Tuesday, May 03, 2022

KAPITALI$M IS KRI$I$

Australia Wealth Fund Posts Biggest Quarterly Loss in Two Years

Matthew Burgess, Bloomberg News

Sydney Harbour Bridge in Sydney. Photographer: Brent Lewin/Bloomberg , Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- Australia’s sovereign wealth fund suffered its largest quarterly loss in two years amid renewed geopolitical and monetary policy risks.

Future Fund lost 1.5% in the three months to March 31, the biggest drop since the same period in 2020, causing its main fund to shrink to A$201 billion ($141 billion) from A$204 billion, it said in statement Monday. At the same time, the fund reduced its cash holdings as allocation into Australian and developed market stocks and so-called alternative assets increased, the statement said.

“As central banks tighten monetary policy to rein in inflation and geopolitical tensions continue to create shocks in investment markets, we have been positioning for what will be a challenging and volatile future,” Future Fund Chairman Peter Costello said in a statement.

The Future Fund was warning of a worsening global outlook even before Russia’s aggression toward Ukraine, anticipating an increase in volatility as central banks remove stimulus and lift borrowing costs to combat rising consumer cost pressures. It trimmed its stock allocation in December, helping to cushion the impact during a turbulent quarter for global equities.

Future Fund Chief Executive Raphael Arndt warned future returns will be harder to achieve given the ongoing fragility in global markets combined with rising inflation. That echoed Norway’s wealth fund, the world’s largest, which recorded a 4.9% quarterly loss in March. The Future Fund is hunting more unlisted assets while relying on its alternative strategies to cushion the portfolio, he said.

Australia’s wealth fund decided on Feb. 28 to drop Russian assets in response to the country’s invasion of Ukraine, but ran into problems with implementing the decision after Russia banned foreigners from executing trades on its stock markets. The fund, which had about A$180 million of Russian assets at April 5, will wind down the holdings as market conditions allow, Costello said.

VIDEO: Kansas tornado generated 265 kmph winds as it destroyed homes
02 May 2022

A combo image shows the tornado ripping through a neighbourhood in Kansas.

Gulf Today Report

The tornado that damaged more than 1,000 homes in south-central Kansas generated winds of up to 165 mph (265 kmph) and left a path of destruction nearly 13 miles long.

The National Weather Service said the tornado caused extensive damage on Friday, mostly in suburban Wichita in Andover.

Several people were injured.

THIS IS ONE OF THE BEST TORNADO VIDEOS I HAVE SEEN

Andover Fire Chief Chad Russell said at least 300 to 400 buildings were completely destroyed by the storm out of a total of 1,074 damaged buildings.

The Weather Service said the tornado remained on the ground for 21 minutes on Friday.

Four people, including two firefighters who responded to a call in Andover, were injured in the storm, but their injuries were minor.

Russell said it would take Andover years to recover from this storm.

By Sunday, utility crews had restored power to nearly all of the more than 15,000 customers who lost power during the storm.

Officials said fewer than 1,000 people were still without power in the Wichita area as of Sunday morning.

In addition to storm damage, the Oklahoma State Patrol said three University of Oklahoma meteorology students were killed in a car accident about 85 miles north of Oklahoma City in Oklahoma on Friday night while returning from storm chasing in Kansas.

Russia: programme of ‘patriotic education’ aims to create next generation of Putin faithful

Generation ‘Z’: members of Russia’s Young Army Military Patriotic Movement

at a rally in 2021.

Mikhail Tereshchenko/TASS/Alamy Live News

THE CONVERSATION
Published: April 21, 2022

As Russia shifts the focus of its “special military operation” in Ukraine to the Donbas region, there seems no end in sight to the fighting. Casualties on both sides are mounting. While Ukraine is able to call on its citizens to help defend their homeland from Russian aggression, Moscow’s ability to rally and maintain support for this war among ordinary Russians will be crucial for sustaining its military effort.

The Kremlin regards children and young people as a vital part of this effort. The government has launched a series of patriotic education campaigns aimed at Russia’s youth to encourage them to regard the war in Ukraine as a continuation of the second world war and to feel a personal connection to the Russian soldiers fighting there.

Targeting propaganda at young people is not new to Russia. When the Bolsheviks took power in 1917, they introduced patriotic-military education to prepare the next generation for war. During the Brezhnev period from 1964 to 1982, the focus of attention turned to Soviet Union’s victory over the Nazis in what Russia still calls the “great patriotic war”.

There was a strong psychological dimension to Soviet patriotic-military education during the cold war. Heroic stories of self-sacrifice during the great patriotic war were used to develop children’s devotion to the motherland. Whether through activities in youth groups or in more formal educational settings, a clear message was delivered to young people: they had a responsibility to preserve the memory of the victory that their parents and grandparents had achieved.

Since the collapse of the USSR, the memory of the great patriotic war has become even more important to education in Russia. Young people have not only been charged with preserving the state’s version of history, they are also expected to be vigilant and denounce efforts by others to “falsify” and “diminish” Russia’s historical role in the world.

The memory of the great patriotic war is also central to the way that Moscow is justifying its war in Ukraine to Russian society. The baseless claim that Russia was forced to intervene to combat growing Nazi sentiment in Ukraine is now being woven into the messages targeted at Russia’s young people.

One aspect of this campaign was the launch of the “strength is in the truth” initiative. The opening ceremony in Moscow was attended by schoolchildren from regions across Russia, including members of the national Young Army Movement created in 2015. In his remarks at the ceremony, Russia’s education minister, Sergey Kravtsov, said that a situation like the one in Ukraine will never happen again, because “we have wonderful young people … because you believe in Russia, in our country, in our teachers, in our victories, and that you are right! Thank you, guys, for your position, for speaking directly about this and not distorting history.”

Every army needs new recruits: young members of the All-Russian Young Army Forum with defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, in 2021.

Mikhail Tereshchenko/TASS/Alamy Live News

Another strand of this campaign is the use of Holocaust memory to bring Nazi atrocities to the forefront of youth consciousness and to make connections with the war in Ukraine. On April 19, the Victory Museum in Moscow opened an exhibition titled Ordinary Nazism. The exhibition highlights “the atrocities of Ukrainian nationalists during the second world war, as well as the mass crimes and terror of modern neo-Nazis against the inhabitants of Ukraine in 2014-2022”.

The same day was also marked as The Day of United Action in Russia in memory of the genocide of the Soviet people that began in Russia by the Nazis and their accomplices. The event involved concerts, exhibitions, rallies and performances in schools and universities across Russia.
Generation ‘Z’

In schools throughout Russia, teachers are trying to find age-appropriate ways of connecting children and young people with the soldiers fighting in Ukraine. The youngest children are given simple tasks, such as drawing and colouring pictures of the “Z” ribbon or standing in formations to make the shape of that letter. The (non-Cyrillic) letter “Z” has been turned into a symbol of the war and has become something of a badge for those who support it.

Older children write letters to soldiers serving in Ukraine, especially soldiers who are from their towns or regions, and make care packages to send to them. Schools are now being supplied with desks featuring [images and biographical details] of distinguished soldiers inscribed on them, providing a vivid reminder of the proud history of Russian military heroism that young people are invited to join.

These efforts to deliver carefully constructed messages about the war in Ukraine to children and young people serve several purposes. There are short-term benefits, such as encouraging a positive attitude towards military service in older teenage boys who will be eligible for conscription in the near future. Given the number of Russian soldiers reported as killed in action so far in this conflict, recruitment will remain a crucial part of the war effort.

The work of reaching young people with these messages also makes more Russian adults complicit in supporting the Kremlin’s narrative. Some teachers may genuinely support the war, but for many, this will be just another way of showing their bosses they are doing their jobs well – and perhaps showing the state that they are loyal citizens. The consequences for those who refuse can be serious: there is evidence of pupils reporting their teachers for making disloyal remarks.

In the longer term, patriotic education aims to establish a deep and enduring sense of patriotism, duty and love of country in the next generation of Russian citizens, along with a great deal of respect for the military as an institution. Key to this is Russia’s systematic presentation of its history to new youth groups, while cutting them off from opposing worldviews. The creation of future generations that can be easily moulded to believe the Kremlin’s messages and fulfil its agendas is an important feature of Putin’s toy soldiers.

Authors

Jennifer Mathers
Senior Lecturer in International Politics, Aberystwyth University

Allyson Edwards
Teaching Fellow in History, University of Warwick

China-Britain hydrogen energy cooperation enjoys huge potential, broad prospects: ambassador

(Xinhua) 11:51, May 02, 2022

MANCHESTER, Britain, May 1 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Ambassador to Britain Zheng Zeguang has praised the China-Britain joint efforts in hydrogen development and encouraged both sides to conduct more mutually beneficial cooperation in the future.

In recent years, China and Britain have carried out joint projects in hydrogen fuel cells and hydrogen industrial parks, and such mutually beneficial cooperation in hydrogen energy has huge potential and broad prospects for further growth, said Zheng.

He made the remarks on Thursday while addressing the opening ceremony of the China-UK Hydrogen Energy Cooperation Forum, which was co-hosted online from the central Chinese city of Wuhan and Britain's second largest city of Manchester.

The two sides should encourage local governments to strengthen communication, dock their policy measures, build platforms for business partnerships and create new highlights of mutually beneficial cooperation, said Zheng.

"We should promote international cooperation on hydrogen energy standards, foster a sound environment for the development of the international hydrogen energy industry, and contribute to its sustained and healthy development," said the ambassador.

Speaking to the participants of the forum, Zheng said that the forum is important for implementing the consensus between the leaders of the two countries on enhancing cooperation on green development and ecological conservation.

The two-day forum hosted discussions on current developments and opportunities of cooperation in the hydrogen energy industry among government representatives as well as hydrogen energy specialists, scientists and business leaders from both sides.

At the opening ceremony, Wuhan City and Manchester City, which became sister cities in 1986, signed a memorandum of understanding on hydrogen energy industry exchange and cooperation, and Wuhan University of Technology and Manchester Metropolitan University signed a letter of intent on hydrogen energy cooperation.

(Web editor: Zhong Wenxing, Bianji)

South Korea’s Next Defense Minister Expresses Reservations On CVX Program

HHI unveiled a stunning CVX light aircraft carrier design at MADEX 2021

Lee Jong-seop, a member of the Presidential Transition Committee's foreign and security policy team and the incoming President Yoon Suk-yeol's nominee for the Minister of National Defense, expressed reservations about the South Korean aircraft carrier or CVX program on April 25 when asked by National Defense Committee member Kang Daesik.

Juho Lee 02 May 2022

“There are diverse opinions on the CVX program. I think we need to carefully evaluate our priorities by taking into account several factors including strategic and tactical operational doctrines, military requirements, national interest, and cost efficiency,”

Lee Jong-seop, Incoming Minister of National Defense

According to several domestic observers, this statement effectively amounts to a break of policy with the current administration, which has expressed support for the program.

The CVX program has been a subject of great controversy over the past few months. Funding for the program was axed last November, only to be revived unilaterally by the ruling party the month after. The incoming President is a member of the People Power Party, the program’s harshest critic in the National Assembly. Therefore, the CVX program will likely face more hurdles in the coming years.

Lee also criticized North Korea’s latest missile test, saying that it contradicts the “spirit of the 9.19 Pyongyang Declaration.” In addition to this, he expressed support for expanding joint U.S.-South Korea military exercises, saying, “A military that doesn’t train might as well not exist. We shall review expanding the exercises to 2019 levels.”

About CVX aircraft carrier program

DSME initial proposal for ROK Navy’s CVX program.

The CVX program is the Republic of Korea Navy (ROKN)’s first aircraft carrier program. Initially CVX was conceived as being the last ship of the Landing Platform eXperimental (LPX) program which produced the largest ships operated by the ROKN currently, the Dokdo-class amphibious assault ships. Preliminary plans, dubbed LPX-II, envisioned an amphibious assault ship-like vessel that would also be capable of operating fighter aircraft.

However, in August 2020, the ROKN officially announced plans to acquire a fully-fledged aircraft carrier with the term CVX being introduced in February 2021. The ROKN hopes CVX will be ready for operations by 2033.

The CVX is expected to cost ₩2.3 trillion ($2 billion) to construct and around ₩50 billion ($45 million) per year to maintain. It will be 265 meters in length, and 43 meters in width and have a light and maximum displacement of around 30,000 tons and 40,000 tons respectively. The ship will be capable of operating 16 F-35B fighters as well as eight helicopters. It will also feature a high degree of automation and have a complement of 440 crew, excluding the air element. The carrier will have two islands, similar to the Royal Navy’s Queen Elizabeth class. Two shipbuilders are competing: Hyundai Heavy Industries and DSME.

CVX will be equipped with the AESA radar being designed by Hanwha for the “integrated mast” on the KDDX destroyer. The S-band radar will have a range of 300 km for long-range detection of aircraft, while the X band radar will be used for short-range detection. The carrier will also feature LIG Nex1’s torpedo acoustic countermeasure, Haegung (K-SAAM) surface-to-air missile system, and close-in weapon systems (CIWS) for point defense.

SEE LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for PERMANENT ARMS ECONOMY

ANTIWAR.COM

Nuclear Weapons Cannot Be Un-Invented

MEMORANDUM FOR: The President
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
SUBJECT: Nuclear Weapons Cannot Be Un-invented, Thus …
PRECEDENCE: IMMEDIATE
REF: Our Memo of 12/20/20, "Don’t Be Suckered on Russia"

May 1, 2022

Mr. President:

Mainstream media have marinated the minds of most Americans in a witches’ brew of misleading information on Ukraine – and on the exceedingly high stakes of the war. On the chance you are not getting the kind of "untreated" intelligence President Truman hoped for by restructuring intelligence, we offer below a 12-point factsheet. Some of us were intelligence analysts during the Cuban missile crisis and see a direct parallel in Ukraine. As to VIPs’ credibility, our record since Jan. 2003 – whether on Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, or Russia – speaks for itself.

The growing possibility that nuclear weapons might be used, as hostilities in Ukraine continue to escalate, merits your full attention.
For almost 77 years, a common awareness of the awesome destructiveness of atomic/nuclear weapons created an (ironically stabilizing) balance of terror called deterrence. Nuclear-armed countries have generally avoided threatening to use nukes against other nuclear-armed countries.
Putin’s recent reminders of Russia’s nuclear weapons capability can easily fit into the category of deterrence. It can also be read as a warning that he is prepared to use them in extremis.
Extremis? Yes; Putin regards Western interference in Ukraine, particularly since the coup d’etat in Feb. 2014, as an existential threat. In our view, he is determined to rid Russia of this threat, and Ukraine is now a must-win for Putin. We cannot rule out the possibility that, backed into a corner, he might authorize a limited nuclear strike with modern missiles that fly many times the speed of sound.
Existential threat? Moscow sees U.S. military involvement in Ukraine as precisely the same kind of strategic threat President Kennedy saw in Khrushchev’s attempt to put nuclear missiles in Cuba in violation of the Monroe Doctrine. Putin complains that US"ABM" missile sites in Romania and Poland can be modified, by simply inserting an alternate compact disk, to launch missiles against Russia’s ICBM force.
As for putting missile sites in Ukraine, according to the Kremlin readout of your Dec. 30, 2021 telephone conversation with Putin, you told him the US"had no intention of deploying offensive strike weapons in Ukraine". So far as we know, there has been no objection to the accuracy of that Russian readout. Nevertheless, your reported assurance to Putin disappeared into thin air – contributing, we imagine, to Russia’s growing distrust.
Russia can no longer doubt that the US and NATO aim to weaken Russia (and to remove him, if possible) – and that the West also believes it can accomplish this by pouring weapons into Ukraine and urging the Ukrainians to fight on. We think these aims are delusional.
If Secretary Austin believes that Ukraine can "win" against Russian forces – he is mistaken. You will recall that many of Austin’s predecessors – McNamara, Rumsfeld, Gates, for example – kept assuring earlier presidents that corrupt regimes could "win" – against foes far less formidable than Russia.
The notion that Russia is internationally "isolated" also seems delusional. China can be counted on to do what it can to prevent Putin from "losing" in Ukraine – first and foremost because Beijing has been designated "next in line", so to speak. Surely, President Xi Jin-Ping has been briefed on the Pentagon’s "2022 National Defense Strategy" identifying China as the #1 "threat". Russia-China entente marks a tectonic shift in the world correlation of forces. It is not possible to exaggerate its significance.
Nazi sympathizers in Ukraine will not escape attention on May 9, as Russia celebrates the 77th anniversary of the victory by the Allies over Nazi Germany. Every Russian knows that more than 26 million Soviets died during that war (including Putin’s older brother Viktor during the merciless, 872-day blockade of Leningrad). Denazification of Ukraine is one of the key factors accounting for Putin’s approval level of above 80 percent.
The Ukraine conflict can be called "The Mother of All Opportunity Costs". In last year’s "Threat Assessment", National Intelligence Director Avril Haines identified climate change as a major national security and "human security" challenge that can only be met by nations working together. War in Ukraine is already diverting much needed attention from this impending threat to coming generations.
We note that we sent our first Memorandum of this genre to President George W. Bush on Feb. 5, 2003, critiquing Colin Powell’s unconfirmed-intelligence-stuffed speech at the UN earlier that day. We sent two follow-up Memos in March 2003 warning the president that intelligence was being "cooked" to justify war, but were ignored. We end this Memo with the same appeal we made, in vain, to George W. Bush: "You would be well served if you widened the discussion beyond the circle of those advisers clearly bent on a war for which we see no compelling reason and from which we believe the unintended consequences are likely to be catastrophic."

Lastly, we repeat the offer we made to you in December 2020 (in the VIPs Memorandum referenced above): ‘We stand ready to support you with objective, tell-it-like-it-is analysis.’ We suggest you might benefit from "outside" input from veteran intelligence officers with many decades of experience on the "inside".

FOR THE STEERING GROUP: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

Fulton Armstrong, former National Intelligence Officer for Latin America & former National Security Council Director for Inter-American Affairs (ret.)
William Binney, NSA Technical Director for World Geopolitical & Military Analysis; Co-founder of NSA’s Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center (ret.)
Richard H. Black, Former Virginia Senator; Col. US Army (ret.); Former Chief, Criminal Law Division, Office of the Judge Advocate General, the Pentagon (associate VIPS)
Graham E. Fuller,Vice-Chair, National Intelligence Council (ret.)
Philip Giraldi, CIA, Operations Officer (ret.)
Matthew Hoh, former Capt., USMC, Iraq & Foreign Service Officer, Afghanistan (associate VIPS)
Larry Johnson, former CIA Intelligence Officer & former State Department Counter-Terrorism Official (ret.)
Michael S. Kearns, Captain, USAF Intelligence Agency (ret.), former Master SERE Instructor
John Kiriakou, former CIA Counterterrorism Officer and former senior investigator, Senate Foreign Relations Committee
Edward Loomis, Cryptologic Computer Scientist, former Technical Director at NSA (ret.)
Ray McGovern, former US Army infantry/intelligence officer & CIA analyst; CIA Presidential briefer (ret.)
Elizabeth Murray, former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East, National Intelligence Council & CIA political analyst (ret.)
Pedro Israel Orta, former CIA and Intelligence Community (Inspector General) officer
Todd Pierce, MAJ, US Army Judge Advocate (ret.)
Theodore Postol, Professor Emeritus, MIT (Physics). Former Science and Policy Adviser for Weapons Technology to the Chief of Naval Operations (associate VIPS)
Scott Ritter, former MAJ., USMC, former UN Weapon Inspector, Iraq
Coleen Rowley, FBI Special Agent and former Minneapolis Division Legal Counsel (ret.)
Kirk Wiebe, former Senior Analyst, SIGINT Automation Research Center, NSA (ret.)
Sarah G. Wilton, CDR, USNR, (Retired)/DIA, (Retired)
Robert Wing, former Foreign Service Officer (associate VIPS)
Ann Wright, Col., US Army (ret.); Foreign Service Officer (resigned in opposition to the war on Iraq)

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPs) is made up of former intelligence officers, diplomats, military officers and congressional staffers. The organization, founded in 2002, was among the first critics of Washington’s justifications for launching a war against Iraq. VIPS advocates a US foreign and national security policy based on genuine national interests rather than contrived threats promoted for largely political reasons. An archive of VIPS memoranda is available at Consortiumnews.com.

BANKSY OUTLAW ART VIDEO

S. Korea finds descendants of 6 Hawaii-based independence fighters

By Yonhap
Published : May 2, 2022

This file photo released by the Ministry of Patriots and Veterans Affairs on Monday, shows South Korean independence fighter Dora Moon (R) and her daughter Whila Chung. (Yonhap)

South Korea has identified descendants of six independence activists who supported the nation's fight against Japan's 1910-45 colonial rule * from Hawaii, the veterans affairs ministry said Monday.

The identification was an outcome of the project that the ministry launched in December to locate descendants of the activists, who operated in the U.S. territory, and properly honor them with state benefits, according to officials.

Among the four descendants were George Blair McCun, the grandson of George S. McCune, an American who won the Order of Merit for National Foundation in 1963 for his contribution to the Koreans' movement against Japan's colonization.

Elsa Carl, great-granddaughter of Dora Moon, was also on the list. Moon participated in the first organization of Korean women in Hawaii in 1913. Her daughter, Whila Chung, also raised funds to support the independence movements with other Korean women.

The ministry was able to find those descendants by researching old documents and newspaper articles and meeting related officials in Hawaii.

"The identification of the descendants carries significant meaning, given that it sheds new light on Hawaii-based independence fighters who financially supported their country's independence and the activities of its provisional government," a ministry official said.

South Korea has conferred merits to the activists from 1963 to 2022 but could not deliver them to the descendants as their whereabouts remained unknown.

The ministry plans to deliver the medals to the surviving family members on Liberation Day that falls on Aug. 15.

*THE JAPANESE STILL MAINTAIN THEIR RACIST VIEWS OF KOREANS WHICH IS REFLECTED IN THEIR MIGRANT WORKER AND THEIR

ANTI- MIGRANT POLICIES

White Supremacy Matters
In America it always has.

April 26, 2022

by William Spivey

Make no mistake. White supremacy matters now and has ever since the founding of America. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to learn this. America was founded on the premise that the only ones that mattered were rich, white men. The case can and should be made that class and gender have always mattered, but that is not today’s topic.

Technically, the concept of a white race didn’t exist when what would become America was discovered by Europeans. Certainly, there was nationalism, but the idea of white people being a superior race didn’t come until later. Historians mark Bacon’s Rebellion as the turning point where white became a thing. Before Bacon’s Rebellion, the vast majority of Black people in the colonies were not enslaved but indentured servants. They held more or less the same status as white indentured servants that signed a seven-year contract to pay for their passage to the colonies. Of course, Black indentured servants often had their terms extended or were subject to a lifetime of servitude for real and imagined offenses. Nathaniel Bacon led an armed rebellion against Virginia Governor William Berkley. What created the need for the white race was when white indentured servants, Black indentured servants, and Black enslaved people united in following Bacon.

More than a few moments in history scared the rich, white men who held power. The Haitian Revolution and Nat Turner’s Rebellion were among them. White slaveholders always feared that enslaved people might turn on them; in many locales, whites were the minority and depended on slave patrols and militias to maintain order. But the thought of whites and Blacks of the underclass working together raised such concern that a way had to be found to divide them. White people were elevated to where the poorest white person was considered better than any Black person. They often became the overseers on the plantations, and white indentured servants were no longer a thing. Black indentured servants went away, too, as enslavement became the norm.

Bacon’s Rebellion began in 1675, but thirteen years earlier, the stage was set for what was intended to be the permanent enslavement of Black people. Partus Sequitur Ventrem was passed by the Virginia House of Burgesses, which changed how babies had been recognized previously by England and its colonies. Children born to Black enslaved women would follow the mother’s bloodline, leaving the father no responsibility and condemning the child of a female slave to be an enslaved person as well. If a white woman bore the child of a Black enslaved or free male (which did happen more frequently than you’d think). The woman was embarrassed or shunned, but the child was technically born free. Many of them were enslaved anyway or killed to coverup the paternity. The lucky father or whoever the woman pointed out might have been killed as well for having dared touch a white woman.

I’m skipping ahead a whole century during which white supremacy became firmly entrenched. Enslavement had totally replaced indentured servitude and was the foundation of the South’s economy and benefited the North. Those militias formed to control enslaved people would soon become police forces, they were the basis for the Second Amendment rights for those militia members to carry guns. The fear that abolitionists would either unarm the slave patrols or induct them into the military caused southerners to insist on enshrining their rights in the Constitution. That same Constitution set the stage for eliminating the international slave trade twenty years from its ratification in 1798. The purpose was not to gradually eliminate enslavement but to provide price protection for domestic slaves. It also meant an increased demand for domestic enslaved people, which was met by forced breeding, often via rape.

The Constitution wasn’t finished establishing the superiority of white people. It gave us the three-fifths provision which counted an enslaved person worth less than a white person when establishing representation. Those Black people didn’t actually vote themselves as that privilege was generally reserved for rich, white men. We also got the Electoral College, which was effectively affirmative action for white people, designed to ensure those opposing slavery couldn’t outvote the slave states.

Skipping ahead again to just before the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which wasn’t quite as wondrous as people now believe. The proclamation didn’t free all enslaved people — just those in states that seceded from the Union. The move was designed to disrupt the South’s economy and keep foreign powers Britain and France from partnering with the Confederacy, with whom they still had trade ties. Lincoln firmly believed in white people’s superiority, as demonstrated many times in the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates.

“I will say here, while upon this subject, that I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so. I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the black races. There is a physical difference between the two, which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality, and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position.” Abraham Lincoln

A few things happened in rapid succession that changed America forever. On January 31, 1865, Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment, which freed all enslaved people, except those being punished for a crime and those in the Confederacy who didn’t acknowledge Union laws. On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomatox, effectively ending the Civil War though it didn’t officially end for another month. Six days after Lee’s surrender, Abraham Lincoln was shot in the head while at Ford’s Theatre while watching a play. He died the next morning across the street at the Petersen House. His killer, John Wilkes Booth, was an avid supporter of slavery. White supremacy does not go quietly into the night.

There was a brief period where white supremacy was on the decline. The Reconstruction Act of 1867 outlined the requirements the rebel states had to meet to rejoin the Union. They had to each write a new constitution, approved by a majority of voters, including Black ones. They had to ratify the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, which freed the slaves and gave them the right to vote. These new laws were enforced by federal troops who protected the freedmen somewhat from the Ku Klux Klan that formed in 1865 to enforce in the dark what white people ceded in the daytime.

State governments appealed to Congress for help, and they passed three enforcement acts, including the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. Crimes that states and local governments wouldn’t prosecute (lynching, beating, and voter suppression) were now federal crimes with troops nearby to enforce them. Black men began to get elected to Congress and even won statewide elections in Mississippi. Reconstruction was promoted by and enforced by the Republican Party, which was born of the abolition movement. They were for Black people until they weren’t.

In 1876, there was a contested presidential election that the Democrat Tilden should have won by all appearances. He was one vote shy of the votes needed in the Electoral College and won the popular vote with two state’s results contested. Republicans still controlled Congress, and if Tilden won, he would have difficulty getting legislation passed. A compromise was reached, which resulted in Republican Rutherford B. Hayes being elected as president with the understanding all federal troops would be removed from the South. Hayes kept his end of the bargain and later enacted Posse Comitatus, which ensured those troops could never return. This effectively ended Reconstruction. The Black representatives to Congress were either forced to resign, serve out their terms, and not run again or defeated at the ballot box as Black voters were mostly unable to vote. Sometimes white supremacy is defined by looking the other way when injustice occurs as long as it doesn’t happen to you.

Jim Crow became the law of the land and not just in the South either. Laws designed to replicate slavery, dictate housing, and sometimes force employment under the very same people once their owners. The Klan had been almost crushed in the 1870s but returned in 1915. The Great Migration saw Black people move to northern cities for better employment. Still, redlining and housing discrimination forced most of the six million Black migrants into ghettoes in northern cities.

By that time, police forces had evolved from slave patrols. In the South, they primarily tended to the formerly enslaved people and their descendants. In the North, they controlled the Black migrants and the immigrants that would soon enough be allowed to be white as there weren’t enough regular white people to still be supreme. Abraham Lincoln and others predicted that when Black people were no longer enslaved, there would be resentment. Indeed they were when they discovered freedom didn’t mean what they hoped it did, and they were still bound by many of the same rules.

By 1920, women had the right to vote in their first presidential election after the Nineteenth Amendment passage. The Klan was nearing their peak membership of four million people. Women and Blacks voting was apparently too much, so they doubled down on preventing Black men and women from voting. In Florida, there was a statewide conspiracy among Democrats to suppress Black votes. When July Perry and Mose Norman tried to vote in Ocoee, Florida (outside of Orlando). A white mob that included law enforcement officials killed Perry, shot and killed many Ocoee Black residents, and burned out the rest. Ocoee was an all-white town for the next forty years.

“At the time that I visited Ocoee, the last colored family of Ocoee was leaving with their goods piled high on a motor truck with six colored children on top. White children stood around and jeered the Negroes who were leaving, threatening them with burning if they did not hurry up and get away. These children thought it a huge joke that some Negroes had been burned alive.” Walter White — NAACP

Law enforcement and the military have always been infiltrated by and often led by white supremacists. In 1921, the Black Wall Street area in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was attacked by a white mob after the alleged assault of a white woman in an elevator. The coordinated attack included bombs dropped from the air by the National Guard. Thirty-five blocks were destroyed, and at the time of this writing, mass graves are being uncovered as Tulsa finally decided to look for them. In 1923, the Black residents of Rosewood, Florida, were attacked; the story was recounted in a 1997 film. These are but a few of the massacres of Black people perpetrated by whites during the period. Universally true is that no one was prosecuted when Black families were destroyed; their land and businesses were taken by white people because they could. In 1926 in Washington D.C., long before the Million Man March, the 50,000 Klan March was well received. The Klan held open recruitment events, conducted Klan weddings, and in some areas was listed in the phone book. Perhaps this was the era of greatness Donald Trump is wistful about?

In the 1870s, it was a targeted effort to wipe out the Klan that stifled them. The Great Depression crushed the KKK. People unable to feed themselves could not pay the ten-dollar membership fee, and they soon faded away. Like the South, they rose again to fight against civil rights and perpetually engage in voter suppression. What got their ire up was the integration of the armed forces, which also started the drift from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party as it was Democrat Harry S. Truman who issued the executive order. Truman was rumored to have been a KKK member, but as many people said he wasn’t as he was. The major blow to white supremacists was when Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson passed the Voting Rights Act after the Bloody Sunday events that were nationally televised. The Klan knew to ride at night, Bull Connor and the Selma police acted with impunity in the daytime, making America nervous.

In the 1960s, the Southern Strategy was in full effect by the Republican Party. Democrats, after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, were actively recruiting Black voters, and Republicans were trying to make America afraid of Black people. They suddenly became the party of voter suppression. It was as if the party’s decided to switch places. Not out of ideology but because of political expediency. The Republican Party utilized the Southern Strategy to elect Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H. W, Bush, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump. The Republican Party got almost all the Black vote during Reconstruction but had now become almost exclusively white.

White supremacy had become the roadmap to victory. America was sufficiently afraid of “Willie Horton,” “welfare queens,” and “super-predators,” that it ramped up both mass incarceration and voter suppression. Donald Trump became the personification of white supremacy with his attacks on everybody of color. It would be gratuitous of me to remind everyone that his company refused to rent to Black people in his younger days, marking their applications “C” for colored so they would be rejected. I can be petty, so I threw that in there. He also took out a full-page ad advocating the death penalty for the Central Park Five, who, by the way, were innocent. Think Donald Trump apologized?

Trump’s biggest accomplishment was making it possible for white supremacists to throw away their robes and come out of their racist closets. He appointed openly white nationalists to his staff. At one time, Steve Bannon was his Chief Advisor, and Stephen Miller wrote his speeches and developed his immigration policy. Miller (and Jeff Sessions) were chiefly responsible for throwing brown children in cages and separating them from their families, some forever. The Klan is far less of a presence today, but they have been joined by the Proud Boys, Boogaloo Bois, and literally hundreds of other hate groups across the country. The SPLC documented 940 groups in 2019, most of them bunched in states led by Republicans. Many of them came together in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, which led to a clash killing one woman and two State Police Officers. White supremacists were chanting, “our blood, our soil,” and, “you will not replace us.” President Trump said there were, “good people on both sides.”

Charlottesville was the precursor to what happened on January 6, 2020, at the Capitol. The Proud Boys, Boogaloo Bois, and many of the others joined forces with non-affiliated racists. They stormed the building, seeking to overturn the election and kill a few elected leaders along the way. For the first time in American history, the Confederate flag was paraded through the Capitol rotunda. Instead of being horrified, Trump was giddy. The racist groups are using the news coverage and videos to recruit and fundraise. They promised this isn’t over, and I believe them.

It’s important to note that Congress across several administrations has failed to acknowledge white supremacists groups’ threat. They have covered up the extent of their threat and refused to address the coming storm. In 2006 the FBI warned of white supremacist infiltration of police forces, but nothing happened. Twice in a five-year period, a Florida town ousted police force members for membership in the Klan. Racist emails among police officers have been uncovered within forces across the nation, including Los Angeles, Miami, Ferguson, San Francisco, New York, and elsewhere. The Department of Homeland Security delayed the release of a report for months, outlining the threat of the increasing number of white supremacist groups. They finally released it in October of 2020. Since the release of the report, Congress has done nothing.

White supremacy has always existed in America. In fact, it defines America. We send people worldwide and shame them for human rights violations yet do nothing to address our own. Demographics is working against those with white supremacist views. White people are projected to be a minority in America by 2045. It’s why our immigration policy is attempting to turn back the clock and why voter suppression of minorities is again at the forefront of Republican policy (though once it was the Democrats’ way). One true thing across the history of this nation is that white supremacy has mattered. It’s time to make that no longer true.

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This post was previously published on Black History Month 365.

Bill Maher and Elon Musk are old, rich, white guys shaking their fists at the 'kids these days': MSNBC panel

Sarah K. Burris
May 01, 2022

Bill Maher (ABC)

After the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, posted a meme showing that "both sides" have moved toward the extreme. It was resoundingly denounced by those who dedicate time to researching and monitoring such movements. But it sparked a conversation about just how far the GOP has gone to the right, culminating in an actual insurrection on the U.S. Capitol in Washington.

"Most people don't follow politics closely, and, therefore, it's very easy to just go, 'far left — far right. They're the same!' And take an equidistant position between the two extremes, and it's not just Musk doing that," said MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan. "I mean, vast swaths of the American media, sadly. Molly, if you think, if anyone thinks America's far-left and far-right are equally dangerous, surely, they must be suffering from some form of brain rot. But it's important to point out. It's not just Musk. It's many people in our media."

The Atlantic's Molly Jong-Fast linked Musk, who grew up in South Africa under Apartheid, with Bill Maher, the HBO host who has increasingly turned to the right after COVID mitigation efforts caused him inconveniences. She began by explaining that every older generation in history has complained about the younger generations because they're different. Maher is no different.

"I do think he's [Musk] being courted very hard by this far-right fringe, and you see it," said Jong-Fast. "You see Joe Rogan and those types are working very hard to, sort of, charm him. He does seem to be a person who likes it when people are nice to him, right? So, he is quite upset with the left because he has all these labor problems. He has, you know, a lot of workers complaining about racism and sexism, terrible sexual harassment complaints, and racism complaints in the factories. So, there's, you know, there is a real move to try to unionize. But also if he doesn't like it. I think he's a person who likes to be liked, and that's really what it is. And these guys are working really hard to make it his friend."

She went on to compare the whining about the left to Maher, who was once thought of as a liberal host.

"The other thing I would say about him, and with all these guys, and you've seen this also with Bill Maher, you know, so much complaining of, 'oh, you know, everyone so woke, they don't let me tell my jokes,'" she said. "But you know, old, rich white men have since the beginning of time, complained about young people. This is not new. You know, the older rich white, you've got everything, of course, you are threatened by young people. Of course, you are mad, of course, you don't like their beliefs. I mean, think about the 1960s. Like this is not some new phenomenon. Old, rich, white men are always very threatened by young people. So, as much as I understand it, I think their fault in some ways, and it's on the mainstream media for reporting this incredulously, and not saying — this is a rich guy who does it want his factory unionized."

It's reminiscent of the 1960's complaints about "kids these days with the hair and the music..."

See the clip below:
Old rich white dudes shaking their fists at kids these days with the hair and the music
youtu.be