Early Morning Racism Note

Listening to Morning Edition in the early morning darkness I heard a story about a Sikh family in Canada disappointed to be denied visas to return to India because the two countries are having a diplomatic conflict. One man was disappointed about not being able to bring his children to celebrate Diwali in the place where he was born and raised.

Listening I had a flashback from childhood of my maternal grandmother, who was a teacher of elocution, correcting me when I said something about a woman who was "raised" to believe something or other. She corrected my use of the term raised by saying "Don't use that word for people because people are reared, not raised. Animals are raised, and people are reared."

On another occasion she corrected me for referring to a woman of color as a lady. "Say woman, not lady. We say Negro woman and white lady." She is also the only person I knew who used the word octoroon in conversation suggesting someone she saw on TV likely had a black great-grandparent.

I was spoon-fed polite prejudice and racism from an early age. I already knew not to use the word "black" because it was how ignorant people spoke. Also we were always taught to pronounce the word properly: NEE-grow. We never used the N-word. 

I was nearly twenty when I realized how prejudiced I had been "reared", becoming pro-active overcoming it in myself and others. And now, pushing eighty, I'm still fighting the same level of ignorance in the world around me.

Morning Reflections

Early morning reflections...

One consequence of the Hawaiian tragedy was the resignation of the management chief in Maui. He cites health reasons but the real reason is his being targeted for what is being called the "failure" to sound the alarm systems that might have saved lives by triggering an evacuation. The reason the alarms were not sounded is that the system that has been in place for years is designed to move people out of the way of possible tsunamis by moving to higher ground. Such a move in this case would have sent people into the fires, not away. Moreover, there were no plans to evacuate people from areas deemed safe from tsunami threats so the alarm systems would have just added to the danger. 

As I listened my mind wandered to all the times I have heard similar warnings about weather threats, child abductions, road closures and such. I wondered how many agencies, commissions and other regulatory authorities we have and realized how much they affect our ordinary lives. Interstate commerce, stock trading, food safety, work rules, labor laws... the list seems endless. 

My web search "How many federal commissions do we have?" (noting two billion-plus responses) was reworded to read "The President also appoints the heads of more than 50 independent federal commissions, such as the Federal Reserve Board or the Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as federal judges, ambassadors, and other federal offices." 

Before moving on with the rest of my day, I finally settled on the Wiki article Independent agencies of the United States government which lists a remarkable array of agencies and commissions. This, I suppose, is what cynics call the deep state, or swamp, in an effort to suggest political implications. 

Take a look at the list and decide for yourself what life would be like this population of technocrats -- nearly all of which are non-political -- were somehow fashioned into the political resources authoritarian leaders typically use to control non-democratic regimes. FTC, ICC, GSA, NLRB, NRC, Peace Corps, Social Security, Postal Service, the list seems endless.

"Agencies outside of the executive branch" are also noted...

• Fannie May
• Freddie Mac
• National Gallery of Art
• Smithsonian Institution

That's enough. 
Time to start my day...

Polite racism, spoon-fed from my childhood

Blind Tom, polite racism and other notes from my original blog sixteen years ago. 

When I was young, I got radicalized by events around me. Now that I'm older, the same disease is returning. I don't know which is easier to take, a young person who doesn't know his head from a hole in the ground, or an old person getting ready to go into one. David Neiwert mentioned "sundown towns" and how the phenomenon is spreading . For those who don't know what is meant by the term, sundown town refers to a community that makes it clear, one way or another, that the good people of that place do not want anyone there who is not like them in every fundamental way. (Gives meaning to the word fundamental, by the way.)

Sundown Towns

I am familiar with the term from childhood. I never saw an actual sign, but my dad said there were places in Georgia, Kentucky and Tennessee where signs were posted at the city limits that said "Nigger, don't let the sun go down on you in [town or county name]." The meaning was clear. If you were black you are not only unwelcome but likely to be at risk for injury or death if you were still there at sundown. It's one thing to visit, spend your money or work in a place. It's very different if you expect to live and be accepted there socially.

I was spoon-fed racial prejudice from an early age. I know what it feels like, tastes like and how it penetrates to the core of your very being. Thanks to an epiphany sometime in my youth, I left that part of my heritage behind. Unfortunately, like a reformed alcoholic or abuser, I was left with a higher awareness of the problem than normal, and so the rest of my adult life it has been my portion to point and inform every chance I get. This is the purpose of my post this morning.

Flashback: as I wrote that last paragraph, I remember a story about my maternal grandmother. About 1959 I was listening to a record of someone reading short-stories by Somerset Maugham. There was a passing reference to "Blind Tom, a Negro half-wit who played the piano." We were living in Columbus, GA at the time which is where Blind Tom, a slave, also had lived. I noticed a historic marker about that which piqued my curiosity.

My grandmother, who was in failing health, was living with us at the time, and I mentioned Blind Tom to her in conversation. She said that her father got a chance to see Blind Tom once while traveling on a train. He didn't hear him play the piano, but he met Blind Tom's master, or as she said, "the man who owned him." He asked permission to feel the man's head, which he did, because it was thought at the time that the shape and growth patterns of the skull had something to do with mental development. It was nothing more than a layman's interest in phrenology, but this great-grandfather of mine didn't want to miss the chance to feel for himself this remarkable man's head to see if he noticed it to be any different from anyone else's head.

My grandmother told the story as dispassionately as if she were remembering a dress her mother had made. There was no hint that there was anything out of the ordinary, other than what we now call a savant's gifted ability to play the piano. No hint of racism, note. It was not necessary to mention that. The Brown decision was not yet five years past and a national movement was not to reach where we lived for a couple more years.

Getting back to Naomi Wolf and Dave Neiwert...

At the end of Neiwert's post he referred to yesterday's defeat of the DREAM Act, a test vote in the Senate that once again reveals that the country is not yet ready to come to terms with what to do with illegal immigrants. That piece of legislation would have opened the doors of opportunity to the children of undocumented immigrants to start the slow, tedious process of becoming Americans the old-fashioned way: facing an uphill struggle like that which faced the progenitors of nearly everyone who lives here now. I remembered a great story from two years ago of some kids in Arizona who make the realization of the "dream" a possibility.

A blog search for DREAM Act is my wake-up call.

Scanning down the list of hits, I realize that the opposition to that piece of legislation is widespread and tight-knit. The angry rhetoric of shock-jocks, Fox News and journalists who claim to speak for the "conservative" side of American society is gripping the body politic in a way that makes Naomi Wolf's arguments sound a lot less shrill. Her credibility shoots way up when I come across one blog's commentary. Documenting statistics from Investor's Business Daily about widespread opposition to the DREAM Act, the blogmaster feels the need to add:

Please consider this: no matter how large or small the turd is and, no matter what color one paints said turd, the fact remains as follows; a turd is still a turd and no, you cannot pick up a turd by the clean end.

That language is not remarkable. It is an idiom not only understood but appreciated by a growing number of otherwise decent Americans. Lots of folks will think it's cute.

Nor is the Congress to blame. They know, both in the Senate and the House, that their jobs depend on not pissing off their constituencies too much. They can lean this way or that and call it leadership... but in the end, if they don't do pretty much what they were sent there to do, they will not be re-elected. Simple as that. Why else do earmarks outweigh common sense? The old-fashioned dilemma was "guns or butter" We now face "guns or bacon." Why else would a multi-billion-dollar war keep sucking up money when the price of S-CHIP is trivial by comparison? And yet, the bacon (earmarks) keeps coming home.

Daniel Mackler, LCSW (Licensed Clinical Social Worker) is a filmmaker, musician, and lover of life-and for ten years was a psychotherapist in New York City. He writes extensively on healing childhood trauma and reclaiming the true self. (Google Books)

His You Tube channel is loaded with videos like this about a variety of subjects. I cannot find links to professional peer-review journals but his common-sense observations and obvious curiosity seem harmless enough. 

The Real Goal of the New Mar-a-Lago Charges Against Trump

This is a backup copy for future reference.

The Real Goal of the New Mar-a-Lago Charges Against Trump

BY DENNIS AFTERGUT
JULY 27, 2023

On Thursday, the Florida grand jury that indicted Donald Trump and his valet, Walt Nauta, in June for obstructing a grand jury investigation and conspiring to willfully retain classified documents, filed a superseding indictment. That means the grand jury issued a new charging document to replace the old.

It’s a bombshell.

The new indictment adds a new defendant, Carlos de Oliveira, Trump’s property manager at his Mar-a-Lago property. More importantly, it also adds explosive new charges that include allegations of a conspiracy to corruptly persuade another person to alter, conceal, delete, and mutilate security camera footage at Mar-a-Lago.

That footage presumably documented the unlawful retention of government documents. The new allegation is that Trump sought to have it destroyed after receiving a grand jury subpoena for it.

Of course, an indictment is only an accusation, not proof. And the defendants are innocent until proven guilty.

Without minimizing the importance of those legal facts, one can state the obvious: These allegations are dynamite for a trial jury. Special Counsel Jack Smith would not have allowed the grand jury to include the charges unless he had compelling evidence to prove them. That evidence at the very least appears to include testimony from Yuscil Taveras, a Mar-a-Lago IT employee whom de Oliveira allegedly cornered in an audio closet days after Trump received the subpoena and told “the boss” wanted the server deleted.

This May Be the Strongest Legal Case Against Trump

As an experienced prosecutor, Smith knows that defense lawyers’ bottom-line job is complete if they provide a jury with enough reasonable doubt so that a single juror resists voting to convict and hangs the jury. Smith is not blind to the fact that Florida, where the trial will take place, is Trump country, and that jurors who start out leaning strongly his way are likely.

What Smith appears to have done with this superseding indictment, however, is to have assembled the kind of case that that is so strong—and alleged misconduct that should be so offensive to any law-abiding citizen—that any majority in the jury room for conviction will be armed with the kind of ammunition that could overpower even the most recalcitrant hold-out.

Here are four reasons why the new charges are packed with punch for jurors.

1. First, you don’t need to be a criminologist, or even to have binged Law and Order episodes to understand that destroying evidence is what mobsters do to cover their tracks and try to stay out of the joint. Prosecutors call it “consciousness of guilt,” which can be the best available evidence of corrupt intent.
2. Second, the new indictment makes clear that Jack Smith has an inside witness to the conspiracy—the indictment’s “Employee No. 4,” whom the New York Times has reported to be Taveras. The indictment details how the new defendant, de Oliveira, attempted to enlist Taveras in the newly charged obstruction by telling him, “The Boss wants to delete the server.”
   Per the indictment, when Employee No. 4 equivocated, Nauta repeated the statement insistently and asked, without apparently subtlety, “What are we going to do?” Again, this would sound to any juror like mobster talk.
   You can be sure of three things. First, there’s only one “Boss” at Mar-a-Lago. Second, Taveras testified to those words to the grand jury, or it wouldn’t have included them in the superseding indictment. Last, Jack Smith will not be relying on the word of Taveras at trial without a mountain of corroboration.
   Just to take a wild guess about one possibility: It could well be that there is video tape footage in the grand jury’s possession that show de Oliveira and Taveras stepping into that audio closet together. There’s also voluminous texts between de Oliveira and Nauta immediately after Trump would have been informed of the subpoena for the server that points to the pair plotting, as well as documentation of respective phone calls between the two men and Trump.
3. Third, the time sequences detailed in the indictment scream cover up. Smith would not have described them so precisely without proof beyond any doubt of the timeline. It adds a layer of culpability that will be hard for any common-sense juror to resist.
   For example: On June 22, a Trump lawyer was informed that the grand jury was going to subpoena the security footage tapes. The next day, Trump talked by phone to de Oliveira for 24 minutes. The day after that the formal subpoena was delivered and Nauta, meanwhile, immediately changed his travel plans, returning to visit Florida instead of travelling with Trump from Bedminster to Illinois. At this point he contacted de Oliveira and Taveras to enlist them to meet at Mar-a-Lago. The conversations between de Oliveira and Taveras about “deleting the server” occurred first thing that Monday morning, June 27.
4. Fourth, the grand jury has charged de Oliveira in a separate count of making false statements to the FBI about his role in the conspiracy. Again, the timing is critical. The recounted false statements occur in an interview months after the grand jury subpoena was received and after de Oliveira is on video moving boxes of classified documents, which the FBI had subpoenaed and acquired. In the FBI interview, de Oliveira denied six times—count them—that he had any role in the subterfuge.
   That count puts enormous pressure on de Oliveira, just as a parallel count charges Nauta with virtually identical falsehoods. To a prosecutor, and likely a jury, that strongly suggests they got their stories together.
   The pressure on these two Trump loyalists, whose lawyers are reportedly being paid by Trump’s PAC, does not mean that either will “flip.” Any one of us can just guess what promises Trump has made to them if he is reelected president and they keep quiet.
   But do note this: These separate counts give them a lesser crime to plead guilty to if either decides to protect himself. The maximum penalty for a false statement to the FBI is five years imprisonment. The maximum penalty of concealing or destroying documents from a grand jury is 20 years behind bars.
5. Fifth, the superseding indictment does something for the nation. Trump himself, and his many defenders, have repeated the argument falsely equating the classified documents found in President Joe Biden’s office and those that Trump has claimed he had a right to. Many citizens not paying close attention may have fallen for that talking point.

But even for citizens who have to date failed to see the difference between Biden’s immediate cooperation in returning the documents in his home versus Trump’s 18 months of stonewalling, here we have something new: There is simply no way to misunderstand the new, even sharper contrast between Biden and Trump: There is no report that Biden sought to conceal anything from a grand jury, much less to have security camera footage obliterated.

And by the way. If, as Trump claims, he had every right to keep the classified documents after his presidency ended, why on earth did he feel a need to destroy tapes or a server?

Just to hammer the point, in this new superseding indictment, Smith added one more charge against Trump under the Espionage Act for a document he allegedly showed a reporter who was working on a book about Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. As we know from the initial indictment, Trump is on tape discussing the document and saying that he never declassified it, an admission that blows a hole in one of his biggest previous defenses.

He has since claimed that there was never any document and that he was just discussing news clippings. Previously, the document had been missing—not recovered in the search of Mar-a-Lago—and Trump’s attorneys had said they couldn’t find it. Well, apparently now Jack Smith has found it. This newly discovered document—reportedly a plan of attack against Iran—will be hung on Trump to show how careless he was with the nation’s top secrets and how he knew that he had no right to show them to anybody.

These charges seem as close to bulletproof as they come.

https://twitter.com/tribelaw/status/1684883320029765632

Twitter thread from Ukraine

Day 500 of the Russian war in Ukraine.

I am president of the Kyiv School of Economics, a former minister of economy of Ukraine, and a professor of economics at the University of Pittsburgh. I left the US for Kyiv 4 days before the war. These are the lessons I learned.

1. We owe our survival to unity and ingenuity
2. Empathy holds more power than rationality.
3. Understanding is out of reach without personal experience
4. War can forge you into a better person, tuned into the world's real problems
5. Our Ukrainian success hinges on knowledge and continual learning
6. The harshness and monotony of war quickly become the norm
7. Life's singular purpose is to persist and advance towards victory for Ukraine; all else is secondary.

Let me expand on each of this points.

1. Unity and ingenuity.
Russia was hoping that a politically polarized Ukrainian society won't be able to provide a quick and unified response to the invasion. They expected that Ukrainians will be slow to react. And surrender its state and government. After all, in the Russia view, people don't have agency. Russian people are no one for the Kremlin, why should Ukrainians be any different. But we are. The war has shown unprecedented unity, willpower, and innovation by the Ukrainians 

2. Empathy holds more power than rationality.
This one is difficult to explain. Because it is irrational. People sacrifice their lives so that others can survive. On the individual level, to a rational person, educated in the West, or living in Russia, it might not make sense  But when you are in the war, you are not doing careful rational calculus. You are often driven by emotions, a much more powerful motivator. In the case of Ukraine, these are primal emotions. Ukraine has been attacked, people are tortured and killed. 

This is the biggest injustice there could be in the world, and it must be corrected. This is what drives people. While it might not be rational, it saves Ukraine and it will ensure our independence and safety from Russia in the future. At the unbelievable high cost of lives  Now I understand that it must be how nations are created and that not any tribe or people could be a nation. Independence and freedom are not free. I just wish fewer people would have to die. 

3. Understanding is out of reach without personal experience
The war is covered in fog. Literally and through disinformation. Also, most of our cognitive and learning frameworks that we are humans and societies have developed - fail. They are not adequate for this environment. So, unless you see and experience it, you don't really know what to believe. This is why it is critically important to visit the front lines, to speak with the soldiers, to interact with the survivors of occupation, and visit all kinds of places in Ukraine. Ukraine is large and the war is diverse. Sometimes two villages a couple of miles apart have had very different experiences and now have different attitudes and culture. So, I have learned to be humble and try to learn first from eyewitness to form my own opinion.

4. War can forge you into a better person, tuned into the world's real problems
This one is simple. War makes you a better person because it cleans you of all secondary thoughts and ambitions. The human life, dignity, freedom become key for me.  Now I truly understand the meaning of the human rights. They are not an abstraction for me anymore. Yes, they can be taken away. They can disappear from your life without warning. You can wake up occupied. But human rights must be defended at all costs.

5. Our Ukrainian success hinges on knowledge and continual learning
Russia is powerful, bigger, has a lot of weapons and people willing to fight or too afraid to desert. So, we need to be smarter, better educated, more tech savvy. We have to deploy technology to win. And we have to be educated to continue to run our society and economy, during and post war.

6. The harshness and monotony of war quickly become the norm
Before the war I was afraid of the war. I was not sure whether I would behave in a decent way. Would I run away from Ukraine? Would I be afraid to be at the frontlines? Clearly, people are differently programmed. But what I learned about the fear of war is that it also comes from ignorance, from the loss of control over your life. Over time one get used to the war, one learns how to live through. Humans are amazing at adapting. The war shows it to you.

7. Life's singular purpose is to persist and advance towards victory for Ukraine; all else is secondary.
That's for me. And for most Ukrainians. We want to survive. So, while I miss my academic career in the US and regret that I might not be a good economist as a result of coming back to Ukraine before the war, I think I have made the right choices as a human. I have one life and I want to liver it true. So, Ukraine must win, and the rest can wait.

Thank you for reading this. I feel we are not alone in this. It will be over one day. X