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Without Black Lives Matter, Would Flint's Water Crisis Have Made Headlines? |
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Wednesday, 10 February 2016 09:59 |
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Douglas writes: "How did Flint grab the media's attention? The historical timing. The Black Lives Matter movement offers a news peg, having insisted that incidents of violence against black communities are not one-offs but part of systemic, structurally based brutality."
Flint resident Sharon Moore cries outside of a hearing on the city's water crisis on Capitol Hill on February 3. (photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
Without Black Lives Matter, Would Flint's Water Crisis Have Made Headlines?
By Susan J. Douglas, In These Times
10 February 16
The mainstream media learns what ‘environmental racism’ means.
 hy is Rick Snyder, Michigan's suddenly infamous governor, in the center of the media’s crosshairs? Massive coverage—front-page pieces in the New York Times, headlines in the nightly news, wall-to-wall coverage by Rachel Maddow—has linked the contamination of Flint’s water supply to the fact that its population is 57 percent African-American, and has either explicitly or implicitly cited the catastrophe as an act of “environmental racism.” That’s a term we haven’t heard much in the media, despite many other instances of environmental racism in the United States—one notorious example being the huge pollution-spewing garbage-burning incinerator in Chester, Pa., that sits right across the street from residential housing. Chester is predominantly poor and black.
So what’s different about Flint? The historical timing. The Black Lives Matter movement offers a news peg, having insisted that incidents of violence against black communities are not one-offs but part of systemic, structurally based brutality. Now there’s a media framework to legitimate Flint residents’ accusations that the water crisis would never have happened in more affluent, white communities like Grand Rapids or Grosse Pointe.
The rise of Donald Trump also provides context here, however subtly. In his campaign, Trump has sought to make a virtue out of the fact that he has no political experience and instead would “get things done” because he’s a businessman and a “deal-maker.” In 2010, Rick Snyder campaigned on this platform as well. He was a wealthy venture capitalist and former tax accountant with zero political experience. Michigan was still reeling from the Great Recession, and Snyder claimed that his business background made him the ideal person for the job. He said one of his guiding questions in developing policy would be “What’s financially affordable?” and championed “a streamlined regulatory system that’s more friendly to businesses.”
As part of this approach, Snyder pushed through his controversial emergency manager law in 2011, which allowed him to appoint officials to run—that is, take over—struggling cities and school districts and who could overrule local elected officials, dictate decisions about finances and public safety, terminate or modify contracts and sell off public assets. They did not need to have any particular expertise—in, say, education or public health—outside of cost cutting. And they were paid anywhere from $132,000 to $250,000 a year. Many Michigan residents denounced the law as undemocratic—it prompted two unsuccessful recall attempts—and in November of 2012, it was repealed by a popular referendum. Six weeks later, Snyder signed a slightly revised version of the bill that included a $770,000 appropriation for the managers’ salaries. Why did that matter? Because spending bills are legally shielded from referendums. And where were the emergency managers appointed? In largely African-American communities.
So how well have these allegedly savvy quasi-CEOs done?
In Detroit, teachers have staged sick-outs because of the failure of the various emergency managers to deal with crumbling school infrastructures, overcrowding and, yes, rats in the schools. Who was the emergency manager of Detroit Public Schools? Why, Darnell Earley, who ran Flint when it switched to the Flint River for its water. In February, he resigned in disgrace. In Flint, the revolving door of managers took authority away from the mayor and city council and pushed to change the city’s water supply from Detroit to the polluted Flint River to save money. We are now seeing how well that worked out. Emergency Manager Jerry Ambrose overruled the city council’s March 2015 vote to return to the Detroit water supply. And because of the autocratic power emergency managers enjoyed, they could ignore rising complaints about the color and smell of the water, and ignore or manipulate data about its safety.
There are many lessons the Flint catastrophe teaches, but one of the biggest is that governments do not work better if they are “run like a business.” It’s not just the ethical problem that slashing spending on things like public health is unjust and immoral. It’s also, in the end, more expensive. The switch to the Flint River for water was projected to save $15 million dollars. It may now cost $1.5 billion to clean up. So much for what’s “financially affordable.”
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Getting Change Wrong |
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Tuesday, 09 February 2016 15:26 |
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McKibben writes: "In the mounting, panicky attempts of elites to derail the Sanders candidacy, one strand dominates. You find it woven through every sage piece from the old-school pundits of the Times and the hip insider websites like Vox."
Climate activist Bill McKibben. (photo: 350.org)
Getting Change Wrong
By Bill McKibben, Reader Supported News
09 February 16
 n the mounting, panicky attempts of elites to derail the Sanders candidacy, one strand dominates.
You find it woven through every sage piece from the old-school pundits of the Times and the hip insider websites like Vox. Yes, they say, he's saying some useful things. But he can't really make them happen. He's talking "puppies and rainbows." Real "reform is hard." The Times editors, in their endorsement of Hillary Clinton, managed a matchless condescension: His ideas about breaking up the banks or guaranteeing health care for everyone, they intoned, "have earned him support among alienated middle-class voters and young people. But his plans for achieving them aren't realistic." Wait 'til you're older and richer like us, and then you'll understand how change happens.
In fact, these pundits couldn't be more wrong about where change comes from. And neither could Hillary Clinton. Here's how she put it a few months ago, backstage at a tense and fascinating little confrontation with Black Lives Matter activists:
"I don't believe you change hearts. I believe you change laws, you change allocation of resources, you change the way systems operate."
That sounds sensible, grown-up, wise. It's what Washington pundits always say -- they said it over and over again when we launched, say, the fight to stop the Keystone pipeline. But in fact it's completely backwards.
Change comes precisely when you do change hearts -- and once that change has come, then the laws and the "allocation of resources," and the "way systems operate" follow pretty easily.
Look, for instance, at gay marriage, which I'm pretty sure that President Obama will be holding up as one of the accomplishments that happened on his watch. And it did, but not much thanks to him. It came from a big, impassioned movement that cleverly changed the zeitgeist: that introduced Americans to their gay neighbors, that won a few court cases and then used that progress to show that the world wouldn't fall apart with gay marriage, that argued in a series of referendum votes for the new right. By the time that Obama (and Clinton) came on board (a decade or two after Sanders), the battle was mostly won. There was mopping up to do, but the change had come, and it had come from changing hearts.
Or look further back in American history. LBJ's the favorite example for this "effectiveness" argument, and indeed he was the legislator that twisted the final arms to get landmark civil rights legislation in place. But it was only because people had spent a generation building a movement that he had an opening. The hard, desperate part was changing the zeitgeist, which involved changing enough hearts. The Voting Rights Act didn't propel the civil rights movement; it was the other way round.
By this token, Bernie Sanders has already changed the world more than Hillary Clinton, despite all her vaunted years of experience. She manages process, but he moves the argument. Because of him there's a reasonable chance now that the TPP trade agreement will fail (he's already moved one of its authors, Hillary, into opposition). He's made it necessary to take inequality seriously -- he's the next stage, after Occupy, in moving the issue to the center of the stage, and the longer he lasts and the better he does the more attention it will get.
No, none of his plans will pass Congress intact. (Nor hers -- see, for instance, her badly mismanaged effort at health care reform in the first Clinton administration). As the Prussian chief of staff once remarked, "no plan survives contact with the enemy." Instead, what survives is momentum, trajectory. Movement. If Sanders can keep building a movement, then he has a far better chance of changing history than she does. Hillary promises constantly that "I'll be there every day, fighting for you." Bernie's slogan is #NotMeUs. There's all the difference in the world.
Now, you could argue that a manager is better suited to the presidency. We've had one the last eight years, and he's done a good job of cleaning up after the mess he inherited; the country, by and large, has been well run. So if you think that there's already enough momentum around issues like inequality and climate change, then it makes sense to elect another manager president. Washington pundits like the world pretty much as it is; it's working pretty well for them.
But younger people and poorer people may not see the world the same way. They may sense an urgent need for change. I mean, we've just broken the planet's temperature record two years in a row. If you think that we need a leader who will push to change the way we see the world then it makes perfect sense to imagine Bernie as the realistic candidate, the one who will get things done.
My guess is that the establishment pundits actually understand that, and I think they fear it a little. The polls in Iowa showed that rich people were backing Hillary while poorer people -- who can't endure much more of the status quo -- came out for Bernie. That should make you think.
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How Washington's New Rich Live |
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Tuesday, 09 February 2016 15:19 |
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Lofgren writes: "The twin explosions of post-9/11 national security extravagance and Citizens United political spending bonanza have reshaped Washington - not only in its political outlook but physically, with this New Class preferring lavish McMansions to show off their newfound wealth."
A McMansion in McLean, Virginia, offered for $12.5 million in 2014. (photo: MRIS)
How Washington's New Rich Live
By Mike Lofgren, Consortium News
09 February 16
The twin explosions of post-9/11 national security extravagance and Citizens United political spending bonanza have reshaped Washington — not only in its political outlook but physically, with this New Class preferring lavish McMansions to show off their newfound wealth, as Mike Lofgren describes.
n 1927, H.L. Mencken rode by train through the Pennsylvania coal country. The houses he saw along the way were so hideous, at least in his eyes, that he was moved to pen his famous essay, “The Libido for the Ugly.” Mencken was writing about towns inhabited by coal miners and railroad brakemen, but what would he say if he were to visit present-day Washington, DC and take a stroll in its surrounding suburbs?
I’d bet the Sage of Baltimore would direct his limitless venom at the spanking-new particle-board McMansions of Washington’s New Class: the K Street lawyers, political consultants, Beltway fixers and war on terrorism profiteers who run a permanent shadow government in the nation’s capital.
This group does not include federal employees or most elected officials. With their statutorily limited salaries, they cannot afford the bloated monstrosities favored by the New Class. Modest developments like Fairlington or the humble cape cods, ramblers and four-squares of Arlington were built for them in the early post-World War II heyday of the federal bureaucrat.
There is talk of a Georgetown elite, but ever since Pamela Harriman’s death in 1997, that crowd has been as defunct as the Romanov dynasty. Georgetown has elegant but cramped townhouses with creaky floorboards, inadequate wiring and an aura of ever-so-slightly shabby gentility. Who needs that when you can buy a brand-new 12,000 square foot McMansion with cast stone lions guarding the front gate, a two-and-a-half story tall great room and a home cinema with built-in FSB ports?
If that sounds more like the jumped-up suburb of a Sunbelt city like Houston or Atlanta than the traditional, old-money atmosphere of Beacon Hill or the Philadelphia Mainline, it is because that is precisely what the neighborhoods of the new establishment have become.
Up the George Washington Parkway in Virginia, across the Potomac from Georgetown lies McLean, where a new elite first began migrating in the late 1970s on former pasturage near the CIA’s headquarters. In time McLean became the mecca of the moneyed new class: some Democrats (mega-fundraiser and Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe is one such resident, as is Zbigniew Brzezinski), but predominantly they are Republican operatives of the better-heeled sort: consultants, lobbyists, lawyers, fundraisers, pollsters and the occasional venture capitalist. The roster includes such luminaries as Colin Powell, Newt Gingrich and GOP über-lobbyist Ed Rogers.
McLean is also desirable real estate for executive-level contractor personnel, whose work is ostensibly the technocratic administration of national security programs, but who in practice constitute part of a distinctive American political class.
All of these people – a select few politicians, their handlers, lobbyists and contractors – are much the same as the political new class that Yugoslavian dissident Milovan Djilas wrote about in 1957 when he described the rising Communist Party bureaucracy as a clique of self-interested strivers who had become a privileged group enjoying great material benefits from their positions.
Back across the Potomac River from McLean lies the similarly well-heeled commuter dormitory of Potomac, Maryland. It is politically more evenly divided than McLean, with roughly equal parts Democrats and Republicans, but the social dynamic remains much the same.
Both suburbs are the residential headquarters of emergent class of Beltway operatives who do well by doing good – for their clients and shareholders if not the country.
Further west of Washington, almost in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains, lies Loudoun County. Loudoun is per capita the richest county in the country – as well as one of the most Republican – and is something of a world headquarters of the McMansion as lifestyle statement. It is in this outer-suburban, more rural county, which used to be Virginia’s hunt country, that executives of Beltway Bandit firms, totally dependent on the federal government for their livelihoods, can pretend to lead the life of a free Jeffersonian squirearchy.
The burgeoning New Class is determined to transform the rest of the Washington metropolitan area into a replica of McLean or Loudoun. My own neighborhood of Fort Hunt still retains its 1950s “Leave It to Beaver” atmosphere, but on its fringes, closer to the views of the Potomac, the great transformation is taking root.
The properties there were allotted in the 1920s, and a surprising number of the houses are quite modest in scale. Or were, until a few years ago: one by one, they are being razed. In their place have arisen the stereotypical McMansions that have irrupted across the country in eczematous patches ever since the savings and loan deregulation of the early 1980s.
The structures resemble the architecture of the Loire Valley, Elizabethan England, or Renaissance Tuscany as imagined by Walt Disney, or perhaps Liberace. As with McMansions everywhere, the new owners could have gotten a much sounder design for the same price or less, but they prefer the turrets, porte-cochères and ill-proportioned Palladian windows that they bought, and accent the whole monstrous ensemble with the obligatory Range Rover in the driveway.
It tells one something about the raw, nouveau-riche tastes of the contractors, lobbyists and corporate lawyers who make up the New Class that they seem to possess a demonic lust to leave their mark on whole neighborhoods like Shelley’s Ozymandias proclaiming “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
One especially pretentious über-McMansion a mile north of me attempts to emulate Citizen Kane’s Xanadu not only in scale, but in hermit-like spirit: surrounding the structure is a forbidding masonry wall whose massive wrought iron front gate is secured with a ship’s anchor chain and a huge padlock. Evidently, Mormon canvassers and aluminum siding salesmen are not welcome.
Often where a perfectly good house, a spacious 1950s ranch of 2500 square feet or so, is perched on an ample lot, a developer will tear it down and erect not one but two New Class mausoleums on the same plot. Since they cannot be very wide, they resemble New Orleans shotgun shacks: narrow and extremely deep, but on a gargantuan scale. In order to obtain the seemingly mandatory 5000 square feet of interior space each, they are obliged to build upward, which increases the appearance of disproportion. The effect is that of a domino placed on its side.
Since these freakish contrivances are built as close to the property line as the law allows even as they strive heavenward like the Tower of Babel, disputes with the neighbors are inevitable.
For those unfortunate enough to live beside them, it is like having a Carnival Cruise liner beached on the adjoining property. But since the eyesore’s owner is probably arguing as part of his day job that rodent hair in cereal is part of a balanced breakfast, he is unlikely to be moved by the whining of neighbors over subjective issues like quality of life or privacy.
In other places where the New Class congregates, like San Francisco or New York, the same dynamic applies. Not just the poor, but even middle-class people are being squeezed out: when long-time residents die or empty nesters move out, the house is torn down and a vastly more expensive one replaces it. The process not only inflates prices for new housing, it relentlessly subtracts from the existing stock of more affordable residences.
It is common knowledge that Wall Street and its inflated compensation packages have remade Manhattan into an exclusive playground for the rich, just as tech moguls have made San Francisco unaffordable for the middle class. It is less well known that the estimated $4 trillion spent since 9/11 on the war on terrorism and billions spent on political campaigns ($6 billion on the 2012 elections alone) have trickled down so extravagantly to the New Class settled around Washington’s Beltway that they have remade the landscape of our capital.
The process symbolizes the transformation of Washington in the era of Shock and Awe and Citizens United. It’s just a pity the beneficiaries have such horrible taste.
Mike Lofgren is a former congressional staff member who served on both the House and Senate budget committees. His book about Congress, The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted, was published in paperback in 2013. His new book, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government, was published in January 2016. He has appeared several times as a guest on Moyers & Company. [This article previously appeared at http://billmoyers.com/story/washingtons-libido-for-the-ugly/]
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FOCUS: Her Name Is Angela Davis |
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Tuesday, 09 February 2016 13:37 |
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Abu-Jamal: "Her name, Angela Davis, is known to millions still after the 60s era uproar over her sensational trial and subsequent acquittal. For people of a certain generation, she is remembered for rocking and outrageous afro - her fists raised in naked defiance of the system."
Mumia Abu-Jamal. (photo: Lou Jones/First Run Features)
Her Name Is Angela Davis
By Mumia Abu-Jamal, Prison Radio
09 February 16
 er name, Angela Davis, is known to millions still after the 60s era uproar over her sensational trial and subsequent acquittal. For people of a certain generation, she is remembered for rocking and outrageous afro - her fists raised in naked defiance of the system. For many years, she taught at UCal Santa Cruz and worked in the prison abolition and social justice movements. Now today, thanks to Haymarket Books, you can read her recent speeches and interviews. Speeches that address the Black Lives Matter movement, the failure of black politics, and gender struggles that are bubbling up from below.
It is vintage Angela. Insightful, curious, observant, and brilliant. Asking and answering questions about events in this new century that look surprisingly similar to the last century. The new book, hot off the presses, is Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. The title draws on a heartbreaking dirge from a negro spiritual some many many years ago in her native south, the long unrelenting struggle for freedom, one that still animates her. The title also reminds us of former Black Panther Kilu Niasha who hosts a show on public radio by the same name. At times, history lesson, political education, world studies and gender theories, Angela Y. Davis gives us all a lot to ponder. It is a slim volume (158 pages) but well worth the read, so check out Freedom Is a Constant Struggle at Haymarketbooks.org by Angela Y. Davis. From in Prison Nation, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
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s I write this, 92% of the precincts have reported in New Hampshire, and Bernie Sanders has received over 138,331 votes. Donald Trump has received 92,062 votes. Now I know that Donald Trump is part of the establishment, but many of his supporters think they are sticking it to the establishment. I wonder how many reporters and pundits will point out that Bernie has received more votes than the top two Republicans combined. Who else is highlighting that Bernie beat “The Donald” by close to 50,000 votes?
