Biden has a plan, and all Republicans can offer in "response" is cynicism and empty sound bites

First off, in the aftermath of Pres. Joe Biden’s “annual address” yesterday, I want to say that both Sen. Tim Scott and Vice Pres. Kamala Harris are wrong that this isn’t a “racist” country. As I said a couple of posts ago, you only have to be racist against one group to be so, and just because every other group shares the same prejudices against a certain group doesn’t mean it’s “acceptable” and not “real” racism.

Carrying on, Biden talked about “winning the future for America,” which sounds a bit more promising that Donald Trump’s “America First” nativism and stoking the fire of white nationalism and grievance. Did Biden inherit a nation in “crisis”? Certainly it faced—and still faces as long as Trumpism controls the Republican Party—a crisis of the soul. But not to worry, because Biden has a plan that “turns peril into possibility, crisis into opportunity, and setback into strength.” This is now an America that “chooses hope over fear, truth over lies, and light over darkness.” There is no “quit in America.”

Damn, doesn’t that make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside? At last year’s State of the Union, there was no pandemic, no worst economic downturn (albeit a temporary one) since the Great Depression, and no violent attempt to overthrow the election. Trump never had to explain any of his failures and crimes in that regard, and even if he had to, it would have just been him regurgitating absurd superlatives than mean nothing. Yesterday, the “house was on fire”: today with the help of Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Schumer, Biden acted to put it out with the “American Rescue Plan” with the “overwhelming support of even Republican voters, if not all of the Republicans sitting in that chamber yesterday. People are getting vaccinated in droves, and in  time everything will be back to “normal,” if people play by the rules.

So what is Biden planning on doing tomorrow? Well, we can talk about it but it won’t be immigration reform, or Medicare eligibility reduced to 50 years of age, or dental care covered by Medicare—the latter items which I suspect most Americans would really appreciate. There is the American Jobs Plan to rebuild the country’s infrastructure and create jobs that wishy-washy Sen. Joe Manchin is afraid costs too much and Mitch McConnell is in a tizzy-fit over. It should be pointed out to these people that the money spent on this is recycled into the economy, which is something that Biden and his friends in media should be making people understand; this is not trillions of dollars in tax cuts for the rich that do not “trickle down” into the economy, but goes right back in, and stays in, the pockets of the rich.

Then there is the American Families Plan, which proposes to “guarantee” four additional years of free public education in order to give American children a fighting chance with kids around the world who seek to populate American universities. This plan also proposes expanded day care, family medical leave and an increase in child tax credits. Do you remember ever hear anything like that from Trump? Biden also mentioned that American Rescue Plan also proposes to strengthen the Affordable Care Act, and make it “more affordable” for those enrolled in the program.

For the benefit of folks like Manchin, Biden claimed that none of this will increase the deficit if we just make the top 1 percent do the “right thing” and pay their fair share of the taxes, meaning a top marginal rate of 39.6 percent. People always misconstrue what that means; that is over a certain income level the overage will be taxed at that rate. The top marginal rate used to be 90 percent, which served as a disincentive for the very rich to pay themselves more than they deserved and allowed the excess profits to “trickle-down” to everyone else. Despite the fact that the corporate tax rate went down to 21 percent, 55 of the biggest corporations in the country paid zero federal income taxes. Trump’s tax “reform” did not close loopholes or prevent these companies from shifting profits overseas. If we “fix” those issues, Biden’s “new deal” can pay for itself, we are informed.

Biden also went on to say that he intends on engaging world leaders on climate change, unfair trade practices, counter aggression and restart arms talks. Then he addressed social unrest, and praised the Senate for passing a hate crimes act to protect Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders. Of course Biden made a big show of support for women, and wants to reauthorize the terribly flawed Violence Against Women Act, which basically gives women license to commit violence themselves. The need for gun control seems to have mentioned, as well passing a new voting rights act. Biden certainly had every dot dotted.

Lest he forget what is really on the minds of Fox News listeners, there was immigration and the need to “end the exhausting war against immigrants.” To his credit, Biden addressed the reasons why people from Central America are coming here—not to commit violent crime, rape or become wards of the state, but because to escape “violence, corruption, gangs political instability, hunger, hurricanes and earthquakes.” Instead of shutting down foreign aid programs to address these problems like Trump did, Biden wants to “restart” and strengthen them.

That was a tough act to follow, and I doubt a majority of the nation after four years of Trumpism was in the mood to hear the usual the sky is falling bullshit from Republicans. But that is basically what we got from Scott, couched in “genteel,” nonthreatening terms. Trumpism controls the Republican Party on the state level and in the House of Representatives; it was a cynical ploy to put Scott (who some Republicans would call a "RINO") out there. In fact, it was so cynical that no one—not Republican nor Democratic voters—fell for it.  Or even if a few of them did, it was probably because they were not reading between the lines close enough.

Scott had no choice but to admit that “Our president seems like a good man. His speech was full of good words.” He at least realized that being openly antagonistic was not going to win any converts back to the side of Trump and his brand of nastiness. But then he accused Biden of offering empty platitudes, without, of course, mentioning the passage of the American Rescue Plan, which Scott nor any of his other so-called “moderate” colleagues voted for purely partisan reasons (how often do voters in Maine have to be made fools of Susan Collins?). Who’s pulling America apart? Not Biden, whose policies have the support of many Republican voters; obviously their representatives in Congress only “represent” themselves, because they are the patricians who know better than the plebes. 

Then Scott proceeded on a laundrey list of empty talking points that he accused Biden of dishing out; but unlike Biden, Scott’s points were entirely lacking in context or any kind of actual “plan”—so indicative of Trump and his camp followers. Phony “opportunity zones,” misrepresenting the Trump tax cuts, claiming we are all “one big happy family” while justifying Republican efforts to undermine the black vote (most of his votes come from white people, so what does he care?). Oh yeah, Republicans are all for “infrastructure”—but where were they during the past four years when Trump was boasting about his “infrastructure” plan? Scott claimed most of Biden’s infrastructure plan is “government waste,” which of course is another way of saying Republicans oppose green energy, electric vehicles, broadband in rural or underserved areas, stuff like that.

Scott went on to say stupid things like, you know, who wants to be “forced” to go to “free” college if they don’t want to? Students can make-up their own minds. You think they are stupid? Well, Republicans do. He made a great to-do about his struggles being black, although, frankly if you are a black conservative, you’ve got a “leg-up” on the competition. Scott’s take on racism was absurd and hypocritical. Nonwhites have been “defined” by their color by whites since forever, and Scott complained about pointing out systemic racism and accusing white people as complicit as being “divisive.” It is not without irony that Scott barely mentioned immigration or the border, because the racist fear of a “great replacement” is the number one “threat” to the country to Republicans, more than any international foe like Russia—which Scott didn’t mention at all.

Certainly a greater portion of America does not spend its time consumed with race, but there is an obviously a more than convincing case to be made that the Republican Party since the 1960s is the White People’s Party, and parading one lone black Republican in Congress to “speak” for the party isn’t fooling anyone.

You can't call the racism of some white women anything other than what it is: something that is ugly and personal

 

Four black Army soldiers are having a meal at an IHOP in Virginia. A “nice” white woman puts $30 on their table as a gesture of “appreciation” for their service, which was said to be not uncommon. But then the woman came back and took $24 off the table. She left, but then came right back. She tells the soldiers “Just so you know, I came back in to give her the rest of the cash from my wallet, because you people are shit bags”:

The soldiers ask her to leave them alone, but instead woman parks herself in their booth, preventing one of the soldiers from leaving. None of the soldiers can understand what is going on here. A white man, who is a retired airman, steps in and asks her to leave. She asks him if he is a “wrestler” or works for IHOP; he is obviously as befuddled by the woman’s behavior as the soldiers are:

The woman finally gets out of the cubicle, but not before telling the soldiers what is really on her mind: “Are you the thin blue line? I get confused. Are you BLM? Are you Antifa?” Witnesses reported that they heard her referring to the soldiers as “lying cock-sucking nig**rs,” and to one person who was telling her to shut-up, “Motherfucker, I will drop you. You wanna go? You wanna go?”

This white woman was probably feeling unhappy about all the white “guilt” she was being forced to endure, and it was more out of spite than generosity that she offered to pay for the soldiers’ meal. Perhaps she thought they were not “appreciative” enough of her “gesture”; not all white people are racists, after all. The problem was that this woman’s action had nothing to do with the men being soldiers; she so clearly had race on the brain, and was probably so discombobulated by being confronted with people who could not easily fit in her stereotypical view of blacks, that this fake show of “appreciation” was a way of expressing her belief that blacks were “undeserving” of any empathy from her regardless of circumstance or occupation. Or maybe I'm being too "nice" to her in trying to ascertain her "motives."

We have been seeing a lot of this behavior in the past few years from white women, no doubt “inspired” by Donald Trump and Stephen Miller. Why should we be surprised about this? Why should we ever have been surprised? What do you think of the women in the picture below? They are shouting menaces at a black student that “integrationists” are “forcing” into their previously lily-white William Franz Elementary School in Louisiana back in 1960:

Here are white women parading in Washington D.C., circa 1925; they must be wearing the latest fashion:

You hear the excuses being made for plainly racist white women like this from the “liberal” side; the feminist “explanation” is that they are being “brainwashed” by a “patriarchal” society. But that is just being disingenuous. Feminist Eleanor Smeal complained about “racism against white women” in USA Today back in the early 1990s; she was upset about the “optics” of media attention on Pamela Smart, who murdered her two children. Smart was white—why wasn’t the media equally fascinated by black female crime? It wasn’t “fair” to white women; after all, black women committed more crimes, right?  Of course today, white female victims are all the media rage.

Let’s be honest about this: the racism of white women can be much more “personal” than that of white men, and more deeply felt. That is why you continuously encounter such sickening incidents like the one above; white female racists not only tend to use uglier language, but they also seem to be much less self-conscious in an expressing their racist beliefs. So-called “progressive” white women might make a show of being “tolerant,” but this more often than not is a “feel good” gesture that they expect something in return, like the kind of “unconditional love” they expect from a dog. If their motives are questioned, or it is pointed out that they are only acting from a position of patronage, they abandon the pretext and return to their defensive white privilege shell.

We must also remember that white women are far from “naturally” altruistic. People tend to be “empathetic” toward the less privileged if their own positions are not “threatened.” We only have to watch crime shows to know that white women are the favored “victims” even though in real life they are the demographic least likely to be a victim of a crime. This is not just a function of gender victim politics in this country as a whole, but of the whole history of racism in this country; this is an off-shoot of the “sanctity of white women” of an allegedly “bygone” era in which “virginal” white females had to be protected from bestial “colored” men—and even the “rumor” of such happening usually led to lynchings or the burning down of “colored” neighborhoods and ensuing massacres. For radicalized gender advocates, this kind of thing “intrudes” on their agenda; racism is something other people are guilty of. The fact that a discussion about white female racism angers and frustrates them shows that they can’t abide by self-examination or the “competition” for “victimhood.”

I remember exchanging an email years ago with a Seattle Times op-ed writer who was a black woman. She told me that she and another black woman in attendance at a women journalists convention were asked if they thought it was their race or their gender that hurt them more. She said that she and her companion looked around the sea of white faces and the fact they were the only blacks in attendance, and answered that their “race” was a bigger problem for them. She observed that the white women in attendance expressed “shock” and “disbelief” by her answer. These white women were simply blind to the benefits of white “privilege,” and that these two black women were just “tokens” to their questionable “generosity.”

The late sociologist Ruth Frankenberg had the audacity to discuss how white privilege aided white women, as opposed to the disadvantages of being a non-white woman in this society. Frankenberg found that educated white women—especially those who regarded themselves as “feminists”—tended to evade or discount race. They even pretended not to think of themselves as “white.” They claimed not to think in terms of “race.” Race was the “problem” of nonwhites, and being “white” and what it meant being so in this society was not worth their time examining. Frankenberg found that white women tended to be “full of contradictions” about racial matters, and used evasive terms while discussing race, especially in how it benefited themselves personally. Many white women she talked to didn’t want to discuss racism in this country at all because it “discomfited” them, and made them feel “guilty” about being white and from a “dominant” social group.

Of course in this muddled society we live in with competing “victims” there must be some “allowances” made. In an article in Race, Ethnicity and Education in 2002, Diane Gillespie writes about a teacher who “mistakenly” discomfited a white female student by talking about her own belief that she benefited from white privilege. The student, Mary, felt that the teacher had “betrayed” her and did not recognize her belief that everything she had was from “hard and honest labor,” and people seeing her as white played no role in it. The teacher decided that she needed to change the way she taught race in class so as to find a way to make white women like Mary feel more “comfortable” in their skin and reduce their “discomfort,” and make them “feel cared for as human beings when they voice unpopular opinions”—like Mary, who told the teacher that now she felt she had to “watch what she says” when she defends her whiteness.

The photo of the taunting white women above was from the cover of the book by Elizabeth Gillespie McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy. McRae writes that although white men engaged in the more “physical” aspects of racism, white women were the “constant gardeners”—meaning it was they who “nurtured” racism and the segregation of the races in the home, in the schools and in their children. It was through the efforts of white women which accounted for the “endurance and shape-shifting capabilities of white resistance.” And all the time, McRae notes, these women claimed not be racist—but were just “protecting” their children and their schools. Their opposition to integration as a “moral”—not racial—issue, was obviously disingenuous to say the least.

McRae also observes in her book that white female racism is also a function of their perceived “gendered” and “class-based” status in society. White women who are racists act the same way as “poor whites” did (and still do), by having a need to be “superior” to someone, that naturally being nonwhite people; demeaning them in ugly verbal ways, and finding “creative” ways to discriminate against them. White women in the early days of school desegregation in the South who felt they lacked “political capital” because of their gender instead sought to make their opinions known by engaging in harassing behavior of “integrationists” and nonwhite students—even encouraging their  own children to “bully” white students who dared to attend integrated schools.

McRae goes so far as to insist that white women’s racism is just as much a “women’s movement” as the feminist movement is. When we see incidents like the one above occur over and over and over again—not just against blacks, but Hispanics as well—it has gone far beyond even that; in the era of Trump, it is just another truth that was waiting for that box to be kicked open to release the full measure of it.

While Putin is preparing for "war." Republicans only seek to undermine this country's ability to counter the threat

 

In Trump World today, democracy is “the enemy”; even many so-called “mature” Republican U.S. senators claim fraud is afoot despite the knowledge that the Democratic candidate has won the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections, and to “remedy” that “inconvenience,” Republicans on the state level are conducting blatant efforts to cheat their way to “victory” through voter suppression. Republicans are “big” on protecting the right to own guns that kill people, but not the right of the people to peacefully vote. Go figure.

But back in the “old” days, both Republicans and Democrats agreed that the principle enemy of democracy here and around the world was the Soviet Union and the spread of communism. After the fall and break-up of the Soviet Union and the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact, the new Russian state appeared poised to join the democratic world. But under the “leadership” of Boris Yeltsin, democracy did not take hold, mainly because the West falsely assumed that younger Russians favored change. But even in the 1990s, before the rise of Vladimir Putin, supposedly “liberal” Russians were few and far between, and most endorsed strong-armed nationalism.

This nationalism may have been partly the result of disillusionment that their country was no longer a “superpower,” and Russians blamed the “chaos” of pseudo-democratic governing for it. But unlike other eastern-bloc countries that only fitfully “embraced” communism after World War II and had a tradition of capitalism, Russians lived under a system where their every movement was controlled by the state for 70 years, and the acceptance of state control became even more ingrained during war, since it was “necessary” to win it. Nothing has really changed in Russia since the break-up, and most of the few anti-corruption activists, journalists and political opponents seem to be in jail or have been “mysteriously” murdered. If that was happening in the U.S., people would be demanding justice; in Russia, it’s just the routine of life.

That Russia would remain an enemy of the West because people willingly “follow the leader” was suggested in British author Colin Thubron’s account of his trip to Russia in the early 1980s, Among the Russians, first published in 1983. This relatively small, 200-page book—which I just happened to find laying discarded in the grass in Seattle—makes for a fascinating time-waster while waiting for the laundry to finish. In his interactions with younger Russians, Thubron found that while they didn’t share their elders veneration of the past (let alone knew anything about the Great Patriotic War), they betrayed no dissatisfaction with the political system in their country; they had simply grown accustomed to it. Each day passed on like the one before, and the next day would be more of the same; they didn’t have to make any decisions, and they liked it that way.

Of course in a democracy, people have to inform themselves about what they want and what political parties offer the most useful policies to achieve those wants and desires. But in Russia, voters didn’t really know what they wanted, and no real political parties emerged with competing visions of the direction of the country. In the end, Russians settled on one “political party” that was ultra-nationalist and only serves as a rubberstamp for anything Russia’s current dictator, Putin, declares he intends to do—and most Russians are quite happy that someone is doing all the “thinking” for them, as long as it makes them feel “super” again.

Meanwhile, here in the U.S., the Republicans seem more interested in making our country weaker internationally, while blaming Joe Biden for Trump’s many mistakes. I dare you to name even one international agreement with Trump’s signature on it. What did Trump ever do on the foreign policy front that didn’t simply destroy, alienate or make things worse? Take Iran, for example. Trump vacated the nuclear agreement, but to what purpose? The other signatories to the agreement didn’t follow his lead, and Trump never provided a revised proposal of what he wanted. All he wanted to do was “kill” it simply because it had Barack Obama’s name on it.  Did Iran cave in? No, because other than minor annoyances, nothing has really changed, and Iran only used Trump’s actions as an excuse to “enhance” its nuclear capabilities.

And then of course there is Russia again, whose dictator Trump considered a “good friend.” While Trump did leave most sanctions against Russian oligarchs in place, he did nothing to pressure Putin to stop threatening the Ukraine—in fact he threatened the Ukraine by withholding military assistance for personal political ends—or stop election interference and cyber attacks. Trump was so desperate to be make Russia our “friend” that he mindlessly believed every lie Putin told him, and all to no purpose for U.S. interests. Trump only made to the U.S. weaker in the face of a threat that Russian expert Rebekah Koffler wrote in The Hill yesterday was “more dangerous now” than it was during the Cold War.

Koffler notes that it is “understandable” from the Russian perspective that the possibility of the Ukraine entering a military alliance with the West is a “red line” that can’t be crossed. But Russia under Putin has gone out its way to distance itself politically and culturally from the West. The West did want Russia to join them in a “pan-European” entity with shared interests, but Putin is a man with delusions of grandeur, and he wants nothing less than to be the leader of a reconstituted Russian “empire,” and because the West stands in the way of that, the West is still as much the “enemy” as it was in the Cold War period, with the U.S. still the strongest power in the Western “bloc,” and thus still the number one “enemy” of Russia. It is Russia which chose that—and because in the minds of most Americans “we” did not choose that, Putin seems to think that the U.S. is too “weak” to stop him.

Koffler writes that the U.S. spent $23 billion on military intelligence last year, but the present director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier, professes that all that money was insufficient to determine why Putin is mobilizing massive forces on the Ukrainian border. Putin has not been clear about what his intentions are, and in this way. Koffler says, “Moscow confuses Western intelligence services and desensitives them to constant changes in force posture, so Putin can conduct a surprise attack if he chooses.” If Putin does send in Russian forces in a ground offensive in the Ukraine, he has threatened a “swift, asymmetric and harsh response” if NATO attempts to intervene militarily.

Putin, for some reason, fears that any success of democracy in the Ukraine and neighboring countries is a “threat” to his dictatorial regime, which is why he has sought to undermine U.S. elections, and to used his intelligence services to corrupt Ukrainian officials and undermine belief in the democratic system there.  Because of this threat to his regime, Putin has ignored economic unrest in the country and poured oil revenues into creating new and more dangerous weapon systems—some of which in testing have seen “mishaps” causing death and environmental damage from radioactive contamination.

Koffler also points out that Moscow’s to us seemingly irrational, “brutal and pitiless” behavior is motivated by “deeply rooted fear of the United States…convinced that U.S. anti-Soviet policy led to the demise of the Soviet Union, rather than its own economic and totalitarian social policies. Putin believes that Washington seeks to weaken Russia economically and militarily and topple his regime.” Putin probably is in correct in one regard: after more than 20 years in power, most people here are tired of his tough-guy act, and want to see if someone else has any better ideas; after all, his friend Trump lost an election, and hopefully we won’t be seeing him holding office ever again.

Putin believes that a U.S.-Russian war is “inevitable,” writes Koffler, which is why Russians have been hacking into government and military computer systems, because they believe that the U.S. military is too dependent on “technology,” and thus is vulnerable to being disrupted by cyber attacks. Russians also “think they understand the American psyche and can maintain the current U.S.-Russian confrontation below the threshold of actual war,” says Koffler, and they believe they can do this by amplifying “existing societal tensions and fuel instability” by disinformation and covert influence operations in this country.

Putin is probably correct in that assumption, because Republicans seem to be deliberately playing into his hands. Of course Republicans are willing toadies to Russian undermining faith in our system of government. I mean, look at what Republicans are doing in Arizona today—six months after the election, and they still insist on a recount of votes in one Democratic-leaning country in search of “fraud.” A Gallup poll in 2016 showed virtually no difference between Republicans and Democrats in belief in the threat posed by Russia to U.S. interests; today, only half as many Republicans consider Russia a threat compared to Democrats, and this is wholly due to Trump’s deliberate efforts to deny or underplay that threat.

Like Russians, Trump supporters simply cannot think for themselves—they need their “leader” to do their thinking for them. The problem for us is that their “leader” is preparing for war, and we are not.

You only have to be racist against one group to be so, Hollywood—and America, for that matter

 

The 2021 Academy Awards was allegedly the most “diverse” ever, but from whose perspective? That might be true from the black and Asian perspective, and people might jump up and down and point out that the father of the director of Judas and the Black Messiah, Shaka King, was allegedly Panamanian; but who’s kidding who here? King clearly identifies black and his movie has black actors, black crew, black producers and black politics written all over it. Fact: not a single Latino was nominated for anything, and that is, I’m sorry to say, typical, racist, Hollywood. Just own it.  

Actress/film director Fanny Veliz Grande wrote on the website Avenida Productions a few weeks ago that people tell her when she points out the seemingly deliberate exclusion of Latinos in, well, anything, people point to the “Three Amigos”—directors Inarritu, Del Toro and Cuaron, all of whom have won Oscars for best director. But if you take a closer look at their American movies, she notes that these films not only have no Latino actors, but have no people of color at all.

That shouldn’t be surprising; as I pointed out it a 2018 post, these directors come from privileged, Euro-elite Mexican society, and racism in Mexico is a fact of life. These people do not want to inform you of reality—they are just telegraphing that they want to be seen as “white” just like you, because they know that being known as “Latino” carries with it the stereotype that what they do is not as “good,” so they “hedge” their bets by only working with white actors with whom they feel most comfortable with socially in any case. Their own racial prejudices and stereotypes prevent them from working with people with even a hint of indigenous or “mestizo” blood. 

The vast majority of Latinos in this country are U.S. citizens, but Hollywood treats them like their money isn't as good as everyone else' is.  Having them seen as the focus of a film makes it a “genre” film that only Latinos and film critics would want to see. Why is that? Because they are not “real” Americans, not even those who speak perfect English and don’t know a lick of Spanish. Even if the only “culture”  they know is the one that is forced on them every day by the media, in the schools and by the behavior of “real” Americans, Latinos are defined by the stereotypes applied to them, and their “side of the story” isn’t worth anyone’s time.

Where did these stereotypes come from, anyways? Mainly from films and TV shows of the “old west” genre; but outside of exotic “good guys” like The Cisco Kid or Zorro, “Mexicans” were easily identifiable by their clothes, their accents and the fact they always seemed to be “bandits,” “revolutionaries,” or just “duplicitous” or lazy.  Or at least that was how the men were portrayed; “Mexican” women were usually “spitfires” or evil seducers of white men. Maybe once in a while, like in The Magnificent Seven, you actually saw some who were actually hardworking farmers who just wanted the bad guys to leave them alone; the same dynamic is at play today from ordinary people and drug cartels, but who wants to hear that story when “all” Mexicans are supposed to be “violent criminals” and “rapists”? No wonder director Robert Rodriguez felt the need to make a movie like Machete so that Latinos could at least imagine that someone was fighting for them for a change and kicking some Nazi ass.

In the history of the Oscars, only 12 U.S.-born Latinos have been nominated in the best acting category. Only four Latinos (not including Spanish actors) have won acting Oscars: Jose Ferrer, Rita Moreno, Anthony Quinn and Benicio del Torro.  Ferrer is the only one to win in either the “Best Actor” or “Actress” category, the rest for supporting roles. Also of note was that Ferrer and Quinn won Oscars playing French—not Hispanic—characters. In fact the success of Ferrer and Quinn was largely due to the fact that they could play “ethnic” European characters; Ferrer even played a German Nazi in Ship of Fools.

Martin Sheen was born Ramon Gerard Antonio Estevez, his father an immigrant from Spain. Despite the fact that he is actually white, he admitted that his film career would never have gotten off the ground had he kept his real name. In a 2003 interview he revealed that whenever he gave his name for a job interview or to rent an apartment, there was always “hesitation” on the other line, until he showed up and people saw that he was white. Sheen never changed his name officially, but since his “invented” name helped him professionally, he kept using it. As Veliz Grande pointed out, Hollywood “will include some of us that can pass solely as white or African-American, as long as our Latindad isn’t showing.”

In a piece in published on the Sports Illustrated website from the “Latino perspective,” Luis Miguel Echegaray saw the reason for Latinos being “outside looking in” as being “the lack of diversity in the writing and production room, where the important casting decisions are made. Latino roles are so narrow that even when they do exist, it is the stereotypical role of drug criminal or house maid. A little story: When I used to go on auditions for pilots or new film projects, almost every single character I would read for was either a thief, drug dealer or immigrant with a troubled past.”

There have been complaints in the Latino arcting community about being ignored by the Emmys as well; but besides pointing out a few good roles, the real problem is that there are still so few Latino actors on television. If there were more Latinos on television, Emmy voters may be more “comfortable” about even nominating one or two. But it also comes down to the fact that neither Hollywood nor the television industry has done anything to promote or nurture potential Latino stars—and that may also be a function of a society that does not conceal it racial attitudes about Latinos.

This has been talked about forever, but nothing changes, because in the media there are no Latino commentators to make an issue of it. In 2016, Lenika Cruz observed in an The Atlantic article, “The Missing Piece of the Oscars Diversity Conversation,” that any conversation about improving Latino representation is viewed by some black activists as a “threat” to their own position (you can include white women in that complaint too).  Quoting USC professor Todd Boyd, “Throughout the long history of Hollywood and the history of the Oscars, there has been an on-going conversation about racism that has often been framed in terms of black and white,” and that the current conversation about the lack of Latino representation reflects that fact. Still, Cruz states that “involving all minority groups in the mainstream diversity discussion is necessary,” and shouldn’t be seen as “diminishing” blacks, or raise questions about the “merits” or “limitations” of solidarity: “To what extent should people of color focus on increasing opportunities for all people of color, versus their own communities,” she asks.

The fact is that blacks have been much more successful in getting their “message” across, and there are reasons for that. Their voices are being telegraphed by an obliging white powers-that-be who hold all the levers of power. That is except for one: the power of fear. Do you really think that all white people in power act through “altruistic” impulses? Do you think business owners with all those boarded-up store fronts with “Black Lives Matter” signs on them are not more concerned about what might happen to them if they don’t make a show of false “empathy”? Charles Foster Kane spoke for these people in the film Citizen Kane:

If I don’t look after the interests of the underprivileged, maybe somebody else will, maybe somebody without any money or property…and that would be too bad.

Latinos, who do not go out on the streets and threaten destruction every time one of their own are killed by police, have neither people to speak for them in the media, or as a group are too divided along racial and “ethnic” lines to form a solid front to do so; white Cubans, for example, couldn’t care less about the “Mexicans”—or, for that matter, black Cubans. Proof of point: Senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, both of Cuban extraction. Latinos really don’t have many friends in this country, outside immigration activists. In a 2018 story in the Seattle Times, we're told this:

Merle “Chucky” Buchanan was charged Monday with two counts of second-degree murder for allegedly shooting two “relative strangers”—Paul Tapia, 45, and Jose Garcia Jr., 51—early Jan. 6 outside the Taradise Café, according to King County prosecutors. Buchanan, whose criminal history bars him from possessing firearms, was also charged with second-degree unlawful possession of a firearm.

The story goes something like this: two Latino males, Tapia and Garcia, were friends who were attending a party for a co-worker at the restaurant. Tapia became highly intoxicated and was asked to leave. As he left the establishment he was “greeted” by a complete stranger, Buchanan, who is black. Security cameras appeared to show them having a “friendly” conversation. Garcia appeared and stood away from them, waiting for them to end their conversation so he could take Tapia home. Buchanan then just pulled out a gun and shot both of them in the head. No “motive” was ever determined for the shooting, but who is kidding who here?

Do black police officers act any differently than white officers when it comes to black "suspects"?

 

A long time ago when I was in the service stationed in Germany, I received a letter inviting me to my sister’s wedding in small town Wisconsin. I put in for two weeks leave and decided to take a real vacation for once. I flew in to JFK, spent three days in Manhattan taking in the sights and the museums—and in the hotel I stayed in, a quarter in the slot was required to get the  TV to turn on for a couple of hours. Then I took a bus to Washington D.C. and spent a few days there, before taking another bus “home,” although not before I stopping briefly in the bus depot in Cleveland, where I was born but had never actually “seen” before.

Next was Chicago, where I was “shocked” to see in the lobby of the depot one section of seating entirely occupied by white people, and the one behind it occupied entirely by black people; I thought it was pretty “weird,” which I suppose is to be expected when you have deal with all kinds of people at close quarters every day as if we were all one big happy “family.”

But there was another stop that sticks in the memory, In between New York and D.C., the bus stopped at the Greyhound depot in Philadelphia; Thankfully I was only there long enough to observe a black police officer drag a black man into a restroom and beat the shit out of him before dragging him back outside. There seemed to be a lot of black people just hanging around; no one  seemed particularly fazed by the proceedings, maybe because the cop was a “brother,” and the guy he was beating on probably “deserved” it. Maybe they would have seen it differently if the officer was white.

This was before the Internet, social media and cell phones for one to record a video of what happened. It is interesting to note that it was the Rodney King incident—which was not a lethal encounter—which foreshadowed today’s protests, riots and politicization of black grievance because it was recorded on video, and it was seen all over the country. That the police officers who did the beating were white naturally “enhanced” the outrage.

It is it interesting, however, that we don’t hear much about black police officers involved in shootings, particular of black civilians. We only hear cases like that Muhammad Noor, the black Minnesota police officer who shot a white woman for the same excuse white officers go unpunished for shooting black females, but was convicted for homicide and received a 12-year prison sentence, while the victim’s family received $20 million in compensation. Since there was no “outrage” by black activists, it is safe to assume that they were willing to sacrifice one of their own just to demonstrate their belief that all police, regardless of color, are accountable. Of course the Noor case wasn’t about police accountability—it was about gender politics.

Truth always seems to be sacrificed to suit politics, although still more so by the political right. In 2019, a National Academy of Sciences study revealed that black police officers were 50 percent more likely to use lethal force against a black civilian than a white one; it also showed that black officers were similarly more likely to use lethal force against Hispanic civilians. On the other hand, Hispanic police officers also used lethal force 50 percent more often against black civilians than white civilians—but were more than twice as likely to use it against Hispanic civilians (2.2 to every one white civilian).

This study was attacked in many quarters that assumed it was an attempt to take racial bias out the question. But the study itself drew no such conclusion, although others did apply that notion in order to deny what the numbers suggested. Many pointed out that black and Hispanic police officers (as well as white) usually patrolled “high-crime” areas, which, of course if you stop to think about it puts most of these officers in a tough spot to begin with—especially when people expect to keep them “safe,” and that these days an increasing number of people “push the envelope” by showing police little respect at all and not only refusing to obey commands, but physically altercate with them—and those that do almost always have a very good reason to avoid police attention that have nothing to do with race.

The NAS study found that race was only a reliable predictor of who police used lethal force against in relation to the rate of violent crimes they committed; as mentioned previously, the latest Justice Department statistics show that blacks are actually less likely than other groups to be shot by police when one takes into account the number of violent crimes they commit. The study states that

We found strong support for these predictions, as the race of a person fatally shot closely followed race-specific homicide rates. Race-specific violent crime was a very strong predictor of civilian race, explaining 44 percent of the variance in the race of a person fatally shot. This reveals that the race of a person who is fatally shot closely tracks same-race violent crime, at least as indexed by CDC homicide data. We largely replicated this pattern with population data. Race-specific population rates accounted for 43 percent of the variance in civilian race, showing that the race of a person who is fatally shot also closely tracks population size.

The study also made the interesting conclusion that there was evidence that white civilians were more likely to be targeted at a higher rate by lethal force in relation to their rate of violent crime than blacks, while the Hispanic civilian lethal force rate was roughly equivalent to their rate of violent crime. In fact the DOJ numbers showed a more than 20 percent disparity between the rate of black violent crime and the percentage of those who lethal force was used against. Furthermore

We did not find evidence for anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparity in police use of force across all shootings, and, if anything, found anti-White disparities when controlling for race-specific crime. While racial disparity did vary by type of shooting, no one type of shooting showed significant anti-Black or –Hispanic disparity, The uncertainly around these estimates highlights the need for more data before drawing conclusions about disparities in specific types of shootings.

The study then heads into rough waters to explain this “discrepancy” that goes against the grain of the claims of current political action:

One police-centered explanation is that these disparities reflect depolicing. Depolicing occurs when police officer’s concerns about becoming targets in civil litigation and the media spotlight imped officers from enforcing the law. Such concerns have been heightened due to recent high-profile shootings of Black men. The disparities in our data are consistent with selective depolicing, where officers are less likely to fatally shoot Black civilians for fear of public and legal reprisals…However, depolicing might be limited to areas of high-profile shootings.

An example of “depolicing” is an incident that occurred in downtown Seattle in January, 2020. At the corner of Third Ave. and Pike Street there is a McDonald’s and a smoke shop; the 7-Eleven that used to be there may still have open at the time. There were usually a couple of SPD bike cops parked there to keep an eye on things, because there were a lot of people who just hung around there without any observable thing to do; maybe it was a place where small-time drug dealing took place. But on that January day the police were not there, and there was a shoot-out between two men, later identified as a couple of gangsters named Latrelle Tolbert and William Ray Tolliver, both with lengthy arrest records. Neither was hit, but nine bystanders were, and one woman died. I had been at that location many times, and I could not imagine such a thing happening, but it did.

The NAS offered another explanation for the disparity it claimed police actually used lethal force at slightly higher rate against whites than against blacks as measured by their actual crime rates:

On the other hand, a civilian-centered explanation for these disparities is that White civilians may react differently toward police than racial minorities in crime-related situations. If White civilians present more threat toward police, this could explain why a person fatally shot was more likely to be White than Black or Hispanic. Among those fatally shot by police, Whites are more likely (relative to racial minorities) to be armed and pose a threat.

The NAS study admitted that there are problems with this conclusion, which we can see for ourselves if we are honest. Outside the rare occurrence when police break into the wrong house of apartment, in nearly every instance involving black civilians they have either committed a crime, or behave in a physically aggressive manner to thwart attempts by police to detain them—and usually both. Many of them were in fact armed: the NAS’ own data showed that blacks and Hispanics were more likely to be armed than white civilians in “fatal officer-involved shootings.”

White civilians, on the other hand, are significantly more likely, according to the data, to have lethal encounters with police when mental health issues were involved, or they behaved “suicidal.”  The study further implied that that nothing should be positively inferred by black and Hispanic police officers being more likely to use lethal force against black and Hispanic civilians, because “the link between officer rate and FOIS appears to be explained by officers and civilians being drawn from the same population, making it more likely than an officer will be exposed to (and fatally shoot) a same-race civilian.”

Politics, such as it is, dictates that we ignore crime rates, how civilians—especially those who committed crimes—interact with police, the level of acceptance of crime in some communities, how those communities want crime “handled,” and the general level of respect/contempt toward police in communities of color. Police certainly bring much of this on themselves when failing to show restraint, or failing to understand the psyche of people who feel they have done nothing to justify, say, a “routine” traffic stop. On the other hand, seeing this only as a “black and white” issue—and throwing Hispanic police under that bus for good measure—ignores the fact that black crime and the way suspects interact with police is a problem for all officers who come into contact with it, regardless of their race.

What have we "learned" at school during the pandemic?

 

Over the past year, when I see so many “yuppie” types out riding bikes or jogging in the middle of the “work” day—or just “hanging out”—I wonder if this is what is called “working remotely.” People might say that there is less “distraction” working outside the office, but it is difficult to believe that to be true, especially with so many things to do (or not do) beyond the reach of supervision in an office environment. Unemployment might be inching closer to pre-pandemic rates, but that doesn’t mean actual “production” is up at the same rate across all sectors of the economy—and that underlines the relative quantitative difference between “virtual” and actual manual work, and how inequitable the compensation system is in this country.

And how is “remote” schooling working out? That depends on who you ask: parents of students who are doing well say it is “great,” and those who say their kids are not learning as well say it is terrible; students who have better access to computers and the Internet to do “remote” schooling obviously “learn” more than those who do not. Students who are good at rote memory can learn in any environment as long as they pay attention, but we are also told that students who have a tendency to “horse around” are deprived of the social environment of a classroom to do that, and thus forced to “focus” more on class work; ditto with “shy” or “hyperactive” kids. It certainly “helps” that grading is “relative” to the quality and quantity of what is learned as compared to the pre-COVID period.

On the other hand, slower learners may only fall further behind, although some defend this as “self-pacing.” A report in the Washington Post tells us that in classrooms with low-income minorities, there was more difficulty in keeping them “engaged”; at one point, surveys of teachers claimed that only 60 percent of students were “regularly participating or engaging in distance learning.” As much three-quarters of teachers claimed that “their students were less engaged during remote instruction than before the pandemic,” that this engagement declined further as time went on. Most students were in contact with their teachers “less than daily,” and one-quarter claimed that this was “less than once a week.” One student was quoted as saying that remote schooling was “boring and bland. I don’t think I’m learning.”

The Post found that in low-income schools, teachers spent most of their time “reviewing” previous class work rather than teaching new content, and “half of high-poverty school districts appear to be offering only ‘perfunctory’ instruction, compared to a third of wealthier districts,” which doesn’t exactly say much about the level of learning in those districts either. The focus on “reviewing” material is defended by one teachers union president as a “focus on welfare checks and on helping students retain what they already learned,” while others charge that by “doing the same old thing all the time” leads to “engagement problems.”

Despite the fact than most parents believed that schools were providing the necessary material for learning, many still believed their kids were falling behind academically. Obviously, while some kids prefer the freedom to do school work when they feel like it, others need the up close support from teachers and friends in the classroom. In a USA Today story, a freshman high school student in Milwaukee named Ruby Rodriguez found that “remote” schooling “made it exponentially harder for her to stay motivated and learn. Her grades have dropped from A’s and B’s to D’s and F’s. She stays up too late. She sleeps a lot. She misses her friends. Like millions of students attending school virtually, Ruby is floundering academically, socially and emotionally.” She is one of an “alarming number of kids falling behind, failing classes or not showing up at all.” Many students are literally a year behind in school work. According to Macke Raymond, director of Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes, thousands of kids are “going feral,” are “unaccounted for, with no contact since schools have closed.”

The Stanford study last October, “Estimates of Learning Loss 2019-2020,” found that Tennessee had the highest learning losses in reading during the pandemic. And since we’re on the subject, we might as well discuss the topic of what’s going at the old school. It’s odd, but despite the world changing, some things remain the same, except that words like “diversity” are twisted to mean something else. Since I don’t want to just pick on that school, I want to show you a screenshot of “liberal” Seattle from the perspective of the main entrance of the University of Washington’s Suzzallo Library back in the "old" days:

First off, the students are real but they are playing extras in the 1965 film The Slender Thread. The lone nonwhite face here is actor Sidney Poitier, who would be considered an “extra” in real life on campus at the time. Fast forward today and this is what UW’s student body looks like:

I don’t care what people claim: this is not “diversity”—this is evidence of a “favored” group muscling-in on the turf of a “privileged” group.  Now, the University of Tennessee, Knoxville  is frankly one of the “whiter” schools around, and like other Deep South schools, it wants to keep it that way—because, after all, these schools were founded to serve the scions from the old plantation days. Those who find the presence of nonwhites beneath their dignity will let you know how they feel about it, one way or the other. In 2019 a UT freshman was “persuaded” to leave the school without any fuss after a snapchat showed him and another student in blackface accompanied with the caption “We for racial equality boys. Bout to get this free college now that I’m black let’s goooo #blacklivesmatter.”

But that was strictly low-tech; today there is “zoom bombing,” which refers to unwanted visitors hacking into the online teleconferencing program Zoom, and making a nuisance of themselves. It has been a problem for universities all over the country, and most incidents seem to have race on the brain. For example, last month UTK’s dean of students, a black professor named Shea Kidd Houze, hosted something called “Milkshake Monday,” in which students can get on Zoom and talk about their experiences at the university. During the “chat,” an “unknown guest” insinuated himself in the background making racial commentary, causing the “chat” to shutdown.

This wasn’t the first time this happened, and it seems that malign actors are taking advantage of the opportunity to make racist or anti-pandemic response commentary anonymously since schools began to conduct their business remotely during the pandemic. After a seeming “lull” in the “action,” the start of the new semester this year restarted the seemingly “random” attacks during online classes again. In February, the student newspaper, The Daily Beacon, reported that a Plant Sciences lecture was interrupted by three people, one who “had an explicit, explicitly racist screen name,” according to the lecturer, Andrew Pulte.  He noted that they “took control of the screen” and “put up disturbing images” while playing a repetitive recording of racist slogans.

As mentioned, this is also occurring in numerous other universities. Although it is not known who these people are, and schools have been eager to blame outside agitators, it is difficult to believe that all of this isn’t an “inside” job by white students who actually know when and where to launch these attacks. Given the publicity of the Black Lives Movement and protests across the country, it shouldn’t be surprising that students of a right-wing, pro-Trump bent would be engaged in these activities. The juvenilia of these people cannot be gainsaid, especially in other incidents across the country in which “bombers” took over screens with swastikas and depictions of genitalia.

But outside of these “distractions,” how are college students fairing in comparison to students in grade and high schools? Inside Higher Ed tells us that students miss the full college “experience” which makes them “excited to learn” and motivates them “to stay engaged in school” and “learn a lot more.” Although college students are “performing better than researchers expected,” Inside suggests that this is perhaps a chimera, since many schools have instituted “more forgiving” pass/fail options that reflect the level of learning actually done—which may not “translate” in the real world.

How we "forget" about the other victims of police shootings

 

While the Seattle Times had its entire front page above the cutline of its print edition covered with a photo from yesterday’s guilty verdict in the death of George Floyd, there are plenty of others asking “What about our people? Just because we are not mass protesting, committing property damage or have people standing by to take viral videos shouldn’t mean that it is open season on us.” I have to tell you, Black Lives Matter protesters in New York yelling at white customers at the Mexican restaurant Maya Taqueria to “get the fuck out of New York” says more about the insular, self-serving prejudices of those so-called "protesters" than it does about those people trying to have a quiet dinner at an eatery that the "protesters" themselves would probably never go to because they don’t like the idea of eating “Mexican” food. Can’t these people see that the “optics” look bad—at least to Hispanics, or don’t they “matter”?

“What about us” is certainly what the family of Gabriel Casso wants to know. Let’s look at shooting that have occurred so far in 2021. On April 3 in Concourse Village in New York, the Hispanic hip-hop artist who friends said was a “good” kid who minded his own business, was shot a block from where he lived. Initial reports blamed two gang members, Kejuan Delaney and Hassan Maxwell, who were randomly shooting into a crowd. Two people were killed, one of them being Casso. But the truth turned out to be quite different.

Casso, like the other bystanders, was running from the scene trying to escape the bullets. Moments earlier, three policemen in an unmarked car that just happened to be patrolling in the area responded to the sound of shooting, jumped out of their car and observed Casso running toward them. Despite the fact that the police saw the two shooters firing into the crowd, they apparently also saw Casso as a “threat” despite the fact that he was behaving in a “natural” way in order to escape getting killed. He was shot “multiple times” in the torso from the front, and follow-up reports admitted that the unarmed Casso ran right into death-by-cop. Why the police viewed him as a “threat” when he was like other people in the vicinity just trying to escape the shooters plainly shows that police assumed Casso was fair game because of his “ethnicity.” If Casso was black would this be the cause of outrage and national news? Very likely.

A few days earlier a 13-year-old boy named Adam Toledo was killed by Chicago police. He and a “friend” were apparently “playing” with a gun in an alley, which was recorded by a “Shotspotter” device. After being chased by police, a body cam showed that an officer running up to Toledo told him to drop a gun while in almost the same instant shot him in the chest. The body cam also showed that a gun was on the ground, and that Toledo was raising his empty hands in the air when he was shot. The officer hadn’t even bothered to wait to see if this kid was “complying” when he shot him; Toledo was reportedly the youngest victim of a police shooting in Chicago “in years,” according to the Chicago Tribune.

Also in Chicago, Anthony Alvarez was fatally shot by police just hours after he had stopped by his father’s home to show him his new Jeep and make plans to eat out with his two-year-old daughter that evening. The details are “sketchy” about what happened; police reportedly were involved in a foot chase with Alvarez a few blocks from his home before alleging that he “produced” a gun. The Tribune reported that police have not been forthcoming about the circumstances of the shooting, or why they were chasing him at all. Alvarez’s father wants “answers” and “justice”; tougher luck with that if you are not black or a white woman. Coming after the shooting of Toledo, Mayor Lori Lightfoot called for the CPD’s “foot chase” policy to be “overhauled.” However, Lightfoot has faced criticism for her refusal to institute the civilian oversight group she promised when first elected.

In 90 percent white Clark County in the state of Washington, for some reason the case of a black man named Jenoah Donald has received almost no attention, not even in this state. Donald was pulled over on a “routine” traffic stop by sheriff’s deputies. One of them, a female deputy named Holly Troupe, became “highly agitated” when she saw a screwdriver in the center console of Donald’s car; she claims that she “feared” that Donald might use it to “stab” another deputy, Sean Boyle. The deputies tried to “wrestle” Donald out of the car, and failing to do that, Boyle fatally shot the unarmed man. Boyle admitted that the traffic stop was entirely arbitrary and he was “unsure” if any crime had been committed to justify the pullover—which there was in fact none at all. Frankly, does this guy really look “dangerous”?:

And yet the Seattle Times has that full page photo showing justice being served in another state.

Also receiving almost no critical review is the killings of mental health patients, who should be in institutions receiving treatment, but are generally put back on the street for lack of resources. The Treatment Advocacy Center reports that although 2 percent of Americans have untreated mental health issues, they make-up 25 percent of victims of fatal police shootings.

For example, this year in New York the mother of a 17-year-old white male named Judson Albahm called police to “assist” in having him transported to a mental health clinic. Albahm had driven away in a car, but law enforcement caught up with him on a lonely road, where he was shot multiple times outside the vehicle. Law enforcement claimed that they felt “threatened” by an object they said was in his hand, but they have yet to identify what exactly that was.

In Texas a black male named Marvin Scott III, who suffered from schizophrenia, was arrested for marijuana possession; he allegedly used the drug to “self-medicate.” After being transported to a hospital for “strange behavior,” he was then sent to the county jail, where his “strange behavior” led police to pepper spray him and cover his head with a “spit hood”—which apparently caused him to suffocate to death.

A 79-year-old white male in Maryland named Leonard Popa was the subject of a “routine” mental health and welfare check by police, but was instead shot and killed by them. Popa did not respond to “requests” to enter his home, and after police forced entry into it, they allegedly encountered the lone Popa holding a gun—or at least that was their “story.”

In Pennsylvania, Ryan Shirey was in the home of his parents when he was overcome by a “heightened paranoid state” due to a “heated argument” with his ex-girlfriend, who called police. Shirey’s parents reported that Shirey became afraid and tried to hide in the basement. Police found him there, huddled with what they claimed was a gun; when he refused to “drop it” he was shot and killed. Shirey’s parents claim that he didn’t deserve a “death sentence” for his mental health issues, although why his ex-girlfriend had been allowed in their house to cause all the trouble in the first place is a question they will have to live with.

In Texas this past Friday, Marcelo Garcia, who police were “familiar” with and had successfully responded to his bouts with mental illness, this time shot him dead right in front of his shocked children, who ran up to his body screaming at police, who did not attempt medical assistance for ten minutes. The officer who shot Garcia had only been on the job for seven months, and was clearly ill-equipped to deescalate the situation as others had been able to do.

Statistica.com tells us that in 2020, of the 895 cases of police shootings of which the race of the victim was known, 50 percent were white, 27 percent were black and 19 percent Hispanic. A January 2021 Justice Department report tells us that blacks represent 12.5 percent of the population, but 33.6 percent of all violent offenses; this isn’t “justifying” anything, but those people committing those crimes are not doing people who are law-abiding any favors, and it does point to why police tend to rely on “stereotype,” which they mistake for “experience.” 

Police shootings is a problem for all of us, and an indictment of how this country deals with mental health. Cases like that George Floyd may grab headlines, but making it a “black” issue demeans all the other victims of police shootings where the use of lethal force was clearly unnecessary. If we continue to view the shootings of whites, Hispanics and the mentally-ill as less worthy of “outrage” than of black shooting victims, then that only insures that police will only be more “cautious” about who their shooting victims are—not prevent its abuse at all.

Afghanistan is another country that should have just been left alone

 

We are being told that the top military brass have been beseeching the Biden administration not to evacuate all U.S. troops from Afghanistan, and there are many politicians, like Sen. Lindsey Graham, who second that. It is rather odd that these people are saying this now when they seemed fearful of saying anything that would “cross” Donald Trump, whose “plan” this originally was. The truth of the matter is that the military is likely trying to save face in the matter, since the ever increasing power of the Taliban within Afghanistan shows that is has failed miserably in the one thing it was expected to do, which was to crush the power of the Taliban and keep it from becoming a regional and global threat.

At this point, the Taliban is less threatened by the U.S. military than by its own failure of hindsight.  In a mostly mountainous country, highly tribal and ethnically-diverse, they seem less a cohesive political unit than they once were; many Afghans currently under the control of Taliban forces report weariness over the “tribalization” of the Taliban, meaning that instead of having to pay extortion to one local Taliban authority, they are being extorted from multiple Taliban factions in the same region—which may in the end do what the U.S. military and the Kabul government failed to do: cause the Afghan people themselves to reject the Taliban and their control over them.

A simple reading of the history of Afghanistan tells us that this is another out-of-the-way country that could have benefited from just being left to its own devices and worked things out on its own. Following the collapse of the Persian Empire after its defeat by the newly emerging Islamic tide in 642 AD, the region that constitutes Afghanistan was mostly in the hands of various empire builders who seldom survived long enough to create a lasting dynasty. The boundaries of modern Afghanistan were created by the British and czarist Russia in 1893, with the country merely seen as a “buffer zone” between Russia and British India.

Under the influence of the British, the Afghan royal court of Abd al-Rahman Khan and his successor attempted to introduce Western ideas and technology into the country, but the anti-British faction was strong, and with the assassination of his son following World War I, Afghanistan’s new rulers tied themselves to the Soviet Union, which supplied the country with economic assistance for the next half-century. During the 40-year reign of Mohammad Zahir Shah, attempts to create a “constitutional monarchy” with an elected legislature and relatively “progressive” social reforms under the prime minister, Daud Kahn, were largely unsuccessful, and Daud Kahn led a coup overthrowing the monarchy in 1973, and attempted to disassociate the country from the Soviet Union.

Daud Kahn would become president of Afghanistan, and promulgated a new constitution. But his ruling cabinet was did not include competing voices from the various national ethnic groups, but rather with his sycophants. Opposition and violence to his rule grew, and he was assassinated in 1978. What followed was more disruption until the Soviet invasion in 1979 and the installment of a would-be communist regime, which quickly proved unpopular and led to the revolt by fighters making up the mujahideen, who were supported with arms by the U.S. and other countries.

The Soviets gave up and left in 1989, and the government they left in place found itself still engaged in a civil war with the mujahideen. When that government collapsed in 1992, elements of the mujahideen attempted to form a government, but disparate tribal agendas prevented a unified government, and social and economic order collapsed. Out of the chaos emerged the Taliban, which took advantage a people looking for a strong hand to end the violence, and the Taliban managed to take control over all but a small northern section of the country. 

But the Taliban proved to be a regime without a plan, other than to impose strict sharia law. The country continued to face economic disaster—its economy largely reduced to criminal enterprises like illegal drug production and smuggling, although the Taliban regime remained afloat with aid from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Outside its regional supporters, the Taliban regime was an international pariah because of its aiding and abetting al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, and its reactionary religious and social policies.

After 9-11, aerial bombing campaigns supporting ground offensives by the Northern Alliance managed to oust the Taliban from power, but they never really went away. A new democratic government headed by Hamid Karzai controlled little outside the capital of Kabul, and despite the presence of U.S. and NATO forces backing the unreliable Afghan national army, by 2005 the Taliban was launching attacks all over the country, and it never stopped. Even the influx of more U.S. troops failed to halt Taliban attacks, and despite the fact that the Kabul government and the Afghan army have had many years to gain effective control of the country, it is too effected with tribal divisions, has no real economic structure and its mountainous terrain perfectly suited to incubate and conceal anti-government elements for a democratic government to survive unless it has many decades of stability, which is impossible to achieve with so many Taliban fighters and too few reliable troops to effectively rid the country of them.

That is where Afghanistan stands now. The so-called “peace plan” devised by the Trump administration was hastily contrived, and from Trump’s perspective, it was just a “face-saving” device to get out of the country as quickly as possible and hope for “the best.” If that meant the “expectation” that the Taliban would no longer harbor or support terrorist groups like al-Qaeda, that was wishful thinking, and demonstrates that the Trump administration as usual had no plan for what constituted a successful end game. The Taliban knows this, which why they continue to stonewall on agreeing to a power-sharing deal, and continue launching attacks all over the country, which they claim will cease when the U.S. withdraws from the country completely. This was the situation left to the Biden administration.

The U.S. military opposes a complete withdrawal from Afghanistan, and there may be good reasons for that. The military may believe that leaving a token force in Afghanistan is important as a “base of operations” from which it can launch attacks to other “hotspots” in the region. But if so that certainly wasn’t part of Trump’s thinking, and the Biden administration apparently believes that it serves no purpose to remain there. The fact that “only” 2,300 American service members died in nearly 20 year of combat in Afghanistan shows that there never was a concerted ground offensive to bring the Taliban under control, the results of which are plain to see.

The top brass can’t still cling to the fanciful notion that they can actually “win” the war there; that would require a far more massive troop deployment than what Iraq ever saw, and a years longer occupation before it is “safe” to hand over the security of the country to the “native” military, which has been a failed experiment so far. Maintaining a token force in the country can do little but serve as a minor irritant to the Taliban if a “peace” agreement is ever signed, and the way current talks stand now, that might not happen for a while; given that the Taliban already controls much of the countryside despite the presence of just a token number U.S. troops, they may never sign an agreement.

There is thus no reason to maintain a military presence in Afghanistan, if U.S. troops are only there to attract, and occasionally swat away, “mosquitos.” One thing that we do know is that the possibility of “winning” the war in Afghanistan was lost long ago. All the U.S. and its allies did in the initial phase of the “war” was to chase away the pests from the host, but they kept coming back to be chased away again in a never-ending cycle. What’s the point in playing this game unless you do what is necessary to keep them from coming back? You eventually just get tired of swatting them away, and go where they are not.

It the far-right world, calling things by their right names is taboo

The April 19, 1995 Oklahoma City bombing has been called the work of a “crazed loner,” Timothy McVeigh, with the assistance of another “crackpot," Terry Nichols. That’s just the way the Clinton Justice Department, the media and Republicans preferred it to be. It didn’t matter that The Turner Diaries was McVeigh’s “blue print” for an anti-government race war, or that a heavily redacted FBI investigation revealed that McVeigh sought assistance from neo-Nazis like Andreas Strassmeir and others at the white supremacist and paramilitary compound Elohim City in Oklahoma. The FBI reportedly intended to raid the compound before the bombing, but did not; is that where McVeigh hid his explosive-laden truck? The connection between McVeigh and the compound is real, and an informer reported that McVeigh was regarded as a “hero” and a “martyr” to the “cause” there. And what “cause” is that—as if we don’t know?

And yet any connection between the residents of Elohim City and the bombing is considered merely a “conspiracy theory” by most commentators. Why does this country put its head in the sand when it comes to right-wing domestic terrorism? We are finding out that far-right groups like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys had in fact forged plans before January 6 to carry out a violent assault on the Capitol building to overturn the election. Yet despite this, Democrats in the House of Representatives are suddenly getting “cold feet” in conducting an independent investigation of the events leading up to the insurrection, which of course suits Republican lawmakers who may have “unknowingly” had a “hand” in assisting in the provision of useful information to some of these people in regard to the layout of the building and the location of suitable targets.

Of course the U.S. isn’t the only country with its head in the sand in regard to the far-right threat to democracy. Take Germany, for example, where many neo-Nazis feel the country is being threatened by those of “impure” blood. Nazi symbolism is “technically” banned in Germany, but that hasn’t stopped people from engaging in a close approximation of it, which most Germans—including law enforcement—believe is nothing more than the actions of a few “crackpots” despite the fact that neo-Nazis have been blamed for a number of racially-inspired killings in the country. The one that has received the most attention was the Hanau mass shooting last year, where 11 people were killed by a far-right extremist named Tobias Rathjen, who believed that Germans who supported allowing immigrants into the country were also fair game for death—such as prominent politician Walter Lubcke, who was assassinated by a neo-Nazi named Stephan Ernst in 2019; Rathjen had been known to complain about how Donald Trump was “stealing” his political and racist eugenics slogans.

The concerning thing about the Hanau massacre was how law enforcement reflected the failure of the country to take the far-right terrorist threat seriously. Rathjen had actually contacted authorities before his attack with manifestos that clearly revealed him as the kind of psychologically-warped individual who was a likely candidate for mass violence, yet no inquiries into his activities was done. The BBC reported that the neo-Nazi cell National Socialist Underground has been under the law enforcement radar for decades, failing to “connect” nearly a dozen racially-inspired murders to the group over the years. Germany’s main opposition party is now the far-right Alternative for Germany, which makes little effort to hide its racialist, “pure-Aryan” vision; one of its most prominent leaders, Bjorn Hocke, has repeatedly made statements that recall Nazi propaganda of yore—including a call for “remigration,” forcing all non-Europeans out of the country.

Is this country taking the far-right threat any more seriously? Not when you have an unabashed fascist who attracted 74 million votes in the last election. There was some noise in the media last week when the usual suspects, Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar, announced that they were establishing a new “caucus” that was even further to the right than the Freedom Caucus—the “America First Caucus,” whose intent is to enshrine “Anglo-Saxon” culture into cement, and work to return the country to the way it “looked” back in the “founding fathers” time. For some Republicans this was a bridge too far—but only after the revelation of the “America First Caucus Platform,” which received widespread condemnation, and Greene and Gosar rather hypocritically disowned it. The “platform” contains the following nuggets:

Mail-in voting, long recognized as subject to fraud, has become normalized. We will work towards an end to mail-in voting, implementation of national voter ID and substantive investigations into mass voter fraud perpetrated during the 2020 election.

We will work to divest power from the federal government and give it back to the states and the people to restore the balance of federalism. We believe in, and fight for, the principles of federalism and decentralization of political power; the government closest to the people is the best equipped to handle their concerns. At the federal level, this means exposing deep state actors, shrinking the regulatory state, and eliminating thousands of regulations and indeed entire bureaucracies.

At this point we should point out an example of the massive hypocrisy of the right. These people had no trouble with Trump acting like a fascist dictator who was above any law so long as he imposed their far-right and racist agenda on the country; the right only cites “federalism” and “decentralization” when it comes to laws they don’t like.

The manifesto continues with ideas on “infrastructure” that come straight out of Nazi Germany:

The America First Caucus will work towards an infrastructure that reflects the architectural, engineering and aesthetic value that befits the progeny of European architecture, whereby public infrastructure must be utilitarian as well as stunningly, classically beautiful, befitting a world power and source of freedom.

For some of us that is only worthy of eye-rolls, but apparently there are people who are all for that. The manifesto goes on to call for an end to all foreign aid, supports a foreign isolationist policy, end all future pandemic responses that “harm” American freedoms, end global trade and bring all manufacturing “back home,” “conserve” the environment only for the purpose of best economic and recreational use, promotes destruction of the environment in search of fossil fuels while ending “wasteful” green energy projects, save for radioactive nuclear energy. The manifesto also promotes “education” that opposes “progressive indoctrination and enrichment of an out-of-control elite oligarchy.” But of course most of the manifesto’s breath is spent on immigration:

America is a nation with a border, and a culture, strengthened by a common respect for uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions. History has shown that societal trust and political unity are threatened when foreign citizens are imported en-masse into a country, particularly without institutional support for assimilation and an expansive welfare state to bail them out should they fail to contribute positively to the country. While certain economic and financial interest groups benefit immensely from mass immigration, legal as well as illegal, and the aggregate output of the country increases, the reality of large segments of our society as well as the long-term existential future of America as a unique country with a unique culture and a unique identity being put at unnecessary risk is something our leaders can afford to ignore no longer.

As such, America’s legal immigration system should be curtailed to those that can contribute not only economically, but have demonstrated respect for this nation’s culture and rule of law. America’s borders must be defended, and illegal immigration must be stopped without exception.

I suspect that people like Greene and Gosar actually do, deep down, support all these ideas, but coming right out with something like this that is clearly straight out of the most paranoid racist's fantasies may be something that the country isn’t quite ready to confess even exists. Sure, some politicians might disown such Nazi talk, but what about "the people," especially those who support Trump? Frankly, how dare these Nazis presume to know the “cultural” adaptability of nonwhites who come to this country, looking for the “promise” of equality and freedom, and finding instead bonehead beliefs like this. Especially in regard to people from Mexico and Central America, whose “culture” has been infused with American “culture” and consumerism. Let’s be honest: it’s about how “pretty” one looks.

We need to call things by their right names. There has been plenty of publicity about the Black Lives Matter movement and concerns about prejudice against Asians in regard to “blame” for the COVID-19 and the massage parlor shootings, but nobody ever talks about racism and prejudice against Hispanics—in fact making demeaning and dehumanizing claims about them is an “acceptable” way to talk about them. I have mentioned an incident at a place I worked briefly where a white male was telling ugly jokes about “Mexicans” in a mixed company of whites and blacks; when I told him his “jokes” were racist, he asserted that nobody there (other than me)  thought that what he was saying was racist.

That shows us a country—both right-wing and “liberals”—that can’t face the fact of their own darkness, and demonstrates that for many, their attitudes toward certain “ethnic” groups is little differentiated from how the Nazis viewed the Jews, and those who can’t accept the fact that it was one of their own (Stephen Miller) who is the one has made that an undeniable fact are simply those who are self-serving hypocrites.