work or telecommute—grocery store employees, delivery drivers and construction workers,” The Washington Post reported. Air travel has largely shut down, and many of the new clusters are in nursing homes, jails and prisons, and factories tied to essential industries. Containing the outbreak was no longer a question of social responsibility, but of personal responsibility. From the White House podium, Surgeon General Jerome Adams told “communities of color” that “we need you to step up and help stop the spread.”

Public-health restrictions designed to contain the outbreak were deemed absurd. They seemed, in Carlson’s words, “mindless and authoritarian,” a “weird kind of arbitrary fascism.” To restrict the freedom of white Americans, just because nonwhite Americans are dying, is an egregious violation of the racial contract. The wealthy luminaries of conservative media have sought to couch their opposition to restrictions as advocacy on behalf of workers, but polling shows that those most vulnerable to both the disease and economic catastrophe want the outbreak contained before they return to work.

Read: What the ‘liberate’ protests really mean for Republicans

Although the full picture remains unclear, researchers have found that disproportionately black counties “account for more than half of coronavirus cases and nearly 60 percent of deaths.”* The disproportionate burden that black and Latino Americans are bearing is in part a direct result of their overrepresentation in professions where they risk exposure, and of a racial gap in wealth and income that has left them more vulnerable to being laid off. Black and Latino workers are overrepresented among the essential, the unemployed, and the dead.

This is a very old and recognizable story—political and financial elites displaying a callous disregard for the workers of any race who make their lives of comfort possible. But in America, where labor and race are so often intertwined, the racial contract has enabled the wealthy to dismiss workers as both undeserving and expendable. White Americans are also suffering, but the perception that the coronavirus is largely a black and brown problem licenses elites to dismiss its impact. In America, the racial contract has shaped the terms of class war for centuries; the COVID contract shapes it here.

This tangled dynamic played out on Tuesday, during oral arguments over Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers’s statewide stay-at-home order before the state Supreme Court, held remotely. Chief Justice Patience Roggensack was listening to Wisconsin Assistant Attorney General Colin Roth defend the order.

“When you see a virus like this one that does not respect county boundaries, this started out predominantly in Madison and Milwaukee; then we just had this outbreak in Brown County very recently in the meatpacking plants,” Roth explained. “The cases in Brown County in a span of two weeks surged over tenfold, from 60 to almost 800—”


“Due to the meatpacking, though, that’s where Brown County got the flare,” Roggensack interrupted to clarify. “It wasn’t just the regular folks in Brown County.”

Perhaps Roggensack did not mean that the largely Latino workers in Brown County’s meatpacking plants—who have told reporters that they have been forced to work in proximity with one another, often without masks or hand sanitizer, and without being notified that their colleagues are infected—are not “regular folks” like the other residents of the state. Perhaps she merely meant that their line of work puts them at greater risk, and so the outbreaks in the meatpacking plants, seen as essential to the nation’s food supply, are not rationally related to the governor’s stay-at-home order, from which they would be exempt.

Eric Schlosser: The essentials

Yet either way, Roggensack was drawing a line between “regular folks” and the workers who keep them fed, mobile, safe, and connected. And America’s leaders have treated those workers as largely expendable, praising their valor while disregarding their safety.


“There were no masks. There was no distancing inside the plant, only [in the] break room. We worked really close to each other,” Raquel Sanchez Alvarado, a worker with American Foods, a Wisconsin meatpacking company, told local reporters in mid-April. “People are scared that they will be fired and that they will not find a job at another company if they express their concerns.”

In Colorado, hundreds of workers in meatpacking plants have contracted the coronavirus. In South Dakota, where a Smithfield plant became the site of an outbreak infecting more than 700 workers, a spokesperson told BuzzFeed News that the issue was their “large immigrant population.” On Tuesday, when Iowa reported that thousands of workers at meat-processing plants had become infected, Governor Kim Reynolds was bragging in The Washington Post about how well her approach to the coronavirus had worked.

Although, by the official tally, more than 70,000 Americans have died from the coronavirus, many governors are rushing to reopen their states without sufficient testing to contain their outbreaks. (Statistical analyses of excess deaths in comparison with years past suggest that COVID-19 casualties are approaching and may soon exceed 100,000.) Yet the Trump administration is poised to declare “mission accomplished,” engaging in the doublespeak of treating the pandemic as though the major risks have passed, while rhetorically preparing the country for thousands more deaths. The worst-case scenarios may not come to pass. But federal policy reflects the president’s belief that he has little to lose by gambling with the lives of those Americans most likely to be affected.

“We can’t keep our country closed down for years,” Trump said Wednesday. But that was no one’s plan. The plan was to buy time to take the necessary steps to open the country safely. But the Trump administration did not do that, because it did not consider the lives of the people dying worth the effort or money required to save them.

The economic devastation wrought by the pandemic, and the Trump administration’s failure to prepare for it even as it crippled the world’s richest nations, cannot be overstated. Tens of millions of Americans are unemployed. Tens of thousands line up outside food banks and food pantries each week to obtain sustenance they cannot pay for. Businesses across the country are struggling and failing. The economy cannot be held in stasis indefinitely—the longer it is, the more people will suffer.

Annie Lowrey: The small business die-off is here

Yet the only tension between stopping the virus and reviving the economy is one the Trump administration and its propaganda apparatus have invented. Economists are in near-unanimous agreement that the safest path requires building the capacity to contain the virus before reopening the economy—precisely because new waves of deaths will drive Americans back into self-imposed isolation, destroying the consumer spending that powers economic growth. The federal government can afford the necessary health infrastructure and financial aid; it already shelled out hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts to wealthy Americans. But the people in charge do not consider doing so to be worthwhile—Republicans have already dismissed aid to struggling state governments that laid off a million workers this month alone as a “blue-state bailout,” while pushing for more tax cuts for the rich.

“The people of our country are warriors,” Trump told reporters Tuesday. “I’m not saying anything is perfect, and will some people be affected? Yes. Will some people be affected badly? Yes. But we have to get our country open and we have to get it open soon.”

The frame of war allows the president to call for the collective sacrifice of laborers without taking the measures necessary to ensure their safety, while the upper classes remain secure at home. But the workers who signed up to harvest food, deliver packages, stack groceries, drive trains and buses, and care for the sick did not sign up for war, and the unwillingness of America’s political leadership to protect them is a policy decision, not an inevitability. Trump is acting in accordance with the terms of the racial contract, which values the lives of those most likely to be affected less than the inconveniences necessary to preserve them. The president’s language of wartime unity is a veil draped over a federal response that offers little more than contempt for those whose lives are at risk. To this administration, they are simply fuel to keep the glorious Trump economy burning.

Collective solidarity in response to the coronavirus remains largely intact—most Americans support the restrictions and are not eager to sacrifice their lives or those of their loved ones for a few points of gross domestic product. The consistency across incomes and backgrounds is striking in an era of severe partisan polarization. But solidarity with the rest of the nation among elite Republicans—those whose lives and self-conceptions are intertwined with the success of the Trump presidency—began eroding as soon as the disproportionate impact of the outbreak started to emerge.

The president’s cavalier attitude is at least in part a reflection of his fear that the economic downturn caused by the coronavirus will doom his political fortunes in November. But what connects the rise of the anti-lockdown protests, the president’s dismissal of the carnage predicted by his own administration, and the eagerness of governors all over the country to reopen the economy before developing the capacity to do so safely is the sense that those they consider “regular folks” will be fine.

Many of them will be. People like Ahmaud Arbery, whose lives are depreciated by the terms of the racial contract, will not.
Related Podcast

Listen to Adam Serwer talk about this story on Social Distance, The Atlantic’s podcast about life in the pandemic:

Subscribe to Social Distance on Apple Podcasts or Spotify (How to Listen)

*Correction: An earlier version of this piece misdescribed a study showing disproportionately black counties were responsible for more than half of coronavirus cases in the United States by describing those counties as “majority black.”


ADAM SERWER is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers politics.
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Christo Found Beauty in Realizing the Impossible


The conceptual artist, who died yesterday at 84, made constructing quixotic, monumental projects his life’s work.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude looking for a possible site for The Mastaba for the United Arab Emirates in February 1982 WOLFGANG VOLZ

It takes a truly unique eye to see beauty in bureaucracy, to look at a snarl of planning regulations and NIMBYism and red tape and to convert it, through sheer imaginative alchemy, into art itself. And yet that quality is exactly what defined the work of Christo, who died on Sunday at the age of 84, and his partner, Jeanne-Claude, over the course of a 60-year career. “For me, the excitement begins when I leave the studio,” Christo says in Christo’s Valley Curtain, a 1974 documentary by the Maysles Brothers that captured the artists’ temporary installation of a 1,300-foot orange drape over a valley in the Rocky Mountains. The “real-life experience” of creation, he explains, the “engineering problems, dealing with construction workers, the blueprints, permission from governments … all of these things give me what I can never imagine.” Like no other artist, Christo saw the obstacles in his way as part of his life’s work, vital elements that affirmed the significance of what he managed to achieve.

Photos: The works of Christo and Jeanne-Claude

Christo and Jeanne-Claude, who died in 2009, also redefined what—and who—art is supposed to be for. Their signature works couldn’t be commodified because they existed for only weeks or months at a time, free for anyone to behold and funded by the artists themselves. They were, in Christo’s own words, “absolutely irrational, with no justification to exist.” Whimsical and intrinsically useless, the immense installations—which included wrapping the Berlin Reichstag in 1.1 million square feet of polypropylene fabric in 1995 and erecting more than 7,500 saffron-colored cloth gates in Central Park in 2005—served as temporary monuments to beauty, and to the triumph of vision.Demonstrating his wrap-it art in 1963, Christo applies a polythene sheet to an ancient sculpture in Rome. With the plastic sheet and some string, Christo explains, "The sculpture takes on the loving form of mystery." (Bettmann / Getty)

Christo’s philosophy that his art should have no purpose was in part a rejection of his training. Born in Bulgaria in 1935 to an activist and the manager of a fabric factory, he attended the Sofia Academy of Fine Arts in the early 1950s, when the country was under Soviet rule and students were expected to produce propaganda. As a student, Christo was sent to help farmers arrange their fields to appear well tended to any Western visitors passing through on the Orient Express. The experience, he said in 2005, crystallized his determination to create freely, but also gave him an early sense of what might be possible working in open spaces. In 1956, he stowed away on a train to Vienna, deserting his military service and seeking asylum as a stateless person. He later moved to Paris on a French visa and met Jeanne-Claude when he was commissioned to paint a portrait of her mother. Their partnership, which lasted more than five decades, was spiritual and practical—when they traveled internationally, they reportedly flew on separate planes so one could continue to finish the pair’s work in the event of a crash.

Starting in the early 1960s, Christo and Jeanne-Claude explored ways to transform the feel and the meaning of objects and spaces. Christo described their works as “gentle disturbances” that rejected political or financial constraints. The couple’s shared ability to sweet-talk naysayers became a crucial part of their process. In 1962, when they constructed a blockade out of oil barrels on Paris’s Rue Visconti, Jeanne-Claude argued forcefully with policemen on the scene until they agreed to let the work stay up for a few more hours. For the 1976 installation of Running Fence, a 25-mile gate of white nylon that ran through private land in California, the couple had to persuade skeptical ranchers to let the artists temporarily co-opt their land for a project that was difficult to explain. After one complained to Jeanne-Claude that the work had no purpose, she replied that the purpose was simply beauty itself, and pointed to the flowers he’d planted in his front stoop instead of more useful vegetables. The pair were so successful at defending and self-funding their work (which they paid for by selling sketches and models of desired projects) that the Harvard Business Review published a book about them titled The Art of the Entrepreneur.Left: Christo and Jeanne-Claude in Ibaraki, Japan, in 1988 (Wolfgang Volz / laif / Redux). Right: Christo and others dragging yards of plastic to be used in the construction of his balloon sculpture entitled 5600 Cubicmeter Package (Carlo Bavagnoli / The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty)

For Christo, the process of negotiating his way to an eventual win—no matter how long it took or how many times he was initially rejected—became its own affirmation of artistic freedom. And the same process of bureaucratic delay changed the context of the works in ways he found irresistible. A project to wrap the Reichstag took 24 years, three official refusals, and the fall of communism before it was completed in 1995. Although Christo rejected political readings of his work, covering the German parliament building in chalk-colored fabric and rope seemed to some to symbolize a blank slate for the country after the fall of the Berlin Wall, rather than the decades-long stifling of a city by a foreign power. A plan to wrap the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, initially scheduled for this year, was twice delayed, once because of the coronavirus pandemic and once to protect kestrel falcons who nest on the structure in the springtime. (Throughout their careers, Christo and Jeanne-Claude tried to prioritize sustainability, commissioning environmental-impact reports for projects in development and making sure that components could be recycled and reused after works were dismantled.)Left: Surrounded Islands in Biscayne Bay, Florida. Right: Wrapped Reichstag in Berlin (Wolfgang Volz)

The transient nature of the works Christo and Jeanne-Claude made also underscored the importance of process to them. Projects that might be in inception for several decades and cost tens of millions of dollars would be installed for just a couple of weeks, long enough for hundreds of thousands of people to witness the transformation of their shared landscape, but fleeting enough to convey a distinctly human vulnerability. “Our works are temporary in order to endow the works of art with a feeling of urgency to be seen, and the love and tenderness brought by the fact that they will not last,” the artists explained in a brochure for The Gates in 2005. That installation in New York City was championed by Michael Bloomberg, and heavily mocked by comedians and commentators at the time, who saw it as an unsightly boondoggle in Manhattan’s most visible public space. And yet the work feels like an astonishing feat in retrospect: a huge, ephemeral, self-funded construction in one of the most expensive and bureaucratically knotty cities in the world, where art and architecture tend to be inextricably entwined with commerce and power. “The reason we don’t like the projects to stay is no one can charge for tickets, nobody can buy this project,” Christo said in a lecture in 2016. “It is freedom. Freedom is the enemy of possession, and possession is permanence.”Left: Wrapped Trees in Fondation Beyeler and Berower Park in Riehen, Switzerland (Wolfgang Volz / laif / Redux). Right: The Floating Piers in Lake Iseo, Italy (Wolfgang Volz)

Christo and Jeanne-Claude weren’t always successful in pushing their work to completion. Over 50 years, Christo told an interviewer in 2014, they realized 22 projects but failed to get permission for 37 more. Some they eventually abandoned; others, they kept fighting for, shifting to new locations in search of a more favorable reception. (2016’s Floating Piers, in which 200,000 bright-yellow polyethylene cubes arranged in Italy’s Lake Iseo allowed spectators to briefly walk on water, was initially denied as a project in Argentina and Japan.) Over the River, a project that was designed to suspend almost six miles of fabric over the Arkansas River in Colorado, was finally canceled in 2017, after 20 years and almost $15 million in expenditures. The reason Christo cited at the time, unusually, was that the government overseeing the federal land had changed. Like many artists, he didn’t believe Donald Trump would be elected president, he told The New York Times then. “I can’t do a project that benefits this landlord.”

Still, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s list of failures is as much a part of their body of work as the art they managed to physically create. The point of their vision wasn’t to make things that could stand grandly outside of museums or in the marble atria of office buildings; it was to prove instead that colossal, difficult, complicated schemes could be realized for no other reason than to make the world more beautiful. The amount of time that it takes to achieve the finished product—and how much work and investment is required—is inevitably forgotten when you get to see for a moment the sheer magnitude of what’s possible.

WOLFGANG VOLZ





SOPHIE GILBERT is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she covers culture.

CHINA, IRAN, VENEZUELA CALL FOR AMERICANS TO OPPOSE "TYRANT" TRUMP 
SO DO G6, G13, UN, WHO, IMF, WORLD BANK, NATO, EU, ETC ETC


THE ONLY PROTESTS TRUMP LIKES ARE THOSE OF ARMED WHITE PEOPLE



Birth of a Nation was the first feature film produced in Hollywood. It remains as divisive as it did when it came out in 1915. D. W. Griffith push the art of cinema into the 20th century by pioneering new editing and camera techniques, however the film’s values are those of racial bigotry, where black people are lazy and criminal, and the KKK are heroes



The First Resurgence

American Experience PBS
After the
"Klansville U.S.A." premiered January 13, 2015 at 9/8c on PBS American Experience. 1915 premiere of D.W. Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation," there was a resurgence in the Ku Klux Klan in America. By the mid-1920s, nearly 4 million Americans claimed Klan membership, making them a powerful political force. 
For information on how to watch the full documentary film, "Klansville U.S.A." please visit: https://tinyurl.com/yakea38v
 
1915, African American newspaper editor and civil rights activist William Monroe Trotter waged a battle against D.W. Griffith’s notoriously Ku Klux Klan-friendly blockbuster The Birth of a Nation, which unleashed a fight still raging today about race relations and representation, and the power and influence of Hollywood. Birth of a Movement features commentary from Spike Lee, Reginald Hudlin, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and DJ Spooky (who created a new score and remix of the Griffith film), and numerous clips from the technically groundbreaking but racially astounding epic.In 



American Academy in Berlin

The American Ku Klux Klan is familiar to many: after the Civil War, it formed in the southern states as a masked terrorist group devoted to maintaining white supremacy and ensuring cheap sharecropper labor. But few know about the “second KKK,” which attracted three to six million members in the 1920s in the northern states. It became a mass organization by expanding its enemies list to include Catholics and Jews. It claimed that America was “destined” to be a white Protestant nation, and that God had created the Klan in order to stop Catholic and Jewish conspiracies to seize power. This second Klan was mainly nonviolent, was not secret, and pursued a highly successful electoral and legislative strategy. In this talk, historian Linda Gordon argues that the second Klan’s white nationalist ideology and strategy continue to influence US politics and can help to illuminate the recent rise of “populist” and fascistic movements around the globe.

Bird may have caused Canada air force aerobatics plane to crash

Issued on: 02/06/2020
A screengrab taken from a video obtained from the Facebook account of Jason Kyle Arnold shows a fire burning after a plane from Canada's Snowbirds, an elite air force aerobatics team, crashed on May 17, 2020 in Kamloops, British Columbia Jason Kyle Arnold AFP/File


Montreal (AFP)

A bird may have caused a plane from an elite Canadian air force aerobatics team to crash, resulting in the death of one team member and injury to another, the defence department said Monday.

The aircraft -- part of the team known as the Snowbirds -- crashed into the front yard of a house in British Columbia shortly after taking off from Kamloops Airport late morning on May 18.

In a preliminary report, the Department of National Defence's Airworthiness Investigative Authority said it had obtained video footage that revealed "one bird in very close proximity to the aircraft right engine intake during the critical post take-off phase.


"The flight safety investigation will focus on environmental factors (the bird strike) and the performance of the escape system," the report said.

The plane was scheduled to fly over British Columbia as part of a tour dubbed "Operation Inspiration," launched in early May to pay tribute to Canadians' efforts to battle the coronavirus pandemic.

The report showed that the CT-114 plane had gained altitude, before abruptly leaving the Snowbirds' formation and entering a nose-down spin.

Both passengers were able to eject from the plane but were injured upon landing. Captain Jenn Casey, 35, a Public Affairs Officer with the Air Force, died as a result of her injuries.

"The most difficult work of an investigation begins as we peel back the layers to understand why and how this happened," said Colonel John Alexander, the director of flight safety and the Airworthiness Investigative Authority.

"We are laser-focused to understanding everything we can about the accident so we can recommend effective preventative measures," he said.

The Snowbirds' signature nine-jet formation, with trailing white smoke, began its tour in Nova Scotia and was to perform aerial displays over cities from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans, at elevations as low as 500 feet (150 meters).

The Snowbirds' signature nine-jet formation, with trailing white smoke, began its tour in Nova Scotia and was to perform aerial displays over cities from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans, at elevations as low as 500 feet (150 meters).

The team has temporarily suspended flights since the crash.

© 2020 AFP

Ex-champ Mayweather to pay for Floyd funeral: report


Issued on: 02/06/2020

Los Angeles (AFP)

Retired ring great Floyd Mayweather will pay for the funeral services for George Floyd, Mayweather Promotions chief executive Leonard Ellerbe told ESPN on Monday.

George Floyd died last week after a Minneapolis policeman knelt on the 46-year-old man's neck for almost nine minutes. Floyd, who was handcuffed, became unresponsive after almost three minutes.

The death of the unarmed black man while in police custody has ignited violent reactions across America.

Ellerbe confirmed to ESPN that Floyd's family had accepted Mayweather's offer to pay for funeral services.

"He'll probably get mad at me for saying that, but yes, (Mayweather) is definitely paying for the funeral," Ellerbe said.

Mayweather "has done these kind of things over the last 20 years," added Ellerbe, who said that the former five-division world champion -- who retired in 2017 with a 50-0 record -- didn't want to talk about his gesture himself.

The lawyer for Floyd's family said Monday that a funeral will be held on June 9 in Houston.

Before that, the family will hold a memorial service in Minneapolis on Thursday and a memorial service on Saturday in North Carolina, where Floyd was born.

An official autopsy released Monday found that Floyd died in a homicide involving "neck compression."

Police officer Derek Chauvin has been charged with third degree murder and one count of negligent manslaughter in Floyd's death.

Once a radical idea, universal basic income is gaining support


BE REALISTIC DEMAND THE IMPOSSIBLE

Issued on: 01/06/2020


People wearing protective masks walk past a placard installed by a homeless person that reads "breaking news, COVID-19 makes you stingy" in Paris on April 14, 2020. © Joel Saget, AFP
Text by:Romain HOUEIX

As the Covid-19 pandemic sinks economies around the world and leads to record rates of unemployment, some politicians and analysts are revisiting the idea of a universal income. Spain on Friday introduced a basic income for the poor – a version of a universal basic income that could see the concept gaining ground.


In the face of a global economic crisis induced by the novel coronavirus, the idea of a basic income paid to all citizens is rapidly gaining new traction.

With one of the highest poverty rates in Europe, Spain took the first tentative steps towards a universal basic income on Friday after the government approved a minimum income of €1,108 ($1,230) per month for about 2.5 million of its poorest citizens. It became the first country in southern Europe to launch such a scheme during the pandemic.

The issue of a basic income was at the heart of the coalition agreement reached between the Socialists and the left-wing party Podemos.

"Today, a new social right is born," said Pablo Iglesias, Spain’s deputy prime minister and leader of Podemos, on Friday, stressing that the crisis had "accelerated the entry into force" of this first step towards a universal income.


Advocates of a basic income argue that it protects the most vulnerable from economic uncertainty, particularly those outside the usual social safety nets, such as the self-employed, part-time workers and casual workers who make up the so-called gig economy.

"It could be really trendsetting for southern Europe if, for the first time, we are to maintain a more consistent approach to income assistance," said Louise Haagh, a politics professor at Britain's York University and a basic income advocate, in an interview with Reuters.

Gaining ground in Europe

An Oxford University study shows that 70 percent of Europeans support the concept of a basic universal income – among them, politicians from across the political divide.

"The time has come for a basic universal income," Scottish Prime Minister Nicola Sturgeon told a briefing on the coronavirus in Edinburgh, adding that she had engaged in "constructive discussions" with the UK government on the issue.

Before coming to power in 2018, Italy’s Five Star Movement campaigned hard for a substantial basic income for all Italians. It opted for a more modest “citizenship income”, an allowance to help the poorest, after realising the country’s coffers were too depleted to support a universal scheme.

In France, the first rumblings in favour of a universal basic income could be heard during the presidential election of 2017, when Socialist candidate Benoît Hamon made it a key part of his campaign. Though he suffered a devastating blow at the polls that ended his presidential ambitions, his policy has continued to gain traction.

The Jean-Jaurès Foundation, a left-wing think tank, has revised Hamon’s initiative in the wake of the current health and economic crises and proposed an unconditional basic income of between €725 and €1,000 per month for France’s poorest households. Eighty of the country’s political and civic figures signed a petition on May 4 backing the foundation’s proposal.

The Finnish experiment

But it is Finland that has gone the furthest in testing the feasibility of a basic universal income. In 2017, it launched a government-run pilot programme in which 2,000 unemployed people received an unconditional income of €560 per month for two years. The income could be combined with family allowances and wages if they found a job and returned to the workforce.

Even though 55 percent of beneficiaries reported feeling happier overall as a result of receiving the income, compared to 46 percent in the control group, in the end only 43.7 percent of beneficiaries found a job compared to 42.8 percent in the control group. The findings were widely panned as the income did not boost employment as hoped. It then led to the Finnish government pulling the plug on the initiative altogether, claiming it was too costly to keep going.

Researchers, for their part, argue they were hamstrung by insufficient government funding and a reduced sample size.

Undermining labour protections?

Governments may feel they are already under too much financial pressure to fund a basic income plan.

"In the crisis we’re in, I don't see how a government would embark on a universal income, with the pressure of financial markets, banks and international financial organisations on countries' budgets," said Joan Cortinas-Munoz, a researcher at the Centre for Sociology of Organizations at Sciences Po Paris and a specialist in social policies in Spain, in an interview with FRANCE 24.

Moreover, governments would need to ensure such a scheme could be fiscally sustainable over the long term.

Supporters of neo-liberalism are not the only ones sceptical of the viability of a universal basic income. Some on the left warn it could be something of a Trojan horse, leading to less protections in the labour market as employers seek to take advantage of the income already provided by governments to pay workers lower wages.

"In its neo-liberal conception, the universal income is supposed to replace social welfare protections (health coverage, housing allowance...). But the latter is essential as a safety net to avoid falling into extreme poverty," notes ATD Fourth World, a social justice advocacy group based in France.

Advocates are convinced that a universal basic income can not only offer a lifeline to the most financially vulnerable but also an opportunity to rebuild economies now plunging into recession because of Covid-19.

This article has been translated from the original in French.


Apr 23, 2020 - ... COVID-19 pandemic shows that it may be time for universal basic income. ... in 1974-1979 to citizens in the small Canadian city of Dauphin.

Dec 3, 2017 - These are not the first experiments in UBI or other forms of Basic Income Guarantee (BIG). ... and rural families in Winnipeg and Dauphin, Manitoba with incomes ... Much of his work involves Universal Basic Income (UBI).
Aug 2, 2018 - Manitoba's "Mincome" experiment in an annual guaranteed income ... at the University of Manitoba examined data from the town of Dauphin, ...

Dec 20, 2016 - Canada tested the basic income in Dauphin, Manitoba, in the 1970s. ... Under a universal basic income, the government cuts everyone a ...



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