1151: Brand Purpose

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Sun, 30 Jun 2019 01:22

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Fri, 28 Jun 2019 17:45

Two new Democratic stars outshone Biden and Sanders on the debate stage.

June 28, 2019 Image Kamala Harris spoke to reporters after the second Democratic presidential debate in Miami on Thursday. Credit Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times The big question going into Thursday night's debate was whether Joe Biden, the clear front-runner in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, would stumble.

That turned out to be the wrong one. The right question was whether he had sufficient vigor in his stride.

And the answer came in watching Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg '-- two of the event's standout performers '-- run articulate and impassioned circles around him.

Biden was O.K. Not bad, not good: O.K. He didn't crumble under some tough interrogation from moderators '-- about his vote for the invasion of Iraq, for example '-- and occasional attacks from his rivals onstage.

[Get a more personal, less conventional take on political developments, newsmakers, cultural milestones and more with Frank Bruni's exclusive commentary every week. Sign up for his newsletter.]

But in his determination to prove how coolheaded he could be, he frequently turned his temperature down too low. In his insistence on not getting tangled in grand promises or lost in the weeds, he too often kept to the side of the field.

At one point, when candidates were asked to raise their hands if they believed that crossing the border without documentation should be a civil rather than criminal offense, his gesture was so tentative and ambiguous that one of the moderators, Jos(C) D­az-Balart, had to follow up: Was he indicating his assent or seeking permission to make a comment?

That was a metaphor for his whole night.

Other candidates demanded that America march forward. Biden kept looking backward. He repeatedly alluded to his decades of experience and even more pointedly reminded voters of his eight-year partnership with President Barack Obama, a towering and popular figure in the Democratic Party. While Bernie Sanders pledged a revolution, Biden promised a restoration.

Will that make voters feel tingly enough? It's possible, given the ongoing trauma of the Trump years.

But the debate brought into vivid relief the shortcomings of his candidacy and the risks of graduating him to the general election.

When you've been in politics and in Washington as long as he has '-- 36 years in the Senate, plus eight as vice president '-- there are votes from eras much different from the current one, controversial positions galore and mistakes aplenty. All of these were ammunition used against him on Thursday night, most electrically when Harris pressed him to defend his opposition to busing to integrate schools.

Harris made it personal, telling him that she got the education she did because of busing. Biden said that he hadn't been opposed to busing so much as in favor of local decision-making, and he thus left himself open to her righteous response: Did he not think that the federal government should swoop in to remedy obvious racial injustice?

''That's why we have the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act,'' she said. ''Because there are moments in history where states fail to preserve the civil rights of all people.''

One of these two candidates was in much better sync with Democratic voters right now, and that candidate was Harris, a black woman who, at 54, is more than two decades younger than Biden, who is 76. The only candidate on the stage older than he is: Bernie Sanders, 77.

And the sense of a generational divide was acute, partly because Buttigieg, 37, and Eric Swalwell, 38, made sure to highlight it. At the very start of the night, Swalwell noted mischievously that Biden had long ago stressed the importance of passing the torch, and Swalwell exhorted Democrats to do precisely that, saying ''pass the torch'' so many times that D­az-Balart asked Biden, ''Would you like to sing a torch song?'' Biden then rattled off a few canned remarks about the importance of education.

Biden and Sanders stood at the lecterns in the center of the stage, their prize for having significantly higher poll numbers than the others. They were supposed to be the pace setters.

But they receded more than they popped. Maybe that was a function of familiarity. I couldn't detect any difference between Sanders now and Sanders four years ago: The mad gleam, bad mood and hoarse-from-yelling voice were all the same. A screenwriter friend of mine emailed me midway through the event to say that Sanders resembled ''a very angry chess player in Washington Square Park in an undershirt and madras shorts in the summer heat.'' He did indeed look steamed.

Buttigieg didn't. He has this way '-- it's quite remarkable '-- of expressing outrage without being remotely disheveled by the emotion, of taking aim without seeming armed, of flagging grave danger without scaring the pants off you. He's from some perfect-candidate laboratory, no?

And nobody onstage spoke with more precision and shrewdness, though Michael Bennet came close a few times. Buttigieg said that the God-garbed Republican Party, in its treatment of migrants, ''has lost all claim to ever use religious language again.'' It wasn't just a dig; it was a deft reminder of his public fight with Mike Pence over Pence's vilification of L.G.B.T. people like Buttigieg.

On the subject of health insurance, Buttigieg said that sick people ''can't be relying on the tender mercies of the corporate system.'' He spoke of China ''using technology for the perfection of dictatorship.'' Phrases like these came like candies from a Pez dispenser '-- colorful, sweet and one after the other.

And when Buttigieg was confronted with questions about the recent police shooting of a black man in South Bend, Ind., where he is mayor, and asked why the police force wasn't better integrated, he admitted, bluntly: ''Because I couldn't get it done.'' He didn't make excuses, instead recognizing that between African-Americans and white police officers, ''There's a wall of mistrust, put up one racist act at a time.''

Harris had a fire that Buttigieg lacked, and it was mesmerizing. She challenged Biden not just on busing but on sloppy recent comments of his that seemed affectionate toward segregationists. She picked apart Trump's boasts of a spectacularly booming economy, telling the right number of right anecdotes at the right time.

And she mixed strength with warmth and even humor. As candidates shouted over one another in a lunge for microphone time, she found a cranny of oratorical space in which to land a good line. ''Hey, guys, you know what?'' she said. ''America does not want to witness a food fight. They want to know how we're going to put food on their table.'' It neatly pegged men as compulsive interrupters '-- a leitmotif of the previous night's debate '-- while flying a feminist flag less strenuously than Kirsten Gillibrand, at the lectern beside hers, did.

Imagine a Harris-Buttigieg ticket, and not only what a wealth of poise but what a double scoop of precedents that would be. Plenty of people on Twitter on Thursday night were doing precisely that.

Plenty more will do so in the coming days, and they should leaven that fantasy with a reality check about how far to the left Harris in particular has moved. She was one of just two candidates on Thursday night who said that she wanted to do away with private health insurance. Sanders was the other. And that could be a general-election problem for her, as it could for Elizabeth Warren, who took that same position the night before.

But I write now in praise of a commanding performance that easily overshadowed Biden's, with his herky-jerky delivery and his reflexive glances in the rearview mirror. Elections, according to all the political sages, are about the future. Biden didn't seem to be pointed in that direction, and he didn't demonstrate any sense of hurry to get there.

Frank Bruni has been with The Times since 1995 and held a variety of jobs '-- including White House reporter, Rome bureau chief and chief restaurant critic '-- before becoming a columnist in 2011. He is the author of three best-selling books. @ FrankBruni ' Facebook

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Sat, 29 Jun 2019 03:04

With the conclusion of the first two Democratic debates of the 2020 election behind us, we are now getting a clearer picture of a possible change of power in Washington. We spoke with Georgia leader, Stacey Abrams, who will be speaking at this year's OZY Festival along with newly announced speakers Kirsten Gillibrand and Beto O'Rourke, about the rights we need to protect as American citizens given the current state of our nation and whether or not she will throw her hat into the 2020 race for the presidency.

"My work is focused on making certain that every American has full access to our democracy," - Stacey Abrams Stacey Abrams. Photo: Getty Images

We are currently living in one of the most politically divided times in our country's history. You will be appearing at this year's OZY festival. Tell us about your involvement and what kinds of messages you hope this festival will convey.

Stacey Abrams: Well, I'm excited, this will be my first OZY Fest, but I have seen a bit about the previous ones and I'm excited to be a part of it. My work is focused on making certain that every American has full access to our democracy, because this is about power. It's about our power to shape our future, our power to participate and how our values are lived. And voter suppression in my mind is the strongest and most prevalent existential crisis that we face. Because our ability to make decisions about climate change, about reproductive choice, about criminal justice reform, about healthcare, all come back to the question of, do we have full participation in our democracy?

With today's Supreme Court decisions, we have seen a bit of a whipsaw where partisan gerrymandering will be allowed. But luckily the citizenship question of the census, won't be. And one of the conversations I hope we have is a conversation about the fact that, this means that every voice will count, and to an exceptional degree in 2020. That we must have every person's participation, because the decisions to be made for the next 20 years through redistricting, will happen based on the census, and based on our ability to elect leaders in 2020, who reflect our values and respect our choices.

It's an understatement to say that the Trump administration seems to be downplaying the threat of foreign influences in our elections. As someone who has suffered the consequences of election tampering, first hand, how important is it to make sure one of our most sacred rights as Americans remains intact?

Stacey Abrams: Exactly. And, what we have to understand is that foreign influence has its effect in part because of the distance that's been created, from citizens and their ownership of their right to vote, and their ability to execute it. When you have three streams of information in an election cycle, information, good information, bad information and disinformation. If there isn't an active supply of good information, then either bad information or disinformation will guide the decisions made by the most vulnerable of our voters. And so, one of the joys of our campaign in 2018, for me, was being able to go into communities that have been unseen and unheard, that had been ignored by politicians, and did not understand just how vital, and effective they could be. We can't stop foreign influence completely. We can certainly do more to mitigate it. And I wish we had leadership in DC, in the Republican party in particular that would be willing to take up the questions of election security. But, in lieu of their actions, our best defense is to have good information going to these editors. Making certain, as they know they have the right to vote, they understand what's at stake, but also that we have cleared a path within our power, which is to remove obstacles to voting, by eliminating voter suppression.

The support for impeachment seems to be growing by the day. Given what we have learned from the Mueller report, do you think now is the right time to begin impeachment proceedings?

Stacey Abrams: I actually do not see those as a common question. Impeachment should be based on the behavior of the president. Whether the president broke the law or not, whether he committed impeachable offenses. And that should be determined by the legislature. I support Speaker Pelosi's approach, which is to actually gather the information and the evidence necessary, to demonstrate the fullness of his ... that action such as they may be. And so, I don't think that timing is the question. I think the real issue is making certain that we have a record that is accurate and full and complete and can withstand what will come of an attempt at impeachment. Because the reality is you ... in the legal world, you do not prosecute until you have sufficient evidence. And while the Mueller report is damning, we need full information. So we understand not only what the questions are, but what the answers are.

Right. And do you think the conversation will change once Mueller testifies?

Stacey Abrams: I think it will continue to evolve, but I think it's just as important that we watch what's happening in Chairman Nadler's committee, with the information they are seeking to secure, what's happening with Chairman Cummings, and the information he's seeking to secure. The machinations of legislative bodies can sometimes seem boring and plotting, but you want the clearest pathway, and you want the deepest amount of information. And having served in a similar role for several years, I know it can sometimes feel very ... it can feel dithering to those on the outside, but I actually support the goals of our Democratic Caucus, which are to make certain in the democratic leadership, to make certain that we've asked the questions, and have the answers before we take this extraordinary step. We've only impeached two presidents in American history, and it is a critical question to me that we do this properly. But the point of a primary is to articulate ideas and to refine those ideas through the context. And I believe that for Democrats, given what we faced from the other side, with notions of rolling back rights, and denying access, and impeding progress, I welcome the opportunity to have such smart, thoughtful people, offering such clear visions for how we move our country forward.

We are currently in the beginnings of the 2020 election cycle. There are a lot of candidates to choose from, are there any that you have been blown away by? Who will be the best bet to lead the Democratic party into the future?

Stacey Abrams: I am a loyal Democrat who will do everything I can to support candidates who are willing to focus on the issues of voter suppression and expanding access to justice, and who will campaign in Georgia. And I will be foursquare behind whoever emerges as the nominee of the party.

Many people thought that you would be running. Is there still a possibility?

Stacey Abrams: It is. No, it's still something I'm considering. I have always said I want to. I think that certainly, the fall is the deadline for making a decision, and that is what I'm looking at. But you know, I will say that I will run if I believe that there is value that I can add to the debate, and add to the contest, and if I believe I can win. But I am incredibly pleased with the caliber and quality of the candidates we have now, which is why I haven't thrown my name into the ring yet.

Do you think having this many candidates hurts or strengthens the Democrats' platform?

Stacey Abrams: I think it's a perfectly appropriate number of candidates. We forget that in 1992 I think it was 18 candidates. In 2016 it was certainly 18 candidates. We have had larger fields, I think on the Democratic side because we have had smaller fields, both in 2008 and 2016. We have sort of a short term memory problem that this is not an unusual surfeit of candidate. What is different is that the debates have started earlier, and the winnowing process in different than it was, you know, a generation ago.

We are now witnessing a true atrocity at our border with more information coming in regarding inhumane conditions in holding centers for undocumented immigrants. Would you agree with Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez in saying that these conditions mirror concentration camps or is this something completely different?

Stacey Abrams: I think the semantics cloud the point. Which is that we are, as a nation, we are being led by someone who is engaging in inhuman behavior that weakens our democracy, demonizes the most vulnerable, and treats fellow humans and dehumanizes them in a way that is deeply, deeply offensive to who we are. And so, we have to recognize that, rather than debating, the language of the description, we should be appalled by the need for language, to define what we are doing. And regardless of who is in charge, this is being done in America's name, and we are all obligated to decry it, and to push for better, and to demand that we return to the moral core that should be guiding our nation.

Stacey Abrams will be speaking at this year's OZY Fest in Central Park July 20 through 21.

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Sun, 30 Jun 2019 12:10

29Jun.2019

New York Times photographer Doug Mills was the big winner at NBC's Democratic Debate.

The Washington Post reports that NBC cameras picked up on the clickety-clackety sound of DSLR camera mirrors flapping at the debate. In order to drown out the din, a NBC producer laid down this directive to the photojournalists covering the debate, ''No shooting unless it coincided with audience applause.''

This didn't affect Mr. Mills who was shooting his Sony a9 mirrorless camera using its silent electronic shutter.

''When I got there, the woman who was from NBC said, 'Hey, you can't shoot.' I explained to her my camera was mirrorless and she was like, 'Why doesn't everybody have one of these?' So then I just kept shooting. I had a great advantage,'' says Mills.via: Washington Post

Order Sony a9 from B&H Photo | Amazon

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Fri, 28 Jun 2019 22:02

''If they give it to the poor, they call it a handout; if they give it to the rich, they call it a subsidy.'' '--Martin Luther King, Jr.Taking Back OUR Democracy from Corporate InfluenceBeneath every issue in American politics lies a deeper one, and nowhere is this truer than with our economy. At this time in our history, our economic system doesn't serve our democratic values. Instead, the government we founded to protect those values has become an instrument of service to an economic system.Beginning in the 1980s, an economic perspective which deems market forces our most appropriate organizing principle, began to infiltrate both American politics and American consciousness.

According to this view, the fiduciary responsibility of corporations to serve short-term profit maximization of their stockholders '' with no particular ethical responsibility to other stakeholders such as workers, community or environment - began to replace democracy as our primary organizing principle. Advocacy for the well-being of citizens and the planet was now to be brokered by market forces, which alone were deemed the appropriate arbiter of our social good.

This view represented a radical departure from a most basic value in our Declaration of Independence: that, ''God gave all men the inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,'' and that, ''governments were instituted among men to secure these rights.'' From now on, our government would function more to secure the rights of multi-national corporations to make more money for their stockholders, while We, the People, were to trust that so much money would trickle down to the rest of us that all would be okay.

All has not been okay.Quite to the contrary, a small minority of Americans - called in today's nomenclature ''the one percent'' '' has become the recipient of extraordinary government largess, while the American middle class has been decimated. From huge corporate subsidies, to tax breaks for the very wealthy, to deregulation of even the most fundamental protections, to greater and greater permission given to moneyed interests to flood our political system, to the proverbial ''revolving door'' practice between corporate and government leaders.

American social and economic policy has acted like a vacuum cleaner, taking the majority of our nation's economic resources and sucking them into the hands of a very few.

It was unreasonable to have expected an amoral economic system to practice ethical largess. Why would a huge multinational corporation - with no particular allegiance to the American worker - feel any remorse about closing an American factory and relocating it in another country? Or fighting an increase in the minimum wage? Or cutting the health benefits of its workers? Or fighting fair labor practices? Or fighting labor itself?

A person with no sense of ethical or moral responsibility is a sociopathic individual, and an economic system with no sense of ethical or moral responsibility is a sociopathic economic system. Once billions, even trillions, of dollars started flowing within a system that deems itself responsible to no one but its stockholders '' particularly when the Supreme Court of the United States has granted to that system the preposterous notion of ''corporate personhood'' '' then a complete disregard of that system for the welfare of the least advantaged and the least powerful among us, and the planet itself, becomes inevitable.For all intents and purposes, our government has become a handmaiden to a new corporate order '' surrendering to those whom President Franklin Roosevelt called ''economic royalists.'' This is not just an economic debate or even a political debate; it is a philosophical and moral debate, challenging this generation to decide in our time whether or not a ''government of the people, by the people and for the people" shall not perish from the Earth.

Just as an individual can dwell in denial, so can an entire group. Today, the American people are in denial if we think that the existence and perpetuation of our democracy is guaranteed. In order to override the tyrannous effects of an authoritarian corporatism that has now infiltrated the highest levels of our government, we must rise up en masse and elect a new wave of officials deeply dedicated to the democratic ideal.

The Williamson Administration's Approach to the EconomyA system that does not feel, which has no sense of ethical responsibility to people or planet, is a dangerous guide to America's future. Living for our principles will provide more economic security than living for short-term corporate interests can ever provide. Our government should not be run like a business; it should be run like a family, where taking care of each other, and taking care of our home, are the values that guide us.Short-term profit maximization, whether for corporations or for the government, is at odds with long-term economic planning. The $2 trillion 2017 tax bill - which gave 83 cents of every returned dollar to our richest corporations and wealthiest citizens - is not an economic stimulus, but rather an economic theft of resources that could have been directed toward genuine economic renewal in the form of a Green New Deal, universal healthcare, better education and free college tuition for those who cannot afford it, cancellation of college loan debt, and equal funding of all public schools.

Every dollar we invest in education, infrastructure, and healthcare helps unleash the spirit of the American people. Everything we do to make it easier for people to create, to work with dignity, to live safely and securely, helps unleash the spirit of the American people. Everything we do to decrease the chronic economic and personal trauma that an unjust economic system has created among millions of people helps unleash the spirit of the American people.

And that is sound policy. The American people have been mentally trained to expect too little from our government, to forget that it is there to work for us and not the other way around. The citizens of the United States have been reduced to saying, ''Pretty please?'' to forces that would withhold things from us that should be considered basic rights in an advanced society. To those forces, we should not say, ''Pretty please.''

To those forces, we should say, ''Hell no.''40% of all Americans are having a hard time earning enough to pay for rent, food, healthcare, and transportation costs, and 62% of Americans cannot be deemed members of the middle class. Such statistics did not come out of nowhere; rather, they were the inevitable result of the systematic movement of major resources over the last few decades into the hands of a very few. Only a few Americans can now easily afford health care, only a few Americans can now easily afford higher education, and so forth. For those of us who make it ''into the club'' in America, there truly is no better place to live. But not enough people can make it into the club today, and that is an unsustainable reality.

How do we close the wealth inequality gap in America today, by which the top 1 percent of households own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined?In the long term, we should massively realign our investments in the emotional, social, health and educational wellbeing of children eight years old and younger. The greatest source of America's future economic vibrancy lies in the entrepreneurial spirit alive in any American kindergarten. Our problem is not that we don't have enough creativity to fuel our economy for centuries; the problem is that we cap it through under-education and a lack of proactive care for our young. An Economic Council of Advisors should include as many experts in child psychology and education as it has economists.

These are policies I would champion that would begin to close the income gap immediately:Universal healthcare, preferably a Medicare-for-all type of plan.Increase minimum wage to a rate that provides a living wage in its given geographical area - and set the rate to adjust for inflation from now on.Make permanent the middle-class tax cuts, while repealing the corporate tax cuts from the 2017 Tax Bill.Radically reduce and, in some cases, outright forgive the debt of college loans. (Currently, 44 million people owe almost a trillion and a half dollars in student loan debt, a crushing burden that holds back the younger generation from starting businesses and buying homes.) We should treat student loans like other debt, enabling a refinance at lower interest rates, and allowing those who declare bankruptcy to be freed.Introduce government support for childcare services.Provide free higher education, including tuition at public colleges, community colleges and trade schools.Restore a modern Glass-Steagall, separating commercial banks (which take deposits and make loans) from investment banks, ensuring that banks cannot make risky investments. If they fail, they should not be bailed out by the government. Hold Wall Street accountable.No bank that is too big to fail should exist. There are benefits to capitalism. One is, things that don't work, shouldn't survive.Establish a Green New Deal, creating millions of jobs repairing America's infrastructure, building high-speed trains, and creating a renewable energy system.Protect the rights of working people to organize for better wages and working conditions.Enact paid family and medical leave to enable working parents to care for loved ones.Provide equal pay for equal work.Paid Vacation should be provided to all employees, even part-timers. Every industrialized nation but ours guarantees this right. Portable retirement plans must be offered to every worker in this nation. A retirement plan that one can take with them from job-to-job. No one should be afraid of their future. Close the loopholes that give big breaks to big business, and ensure they pay their fair share of taxes to level the playing field so small business can compete.Protect homeowners from predatory lending practices, and increase access to loan modifications that enable people to stay in their homes.Invest in our infrastructure, creating jobs by rebuilding roads, bridges, and rails, increasing renewable energy power, updating clean water systems, improving our rail system and massively investing in public transit.Enforce anti-trust laws so that new businesses have a chance to succeed.Eliminate the income cap on payroll taxes.Raise the estate tax (with special care given to help family businesses pay-off the estate tax bill over time so we don't shut down small businesses).Eliminate the carried interest and ETF tax loopholes enjoyed by Wall Street.With the US economy, it is the best of times, and it is the worst of times. Our country enjoys tremendous wealth, but the vast majority is owned by the few, while millions of people struggle financially. In too many areas there are pockets of prosperity in a sea of destitution. Fully 40% of adults could not pay an emergency bill of $400. Although the unemployment rate is low, millions of people who have given up finding work are not counted. Financial desperation is contributing to a rise in stress, bad health, opioid addiction, and suicide. For the first time, the next generation is likely to have a lower standard of living. For the first time, the average American lifespan is getting shorter. As financial disparity leads to financial desperation, people are dying.

These problems will intensify as automation, Artificial Intelligence and robots will replace millions of jobs in the next 5-10 years. Some job dislocation has occurred already in areas such as manufacturing. Millions more people will lose their jobs and be unable to find new jobs. Job loss will hit professionals as well as blue-collar workers. Any job that involves repetition is at risk; even lawyers and doctors, including some surgeons, will be displaced. More wealth will be created, but it will increasingly go to the top 1%.

We must address this crisis of wealth inequality and financial insecurity. We urgently need a plan to relieve financial distress, to create jobs, and to increase prosperity, thereby unleashing the incredible ingenuity and productivity of the American people.

Here is my 4-Step plan:

1. Provide immediate cash relief through a Universal Basic Income.

2. Create jobs through a Green New Deal.

3. Create jobs through a Caring Economy.

4. Increase wealth through a Universal Savings Plan.

1. IMMEDIATE CASH RELIEF WITH A UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME: Under my plan, the federal government will pay $1,000/month Universal Basic Income to all American adults aged 18-65. This will provide immediate cash relief to those who need it. It will give people a small but reliable stream of income. It will create a floor so no American needs to be hungry. It will also provide a big stimulus to the economy as people spend this money on food, clothes and other essentials. This Universal Basic Income will cover all adults until they reach the age for Social Security.

See Andrew Yang's excellent book, The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income is Our Future (2018).

2. CREATE JOBS WITH A GREEN NEW DEAL: We must act now to remove carbon from the economy and slow global warming. This will create millions of new jobs in renewable energy (solar, wind and water power), architecture and building (green buildings), energy-efficient vehicles (electric cars), new public transit systems, and much more. The greening of the economy has already created millions of new jobs; there are twice as many people working in the solar industry than in coal.

The best way to decarbonize is to put a price on carbon; this incentivizes people to find ways to use less carbon.

Additionally, in my plan the federal government will invest billions of dollars to rebuild our roads and bridges, expand public transit, and transition to a renewable energy economy.

3. CREATE JOBS WITH A CARING ECONOMY: The real wealth of our nation is our people. Investing in care is both humane and good for our economy. Much of the care for children, the sick and the elderly is now unpaid, done mostly by women. If this labor were paid, it would strengthen the economic security of millions of workers, especially women, and ensure that people who need care get it.

Our Children: Promote early education and affordable quality child care. This will prepare the next generation for the knowledge jobs of the future, and decrease crime, poverty, and incarceration rates.

Our Families: Everybody needs care at some point, as a child, an adult with an illness or disability, or a senior. I support paid family leave (to welcome a new child by birth or adoption), paid sick leave (to care for yourself or a loved one), and paid caregiving for caregivers. This will strengthen our families and meet the rising demand for elder care as Baby Boomers age. Moreover, since most caregiving is done by women, it will boost women's income and economic security.

4. INCREASE WEALTH THROUGH A UNIVERSAL SAVINGS PROGRAM: Under my plan, each child will receive a gift from the federal government deposited in a fund created at birth. Family and friends can add to that fund as the child grows, with the government matching those contributions on a sliding scale. (Less wealthy families will get 100% match and more wealthy families a 10% match.) Eventually the child grows up and can use those funds for wealth-enhancing purposes such as education, training, house down payment, or to start a business.

See Robert Friedman's book about the Universal Savings Program, ''A Few Thousand Dollars: Sparking Prosperity for Everyone''(2018).

Here's how we can pay for this program:

1. Roll back tax cuts to the wealthy, including restore the estate tax to estates over $5 million.

2. Roll back tax breaks to big business. Why are taxpayers subsidizing Big Oil?

3. Add a fee to financial transactions like buying stocks. Charge a small fee each time someone buys stocks or exchanges currency. There would be no way for the wealthy to dodge the transaction fee which would be charged automatically for each such transaction. This could add trillions of dollars to pay for the above programs.

See The New Operating System for the American Economy by Scott Smith.

4. Cut waste in the military. Big business dominates our military as it does so many other sectors. Corporate lobbyists push for expensive weapons systems of dubious value to our defense. While I favor a strong defense, I oppose wasting taxpayers' money on boondoggles. Force projection to every corner of the globe is expensive and counterproductive.

'

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Fri, 28 Jun 2019 21:57

American author, lecturer, and activist

Marianne Deborah Williamson (born July 8, 1952)[1] is an American author, lecturer, and activist. She has written 13 books,[2] including four New York Times number one bestsellers within the 'Advice, How To and Miscellaneous' category.[3][4][5][6] She is the founder of Project Angel Food, a volunteer food delivery program that serves home-bound people with AIDS and other life-threatening illnesses.[7] She is also the co-founder of the Peace Alliance, a nonprofit grassroots education and advocacy organization supporting peace-building projects.[8]

In 2014, as an independent, Williamson ran unsuccessfully for the seat of California's 33rd congressional district in the United States House of Representatives elections in California. On January 29, 2019, she announced her campaign to seek the Democratic nomination for the 2020 United States presidential election.[9]

Early life and education Williamson was born in Houston, Texas, in 1952.[10][11][12] She is the youngest of three children of Samuel "Sam" Williamson, an immigration lawyer,[12][13] and Sophie Ann (Kaplan), a homemaker.[14][15] Her family is Jewish, and she was raised in Conservative Judaism.[13][16] After graduating from Houston's Bellaire High School, Williamson spent two years studying theater and philosophy at Pomona College in Claremont, California.[14]

Writing and speaking career Williamson dropped out of college her junior year in 1973 and moved to New York City, intending to pursue a career as a cabaret singer.[14][13]

In 1979, after delving into A Course in Miracles, she returned to Houston, where she ran a combination metaphysical bookstore and coffeeshop.[14][17]

In 1983 she moved to Los Angeles. She began regularly lecturing on A Course in Miracles in Los Angeles and New York City, and eventually in other cities in the U.S. and Europe as well.[17][18]

She published her first book, A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles, in 1992.

Books Williamson's first book, A Return to Love, was featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 1992 and remained on The New York Times bestseller list for 39 weeks in the 'Advice, How To and Miscellaneous' category.[19] She has published 12 other books, seven of which have been on the same New York Times bestseller list and four of which have been #1.[3][4][5][6] She has sold more than 3 million copies of her books.[20] In 2018, she published a 20th anniversary revised edition of Healing the Soul of America.[21]

Healing the Soul of America In 1997 Williamson published her book Healing the Soul of America (hardcover originally titled The Healing of America) and began a more robust political engagement. In this book, she laid out plans to "transform the American political consciousness and encourage powerful citizen involvement to heal our society".[22]

She wrote in the book,

It is a task of our generation to recreate the American politeia, to awaken from our culture of distraction and re-engage the process of democracy with soulfulness and hope. Yes, we see there are problems in the world. But we believe in a universal force that, when activated by the human heart, has the power to make all things right. Such is the divine authority of love: to renew the heart, renew the nations, and ultimately, renew the world.[23]

Patricia Holt of the San Francisco Chronicle called it "A huge and wondrous surprise.... The Healing of America somehow makes us proud to be Americans, because every hope for democracy seems newly within our grasp."[24]

Television and media appearances She has been a guest on television programs such as The Oprah Winfrey Show, Good Morning America, and Real Time with Bill Maher. In December 2006, a Newsweek magazine poll named her one of the 50 most influential baby boomers. She bases her teaching and writing on A Course in Miracles, a nonreligious self-study program of spiritual psychotherapy, based on universal spiritual themes.[25]

HIV/AIDS advocacy Centers for Living In response to the HIV/AIDS crises in the 1980s, Williamson founded the Los Angeles and Manhattan Centers for Living, which served as a refuge and non-medical support for people with HIV/AIDS. There they could connect with a variety of psychological and emotional resources, as well as community of support. She has said of that time that "there was so much love, because there was nothing to hold onto but love."[26]

Project Angel Food In 1989, she launched Project Angel Food to build off the work of the Centers for Living. Originally launched to support HIV/AIDS patients, Project Angel Food expanded its outreach and currently cooks and delivers more than 12,000 meals each week, free of charge, to the homes of men, women and children affected by various life-threatening illnesses.[27] The organization's food and nutrition services, including medically tailored meals and nutritional counseling, help under-served people throughout Los Angeles County who are too sick to shop or cook for themselves. In 2017, Project Angel Food served its 11 millionth meal.[28]

Women's advocacy She has worked on behalf of women's empowerment issues for decades. In 1993 she published her #1 NYT bestseller, A Woman's Worth.[29]Publishers Weekly said of the book: "Williamson gives sound, empowering advice on relationships, work, love, sex and childrearing."[30]

In 2010, she launched a series of Sister Giant conferences, trainings, and events to support individuals '' particularly women '' who want to increase their efficacy as activists and/or run for office. On the initiative she has said, ''I want to be a cheerleader for women who have never even considered running for office or being involved in a campaign, but who in the quietness of their hearts might think, 'Why not me?''' The events have focused on how to better address many social issues, including: child poverty, low levels of female representation in office, campaign finance reform, high levels of mass incarceration, among other issues.[31][32]

Peace-building In 2004, she co-founded The Peace Alliance, a nonprofit grassroots education and advocacy organization focused on increasing U.S. governmental support of peace-building approaches to domestic and international conflicts. She has said of the need for this work: "You don't just wait until there is a violent eruption and then just try to throw people in jail or just wait until there is a violent eruption and then try to bomb an entire country, there's just a limit past which this is not workable. Rather, you proactively seek to cultivate the conditions of peace...so we can have a much more sophisticated analysis of what it will take to create a more peaceful world."[33]

Poverty alleviation For years Williamson was a member of the Board of Directors and remains a public supporter of RESULTS, an organization aiming to create the political will to end hunger and poverty around the world. It lobbies public officials, does research, and works with the media and the public to addresses the causal issues of poverty. RESULTS has 100 U.S. local chapters and works in six other countries.[34][31]

Love America Tour Starting in the winter of 2018, she began touring the United States as part of her Love America Tour, discussing how she believes "a revolution in consciousness paves the way to both personal and national renewal." Of the tour she said: "Our own disconnection from the political process, lack of knowledge of how our system operates, lack of understanding of our history, and confusion about many of the issues that confront us now, have led in too many cases to a dangerous emotional disconnection between our country and ourselves."[35][36]

Political career 2014 U.S. House of Representatives campaign Williamson campaigning in 2014

In 2014 Williamson ran, as an Independent, for the seat of California's 33rd congressional district in the United States House of Representatives elections. Regarding her motivation for running, she has said, "America has gone off the democratic rails. A toxic brew of shrinking civil liberties and expanded corporate influence are poisoning our democracy." Her core message was that "humanitarian values should replace economic values as the ordering principle of our civilization."[37]

Prominent elected and public officials endorsed her campaign, including former Governors Jennifer Granholm and Jesse Ventura; former Congressmembers Dennis Kucinich and Alan Grayson; and Van Jones, among others.[38]Alanis Morissette wrote and performed Williamson's campaign song, "Today".[39]

She campaigned on a broad array of progressive issues, including: greater access to high-quality education and free college; child poverty; economic justice; climate change & renewable energy; campaign finance reform; universal health care; criminal justice reform; ending perpetual war and increasing investments in peacebuilding; women's reproductive rights; and LGBTQ equality among others.[40][41][42]

She finished fourth out of 16 candidates,[43] with 14,335 votes for 13.2% of the vote. Williamson said of the process and its outcome: "This conversation of a politics of conscience, a politics of the heart, is much bigger than any one woman winning a congressional seat. And if that woman loses, the conversation goes on. My losing the congressional seat is small; what's big is the larger conversation ... you impact the ethers, and that energy goes somewhere."[44]

2020 presidential campaign Williamson in New Hampshire in January 2019

On November 15, 2018, Williamson announced the formation of a presidential exploratory committee in a video in which she acclaimed that there was a "miracle in this country in 1776 and we need another one" which would require "a co-creative effort, an effort of love and a gift of love, to our country and hopefully to our world".[45] Visiting New Hampshire in early January, she said that she "received enough positive energy to make me feel I should take the next step",[46] and subsequently hired Brent Roske to lead her operation in Iowa.[47] Roske, a film producer who also contested the same 2014 primary for the seat now represented by Ted Lieu,[48][49] maintained a wide network of connections in Iowa due in part to his previous involvement in the state, working on a political television show about the 2016 caucuses.[49] In response to the Iowa Democratic Party's proposed creation of "virtual caucuses" in the 2020 race, Williamson's campaign announced that it would appoint 99 "Virtual Iowa Caucus Captains" (each assigned to a single county) to turn out supporters in both the virtual and in-person caucuses.[50]

Williamson officially launched her presidential campaign in Los Angeles on January 28, 2019,[51] in front of an audience of 2,000 attendees, and appointed Maurice Daniel, who served alongside Donna Brazile in Dick Gephardt's campaign for the Democratic nomination in 1988, as her national campaign manager,[48] with her campaign committee, "Marianne Williamson for President", officially filed on February 4.[52] Following her Los Angeles announcement, she held her Iowa kickoff in Des Moines on January 31.[53] On February 16, in addition to scheduling another trip to New Hampshire, Williamson's campaign announced the appointment of former Congressman Paul Hodes, who represented New Hampshire's 2nd congressional district from 2007 to 2011, as New Hampshire state director and senior campaign advisor.[54] Former Georgia state assemblywoman Gloria Bromell Tinubu, who returned to South Carolina in 2011 to run for Congress in the state's 7th district and later joined Phil Noble's bid for governor in 2018 as his running mate, served as South Carolina state director and national senior advisor to the Williamson campaign,[55] but later ceased working with the campaign.[56]

On May 9, Williamson's campaign announced that she had received enough contributions from unique donors to enter the official primary debates,[57] having raised $1.5 million in the first quarter of 2019, during which the campaign received donations from 46,663 unique individuals.[58] She subsequently met the polling criteria, with three unique polls at 1% from qualifying pollsters, on May 23.[59] In June, Williamson confirmed that she moved to Des Moines, Iowa in advance of the 2020 caucuses.[60]

Political positions Williamson claims to be a "pretty straight-line progressive Democrat", supporting an increase of the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour, reducing income inequality, addressing climate change, and tackling student loan debt.[61] She backs a "Medicare for All model", Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants without a "serious criminal background", and says that the U.S. needs to be an "honest broker" in the Israeli''Palestinian conflict.[62]

She ranks climate change as "the greatest moral challenge of our generation" and backs the Green New Deal.[63] She has called for the establishment of a Department of Peace to expand global diplomacy, mediation, and educational and economic development.[64] She also voices support for stricter gun control, criminal justice reform, improving public education, free college tuition, raising the top marginal tax rate to a point where high earners pay "their fair share of taxes", describing her policies as a "renovation" of a "sociopathic economic system" focused on "short-term profit maximization".[48] She appeared to oppose mandatory vaccinations when she described them as "Orwellian" and stating "To me, it's no different than the abortion debate."[65] She later stated that she misspoke, and "I support vaccines. Public safety must be carefully balanced with the right of individuals to make their own decisions."[66] According to the Los Angeles Times, she "has a history of skeptical comments about vaccinations."[66][67]

Her signature campaign promise is a call for $100 billion in reparations for slavery to be distributed over 10 years by a group of black leaders for selected "economic and education projects",[48][68] and later suggested distributing $200 to $500 billion on The Breakfast Club,[69] a sum far greater than any other primary contenders support. In doing so, Williamson became the only candidate in the Democratic field to submit a detailed plan for reparations for black Americans, though fellow Democratic presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris later pledged support for reparations in late February 2019.[70]

Personal life Williamson was briefly married.[13] In 1990, she gave birth to a daughter, India Emma.[71]

Bibliography A Return to Love, First Edition 1992 (ISBN 9780060927486)Imagine What America Could Be in the 21st Century: Visions of a Better Future from Leading American Thinkers (ISBN 0451204697)Emma & Mommy Talk to God (ISBN 9780060799267)Healing the Soul of America: Reclaiming Our Voices as Spiritual Citizens (ISBN 9780684846224)A Woman's Worth (ISBN 9780345386571)Enchanted Love: The Mystical Power of Intimate Relationships (ISBN 9780684870250)Everyday Grace: Having Hope, Finding Forgiveness, And Making Miracles (ISBN 9781573223515)Illuminata: A Return to Prayer (ISBN 9781573225205)The Gift of Change (ISBN 0060816112)The Law of Divine Compensation: On Work, Money and Miracles (ISBN 0062205412)A Course in Weight Loss: 21 Spiritual Lessons for Surrendering Your Weight Forever (ISBN 1401921531)Tears to Triumph: The Spiritual Journey from Suffering to Enlightenment (ISBN 9780062205445)A Politics of Love: A Handbook for a New American Revolution (ISBN 0062873938)References ^ Knapp, Gwenn (2006). "StarBios Report for Marianne Williamson". MOTTASIA Inc. Archived from the original on October 18, 2006 . Retrieved July 12, 2006 . ^ "Books by Marianne Williamson". Good Reads . Retrieved February 5, 2018 . ^ a b "BEST SELLERS". New York Times. September 6, 1992. ^ a b "Best Sellers". New York Times. July 11, 1993. ^ a b "Best Sellers". New York Times. January 1, 1995. ^ a b "Best Sellers". New York Times. December 15, 2002. ^ "Our History". Project Angel Food . Retrieved February 8, 2018 . ^ "History". The Peace Alliance . Retrieved February 8, 2018 . ^ Bowden, John (January 29, 2019). "Author Marianne Williamson running for 2020 Dem nomination". The Hill . Retrieved February 13, 2019 . ^ Munson, Zack. "God Help Us", The Weekly Standard, Vol. 19, No. 22. 2014 February 17 ^ Merl, Jean. "Marianne Williamson's spiritual path into political realm", Los Angeles Times, 2014 January 13 ^ a b Appelo, Tim. "Love Prophet", Entertainment Weekly, 1992 March 6 ^ a b c d Pristin, Terry. "COVER STORY : The Power, the Glory, the Glitz : Marianne Williamson, an ex-nightclub singer, has attracted many in Hollywood with her blend of new-time religion and self-help--and alienated more than a few.", "Los Angeles Times," 1992 February 16 ^ a b c d Schindehette, Susan. "The Divine Miss W" Archived October 22, 2015, at the Wayback Machine, People, 1992 March. 09 ^ "Jewish Herald-Voice". jhvonline.com. ^ https://www.jta.org/2018/11/28/politics/new-age-guru-marianne-williamson-talks-about-her-jewishness-and-2020-presidential-run ^ a b Harel, Monica Corcoran (May 27, 2014). "The New Age of Marianne Williamson". Los Angeles . Retrieved February 13, 2019 . ^ Weig, Nick (February 4, 2019). "PROFILE: Marianne Williamson". KGAN . Retrieved February 13, 2019 . Siegel, Zachary (March 9, 2015). "Marianne Williamson'--Because Love is not Passive". TheFix.com . Retrieved February 13, 2019 . Micucci, Dana (March 29, 1992). " ' Anytime you try to be a loving... ' ". Chicago Tribune . Retrieved February 13, 2019 . Tolson, Mike (April 18, 2014). "Houston-raised Marianne Williamson eyes a California congressional seat". Houston Chronicle . Retrieved February 13, 2019 . Lett, Alexsandra (January 19, 2018). "Marianne Williamson Spreads Message Of Unity". The Daily Record . Retrieved February 13, 2019 . ^ "Faith: Marianne Williamson is Full of It". Mother Jones (November/December 1997). ^ "Marianne Williamson, Hollywood self-help guru, wants to heal Washington". Washington Post. March 11, 2014. ^ "Healing the Soul Of America". Amazon.com. ^ "Healing the Soul of America - 20th Anniversary Edition". Simon and Schuster. ^ "How To Heal Yourself And The World Around You". Oprah.com. ^ "BOOKS -- The Spiritual Side Of U.S. Politics / Williamson urges rethinking of roles". San Francisco Chronicle. October 14, 1997. ^ "Marianne Williamson on What's Wrong'--and Right'--with the World". Oprah. December 29, 2012 . Retrieved February 8, 2018 . ^ "Marianne Williamson Aims to Defeat Henry Waxman, and Save Washington's Soul". January 1, 2014. ^ "Project Angel Food's Angel Awards benefit, featuring Charo and Cheyenne Jackson, raises $650,000". Los Angeles Times. August 20, 2018. ^ "Project Angel Food serves 11 millionth meal". Los Angeles Blade. November 28, 2018. ^ "BEST SELLERS: July 11, 1993". New York Times. July 11, 1993. ^ "A Woman's Worth". Publishers Weekly. ^ a b "Gabrielle Bernstein Interviews Marianne Williamson: Sister Giant". Huffington Post . Retrieved October 16, 2012 . ^ "The History of Sister Giant". ^ "Marianne Williamson Department of Peace Interview". ^ "Turning Compassion into a Political Force". Results.org. ^ "Marianne Williamson bringing her 'Love America' tour to Detroit". Detroit Free Press. May 15, 2018. ^ "Tour Dates". Sistergiant.com. ^ "Marianne Williamson for Congress". web.archive.org. February 25, 2014. ^ "Marianne Williamson". ^ "Alanis Morissette cuts campaign song for Calif. candidate". The Hill. May 6, 2014. ^ "Marianne Williamson, New-Age Guru, Seeks Congressional Seat". New York Times. November 13, 2013. ^ "Issues". Wayback Machine. Archived from the original on February 26, 2014 . Retrieved April 10, 2019 . ^ "Marianne Williamson Aims to Defeat Henry Waxman, and Save Washington's Soul". LA Weekly. January 16, 2014. ^ "Marianne Williamson, Hollywood's Favorite New Age Guru, Backs Bernie Sanders for President". The Hollywood Reporter. May 1, 2015. ^ "Oprah to Marianne Williamson: 'How Important Was the Win for You? ' ". Oprah.com . Retrieved November 2, 2014 . ^ Thompson, Alex (November 16, 2018). "Oprah pal and spirituality guru plans 2020 run". Politico . Retrieved March 1, 2019 . ^ Steinhauser, Paul (January 8, 2019). "Oprah advisor to visit N.H. as she considers White House bid". Concord Monitor . Retrieved March 1, 2019 . ^ Pfannenstiel, Brianne [@brianneDMR] (January 21, 2019). "Inbox: Marianne Williamson, who formed a presidential exploratory committee ('...) is making "a big announcement" Jan 28 and then will be in Des Moines for a kickoff event Jan 31. She's hired @brentroske as Iowa director for her exploratory committee. #iacaucus" (Tweet) . Retrieved March 1, 2019 '' via Twitter. ^ a b c d Peele, Anna (February 19, 2019). "Marianne Williamson Wants to Be Your Healer in Chief". The Washington Post Magazine . Retrieved March 1, 2019 . ^ a b Rynard, Pat (February 28, 2019). "How The 2020 Candidates Are Staffing Up In Iowa". Iowa Starting Line . Retrieved March 1, 2019 . ^ Rynard, Pat (February 28, 2019). "Marianne Williamson Recruits "Virtual Captains" For Virtual Caucus". Iowa Starting Line . Retrieved February 28, 2019 . ^ Kaji, Mina (February 20, 2019). "Marianne Williamson: Oprah confidant, author, spiritual teacher and presidential candidate". ABC News . Retrieved March 1, 2019 . ^ "FEC Form 2: Statement of Candidacy" (PDF) . Federal Election Commission. February 4, 2019 . Retrieved March 2, 2019 . ^ Opsahl, Robin (January 31, 2019). "Marianne Williamson tells Iowa crowd America needs a 'moral and spiritual awakening ' ". Des Moines Register . Retrieved March 1, 2019 . ^ DiStaso, John [@jdistaso] (February 16, 2019). "JUST IN to @WMUR9 '' Democratic presidential candidate @marwilliamson lands top NH campaign advisor '' Former US Rep. @PaulHodes signs on as Senior Campaign Advisor & NH State Director. They have a busy #fitn schedule on tap. #nhpolitics #WMUR" (Tweet) . Retrieved March 1, 2019 '' via Twitter. ^ Rivas, Briana (February 19, 2019). "SC native Dr. Gloria Bromell Tinubu joins Williamson 2020 campaign". WPDE . Retrieved March 2, 2019 . ^ Marchant, Bristow (April 28, 2019). "Lindsey Graham gets second Democratic challenger in Senate race". The State . Retrieved April 29, 2019 . ^ Stewart, Briana (May 9, 2019). "Marianne Williamson's campaign says she's qualified for the first 2020 Democratic debate". ABC News . Retrieved May 9, 2019 . ^ Schouten, Fredreka (April 15, 2019). "Author Marianne Williamson raised $1.5 million in presidential bid". CNN . Retrieved April 15, 2019 . ^ Shepard, Steven; Montellaro, Zach (May 23, 2019). "Spirituality guru Marianne Williamson locks in 2020 debate spot". Politico . Retrieved May 23, 2019 . ^ Judd, Donald (June 6, 2019). "Marianne Williamson moves to Des Moines in bid for the Iowa caucuses". CNN . Retrieved June 7, 2019 . ^ Rynard, Pat (February 3, 2019). "Love, Reparations, And Fighting Back: A Marianne Williamson Iowa Tour". Iowa Starting Line . Retrieved March 1, 2019 . ^ Yadidi, Noa (February 28, 2019). "Marianne Williamson: Everything you need to know about the 2020 candidate". Axios . Retrieved March 1, 2019 . ^ Woodruff, Judy (June 6, 2019). Why Marianne Williamson thinks she can defeat Trump. PBS NewsHour (Video). Event occurs at 3:30 '' via YouTube. ^ Woodruff interview. Event occurs at 6:15. ^ Kaplan, Anna (June 20, 2019). "2020 Candidate Marianne Williamson: Vaccine Mandates Are 'Orwellian ' ". The Daily Beast . Retrieved June 21, 2019 . ^ a b Pearce, Matt (June 20, 2019). "2020 candidate Marianne Williamson apologizes for calling vaccine mandates 'Orwellian ' ". Los Angeles Times. ^ Shen-Berro, Julian (June 20, 2019). "Marianne Williamson Apologizes For Calling Vaccine Mandates 'Draconian ' ". HuffPost. ^ Burns, Alexander; Flegenheimer, Matt; Lee, Jasmine C.; Lerer, Lisa; Martin, Jonathan (January 21, 2019). "Who's Running for President in 2020?". The New York Times . Retrieved March 1, 2019 . ^ Wang, Esther (March 29, 2019). "Marianne Williamson Wants Your Perception to Shift". Jezebel . Retrieved April 9, 2019 . ^ Herndon, Astead W. (February 21, 2019). "2020 Democrats Embrace Race-Conscious Policies, Including Reparations". The New York Times . Retrieved March 1, 2019 . ^ "The New Age of Marianne Williamson Los Angeles Magazine". Los Angeles Magazine. May 27, 2014. External links Official website Marianne Williamson for President websiteMarianne Williamson, article and shows at Oprah.comMarianne Williamson on "Politicking with Larry King"Sister GiantThe Peace AllianceProject Angel FoodAppearances on C-SPAN

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Sat, 29 Jun 2019 13:00

Jim Watson/AFP/Getty

The internet far-right thinks Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard stole the show during Wednesday's Democratic presidential debate.

High-profile right-wing and alt-right internet trolls like Jack Posobiec, fellow Pizzagater Mike Cernovich, and Infowars' Paul Joseph Watson praised Gabbard on Twitter for her performance alongside nine other candidates on the Miami stage.

Users on 4chan affectionately referred to Gabbard as ''mommy.'' Cernovich called Gabbard the ''breakthrough star of the night,'' while Posobiec retweeted a post calling for ''a movement to push Trump to hire Tulsi Gabbard as Secretary of State.'' (Documents leaked this week show that Gabbard, who served in Iraq, was considered by the Trump transition as a possible Secretary of Veterans Affairs.)

A flash poll posted by the right-leaning Drudge Report marked Gabbard as the winner. While such surveys are statistically meaningless, the morning after the debate Watson tweeted, referencing the poll: ''Leftists are FURIOUS Tulsi Gabbard won the debate. She was the only authentic person on that stage. What does that tell you? #Drudge''.

Users on the notoriously racist and sexist message boards 8chan and 4chan, which both serve as internet hubs for far-right trolls, voiced their support for Gabbard on debate night. In 8chan's overall discussion thread for the event, Gabbard was mentioned far more than any other candidate. Users on 4chan also made several discussion threads dedicated to Gabbard's night at the debate, affectionately referring to her as ''mommy.''

Such support for Gabbard isn't entirely surprising. Since January, when Gabbard announced her campaign, elements of conservative media and the far right have been receptive to the Hawaii politician and aspects of her record, especially in foreign policy, that don't track neatly with normal progressive or Democratic policy positions. Some internet right-wingers who also feel like their politics don't match well with most candidates, even Republicans, have felt a common cause.

Trolls have been attracted by her isolationist views and her willingness to criticize Israel, a country they believe Trump and other politicians have been too cozy with, along with her accusation earlier this year that Democrats participated in ''religious bigotry'' during their questioning of a Trump judicial nominee.

But support for Gabbard in such circles has somewhat faded in the face of a number of other Democratic candidates, including Andrew Yang, who has also caught the attention of segments of the far-right internet troll bloc. Like Gabbard, Yang's relatively unconventional policies (namely his $1,000 monthly universal basic income proposal) have been attractive to 8chan and 4chan users as well as to personalities on the alt-right, including white nationalist Nick Fuentes, who feel like Trump didn't come through for them. Yang has repeatedly disavowed their support as he's tried to carve out his own base of support.

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Sun, 30 Jun 2019 14:42

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Sun, 30 Jun 2019 15:19

2020 Democratic hopeful Kamala Harris was the target of a birtherism-like attack '-- retweeted and then deleted by President Trump's son Donald Trump Jr. '-- targeting her identity as "not an American Black." Her rivals for the Democratic nomination jumped to her defense on Saturday, including former Vice President Joe Biden, who she confronted about race at Thursday's debate.

Harris was born in Oakland, California to parents who had emigrated to the U.S. from India and Jamaica. The viral tweet by right-wing personality Ali Alexander '-- whose Twitter bio claims that he "exposed" Harris and includes the hashtag #NeverKamala '-- mentioned her parents' background and said "I'm so sick of people robbing American Blacks (like myself) of our history. It's disgusting. Now using it for debate time at #DemDebate2? These are my people not her people."

The tweet appeared to get the attention of Donald Trump Jr., who has more than three million followers. Trump Jr. wrote "Is this true? Wow" on Thursday, but soon deleted it. A spokesman told The New York Times Trump Jr. was "asking if it was true that Kamala Harris was half-Indian because it's not something he had ever heard before."

Harris has often resisted sharing her personal background on the campaign trail. But during Thursday's debate, she confronted Biden about his history opposing busing and said she herself had been bused to a public school.

Kamala Harris is seen as a child in an undated photo released by her presidential campaign during the Democratic presidential debate in Miami, Florida, U.S. June 27, 2019. HANDOUT Harris' campaign manager, Lily Adams, said in a statement to CBS News "this is the same type of racist attacks used to attack Barack Obama. It didn't work then and it won't work now."

Harris' husband, Douglas Emhoff, expressed his gratitude on Twitter to those who came to his wife's defense. "...Thx to all the 2020 candidates and everyone else for calling out this crap for what it is"... Emhoff tweeted.

On Saturday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts was the first 2020 candidate to tweet in support of Harris. "The attacks against @KamalaHarris are racist and ugly. We all have an obligation to speak out and say so. And it's within the power and obligation of tech companies to stop these vile lies dead in their tracks," Warren tweeted.

Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey chimed in with a tweet saying "@kamalaharris doesn't have sh[**] to prove." Strong remarks also came from Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, former U.S. Rep. Beto O'Rourke and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg. Biden, the current frontrunner, tweeted on Saturday "The same forces of hatred rooted in 'birtherism' that questioned @BarackObama's American citizenship, and even his racial identity, are now being used against Senator @KamalaHarris. It's disgusting and we have to call it out when we see it. Racism has no place in America."

President Trump was one of the leading voices, along with a group of conspiracy theorists, who questioned whether former President Obama was really born in the U.S. Earlier this month, Mr. Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, would not directly answer whether the president's birther conspiracy against Mr. Obama was racist.

Democratic Presidential candidate, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) as she visits the outside of a detention center for migrant children on June 28, 2019 in Homestead, Florida. Joe Raedle / Getty Images Alexander fired back at the 2020 candidates who defended Harris on Twitter Saturday, claiming there is a "racist Democratic smear campaign against him." A Howard University Professor directly responded.

"Shut down the weaponized ignorance," said professor Greg Carr, Howard University's chair of Afro-American Studies. Carr pointed to the 2016 presidential primary campaign of Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.

Cruz, who was born in Calgary, Canada, also faced criticism from the then-frontrunner, Mr. Trump, but Carr and other civil rights activists say Cruz did not face anywhere near the "crowd swell of birtherism" that former President Obama and now Harris have faced. Carr called birtherism race-based and absolutely racist.

There has been social media criticism of Harris and Booker '-- who is African American and from Newark, New Jersey '-- propelled by an online campaign that operates under #ADOS: American Descendants of Slavery. Online, the group says they "seeks to reclaim/restore the critical national character of the African American identity and experience."

Carr believes their social media discussion around reparations may be driving a conversation to separate those who are "black" and "African American" '-- or "American Black" as Alexander put it. Carr made sure to emphasize that ADOS has nothing to do with major national groups fighting for reparations, like the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America. He connects ADOS to a group that attempts to create controversy or issues in black communities that might lead to nefarious goals, like suppressing the African American vote.

"What good does it do to any of us to assert pride of privilege in oppression," said Carr.

Carr said he would tell Ali "stop standing between attempts to solve our collective problems and people's attempts to understand how best to do it. This doesn't add anything positive to public discourse. And of course my next question would be if you are not in fact just acting out of ignorance, 'Who are you working for?' because we've seen this show before."

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Fri, 28 Jun 2019 12:07

Ms. Harris's legislation would provide up to $6,000 a year in the form of a refundable tax credit to middle-class and working families.

Image Senator Kamala Harris of California. Credit Credit The New York Times In late 2018, Senator Kamala Harris of California announced a proposal called the LIFT the Middle Class Act, a piece of legislation aimed at addressing the rising cost of living by providing middle-class and working families with a significant tax credit. She has been highlighting her proposal on the campaign trail as she seeks the Democratic nomination for president.

What it isThe legislation would provide up to $6,000 a year in the form of a refundable tax credit for households earning under $100,000 annually, and up to $3,000 for single filers earning under $50,000 per year.

If passed, it would come on top of existing tax credits and public benefits for lower-income Americans.

In making the case for the tax credit, Ms. Harris's team cites a survey that found that 57 percent of Americans do not have enough cash to cover an unexpected $500 expense.

How she uses itThe LIFT Act is essentially Ms. Harris's attempt to close the wealth gap. It places her into the growing group of candidates who have suggested addressing the issue through various measures like baby bonds, universal basic income and a wealth tax.

The policy allows Ms. Harris to address income inequality while avoiding the anti-Wall Street rhetoric associated with Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

Ms. Harris has also used the policy as a catchall description of her economic vision, reframing questions about the racial wealth gap and reparations, for instance, into a broader discussion of racial and economic disparity.

Obstacles Rather than trying to appease the party's left wing, Ms. Harris is betting on an incremental approach. But some progressives view the LIFT Act as not bold enough to really help the neediest Americans.

The legislation would need to pass both houses of what could be a sharply divided Congress. And it is not clear how the federal government would recover the tax dollars refunded by the tax credit.

Matt Stevens is a political reporter based in New York. He previously worked for The Los Angeles Times, covering drought, water and the city's west side. @ ByMattStevens

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Desegregation busing in the United States (also known as simply busing) is the practice of assigning and transporting students to schools so as to redress prior racial segregation of schools, or to overcome the effects of residential segregation on local school demographics.

In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. The process of integrating public schools met fierce resistance in the South where segregation laws took hold after the American Civil War and the Reconstruction Era of the United States. In Northern and Western states, de facto segregation was the customary practice. Due to patterns of residential segregation, a principal tool for racial integration was the use of busing.[1] In the 1971 Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education ruling, the Supreme Court ruled that the federal courts had the discretion to include busing as a desegregation tool to achieve racial balance. While the Swann decision addressed de jure segregation in the South, it failed to address de facto segregation which persisted elsewhere in the country. In Georgia, Governor Jimmy Carter saw that Swann was "clearly a one-sided decision; the Court is still talking about the South, the North is still going free".[2] In the 1974 Milliken v. Bradley decision, the U.S. Supreme Court placed an important limitation on Swann when they ruled that students could be bused across district lines only when evidence of de jure segregation across multiple school districts existed.

In the 1970s and 1980s, under federal court supervision, many school districts implemented mandatory busing plans within their district. A few of these plans are still in use today. An example of stiff resistance to desegregation busing was the Restore Our Alienated Rights movement in Boston.

Since the 1980s, desegregation busing has been in decline due to fierce opposition from white voters despite the success of the initiative at narrowing the achievement gap between white and black students.[3] Even though school districts provided zero-fare bus transportation to and from students' assigned schools, those schools were in some cases many miles away from students' homes, which often presented problems to them and their families. In addition, many white families were angry about having to send their children miles to another school in an unfamiliar neighborhood when there was an available school a short distance away. The movement of large numbers of white families to suburbs of large cities, so-called white flight, reduced the effectiveness of the policy.[4] Many whites who stayed moved their children into private or parochial schools; these effects combined to make many urban school districts predominantly nonwhite, reducing any effectiveness mandatory busing may have had.[4] In addition, school districts started using magnet schools, new school construction, and more detailed computer-generated information to refine their school assignment plans.

Contents

1 History 1.1 Before World War II 1.2 After World War II 1.2.1 Black population shift 1.2.2 Legal rulings 1.3 Civil rights movement 1.4 Sociological study 1.5 Reaction 1.5.1 Before 2007 1.5.2 After 2007 2 Criticism 3 Effects 4 Historical examples 4.1 Boston, Massachusetts 4.2 Springfield, Massachusetts 4.3 Kansas City, Missouri 4.4 Las Vegas, Nevada 4.5 Los Angeles, California 4.6 Nashville, Tennessee 4.7 Pasadena, California 4.8 Prince George's County, Maryland 4.9 Richmond, Virginia 4.10 Wilmington, Delaware 5 Re-segregation 6 See also 7 References 8 Further reading 9 External links History [ edit ] Before World War II [ edit ] Prior to World War II, most public schools in the country were de jure or de facto segregated. All Southern states had Jim Crow laws mandating racial segregation of schools. Northern states and some border states were primarily white (as of 1940, populations of Detroit and Chicago were more than 90% white) and, furthermore, existing black populations were concentrated in urban ghettos partly as the result of restrictive covenants.

After World War II [ edit ] The origins of desegregation busing can be traced back to two major developments that occurred in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s.

Black population shift [ edit ] Starting in 1940, the Second Great Migration brought five million blacks from the agrarian South to the urban and manufacturing centers in Northern and Western cities to fill in the labor shortages during the industrial buildup of World War II and for better opportunities during the post-war economic boom. Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) allowed them to settle in formerly white neighborhoods, contributing to racial tension. Meanwhile, the post-war housing boom and the rise of suburbia allowed whites to migrate into the suburbs. By 1960, all major Northern and Western cities had sizable black populations (e.g., 23% in Chicago, 29% in Detroit, and 32% in Los Angeles). Blacks tended to be concentrated in inner cities, whereas newer suburbs of most cities were almost exclusively white.

Legal rulings [ edit ] At the same time, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown vs Board of Education (1954) overturned racial segregation laws for public schools that had been in place in a number of states since the late 19th century, and ruled that separate but equal schools were "inherently unequal". Although the Brown decision affirmed principles of equality and justice, it did not specify how its ruling would promote equality in education. Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP wanted a speedy process for desegregating the school districts, but the Court waited until the following year to make its recommendations. Reasons for delaying had to do with the changes in the Court and with Chief Justice Earl Warren steering a careful course given the expected opposition from Southern states. In May 1955, the Court ruled in Brown II that the school districts desegregate "with all deliberate speed". Public school administrators had to begin the process of desegregating the schools through the development of policies that would promote racial mixing. A backlash of resistance and violence ensued. Even members of Congress refused to abide by the decision. In 1956 over a hundred congressmen signed the Southern Manifesto, promising to use all legal means to undermine and reverse the Court's ruling.[5]

The momentum continued with two additional Supreme Court decisions aimed at implementation. In 1968, the Warren Court in Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, rejected a freedom of choice plan. The Court ordered the county to desegregate immediately and eliminate racial discrimination "root and branch".[2] Then in 1971, the Burger Court in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education ruled that the school district must achieve racial balance even if it meant redrawing school boundaries and the use of busing as a legal tool. The impact of Green and Swann served to end all remnants of de jure segregation in the South. However, the consequence of the Swann decision ushered in new forms of resistance in subsequent decades. The decision failed to address de facto segregation.

Consequently, despite being found "inherently unequal" in Brown v. Board of Education, by the late 1960s public schools remained de facto segregated in many cities because of demographic patterns, school district lines being intentionally drawn to segregate the schools racially, and, in some cases, due to conscious efforts to send black children to inferior schools.[6] Thus, for example, by 1969, more than nine of every ten black students in Nashville still attended all-black schools.[7] Evidence of such de facto segregation motivated early proponents of plans to engage in conscious "integration" of public schools, by busing schoolchildren to schools other than their neighborhood schools, with an objective to equalize racial imbalances. Proponents of such plans argued that with the schools integrated, minority students would have equal access to equipment, facilities, and resources that the cities' white students had, thus giving all students in the city equal educational opportunities.

A federal court found that in Boston, schools were constructed and school district lines drawn intentionally to segregate the schools racially. In the early 1970s, a series of court decisions found that the racially imbalanced schools trampled the rights of minority students. As a remedy, courts ordered the racial integration of school districts within individual cities, sometimes requiring the racial composition of each individual school in the district to reflect the composition of the district as a whole. This was generally achieved by transporting children by school bus to a school in a different area of the district.

The judge who instituted the Detroit busing plan said that busing "is a considerably safer, more reliable, healthful and efficient means of getting children to school than either carpools or walking, and this is especially true for younger children".[4] He, therefore, included kindergarten children in the busing scheme: "Transportation of kindergarten children for upwards of forty-five minutes, one-way, does not appear unreasonable, harmful, or unsafe in any way."[4] The resultant Supreme Court case, Milliken v. Bradley, imposed limits on busing. The key issue was whether a district court could order a metropolitan-wide desegregation plan between urban Detroit and suburban school districts. Busing would play a key role in the implementation phase. The Court essentially declared that federal courts did not have the authority to order inter-district desegregation unless it could be proven that suburban school districts intentionally mandated segregation policies. The implication of the decision was that suburban school districts in the North were not affected by the principles established by Brown. De facto segregation was allowed to persist in the North. The courts could order desegregation where segregation patterns existed, but only within municipalities, not suburban areas. The lasting consequence of the Milliken decision is that it opened the door for whites to flee to the suburbs and not be concerned about compliance with mandatory integration policies.[2]

With waning public support, the courts began relaxing judicial supervision of school districts during the 1990s and 2000s, calling for voluntary efforts to achieve racial balance. In the early 1990s, the Rehnquist Court ruled in three cases coming from Oklahoma City, Kansas City, and DeKalb County in Georgia that federal judges could ease their supervision of school districts "once legally enforced segregation had been eliminated to the extent practicable".[8] With these decisions, the Rehnquist Court opened the door for school districts throughout the country to get away from under judicial supervision once they had achieved unitary status. Unitary Status meant that a school district had successfully eliminated segregation in dual school systems and thus was no longer bound to court-ordered desegregation policies.

Then in 2002, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision in Belk v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education which declared that the school system had achieved desegregation status and that the method to achieve integration, like busing, was unnecessary. The refusal of the Court to hear the challenges to the lower court decision effectively overturned the earlier 1971 Swann ruling.

Finally, in 2007, the Roberts Court produced a contentious 5''4 ruling in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (PICS). The decision prohibited the use of racial classifications in student assignment plans to maintain racial balance. Whereas the Brown case ruled that racial segregation violated the Constitution, now the use of racial classifications violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. Writing for the minority, Justice Breyer said the "ruling contradicted previous decisions upholding race-conscious pupil assignments and would hamper local school boards' efforts to prevent 'resegregation' in individual schools".[9]

Civil rights movement [ edit ] The struggle to desegregate the schools received impetus from the Civil Rights Movement, whose goal was to dismantle legal segregation in all public places. The movement's efforts culminated in Congress passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Signed by President Lyndon Johnson, the two laws signaled the end of discriminatory voting practices and segregation of public accommodations. The importance of these two laws was the injection of both the legislative and executive branches joining the judiciary to promote racial integration. In addition, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 authorized the federal government to cut off funding if Southern school districts did not comply and also to bring lawsuits against school officials who resisted.[2]

One argument against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that opponents of the proposed legislation found particularly compelling was that the bill would require forced busing to achieve certain racial quotas in schools.[4] Proponents of the bill, such as Emanuel Celler and Jacob Javits, said that the bill would not authorize such measures. Leading sponsor Sen. Hubert Humphrey wrote two amendments specifically designed to outlaw busing.[4] Humphrey said "if the bill were to compel it, it would be a violation [of the Constitution], because it would be handling the matter on the basis of race and we would be transporting children because of race".[4] While Javits said any government official who sought to use the bill for busing purposes "would be making a fool of himself", two years later the Department of Health, Education and Welfare said that Southern school districts would be required to meet mathematical ratios of students by busing.[4]

Sociological study [ edit ] Another catalyst for the development of busing was an influential sociological report on educational equality commissioned by the U.S. government in the 1960s. It was one of the largest studies in history, with more than 150,000 students in the sample. The result was a massive report of over 700 pages. That 1966 report'--titled "Equality of Educational Opportunity" (or often simply called the "Coleman Report" after its author James Coleman)'--contained many controversial findings.[10][11] One conclusion from the study was that, while black schools in the South were not significantly underfunded as compared to white schools, and while per-pupil funding did not contribute significantly to differences in educational outcomes, socially disadvantaged black children still benefited significantly from learning in mixed-race classrooms. Thus, it was argued that busing (as opposed to simply increasing funding to segregated schools) was necessary for achieving racial equality.

[ edit ] Before 2007 [ edit ] The impact of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling was limited because whites and blacks tended to live in all-white or all-black communities. Initial integration in the South tended to be symbolic: for example, the integration of Clinton High School, the first public school in Tennessee to be integrated, amounted to the admission of twelve black students to a formerly all-white school.

"Forced busing" was a term used by many to describe the mandates that generally came from the courts. Court-ordered busing to achieve school desegregation was used mainly in large, ethnically segregated school systems, including Boston, Massachusetts; Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio; Kansas City, Missouri; Pasadena and San Francisco, California; Richmond, Virginia; Detroit, Michigan; and Wilmington, Delaware. From 1972 to 1980, despite busing, the percentage of blacks attending mostly-black schools barely changed, moving from 63.6 percent to 63.3 percent.[4]

In some southern states in the 1960s and 1970s, parents opposed to busing created new private schools. The schools, called segregation academies, were sometimes organized with the support of the local White Citizen's Council.[12]

For the 1975''76 school year, the Louisville, Kentucky school district, which was not integrated due to whites largely moving to the suburbs, was forced to start a busing program.[4] The first day, 1,000 protestors rallied against the busing, and a few days into the process, 8,000 to 10,000 whites from Jefferson County, Kentucky, many teenagers, rallied at the district's high schools and fought with police trying to break up the crowds.[4] Police cars were vandalized, 200 were arrested, and people were hurt in the melee, but despite further rallies being banned the next day by Louisville's mayor, demonstrators showed up to the schools the following day.[4] Kentucky Governor Julian Carroll sent 1,800 members of the Kentucky National Guard and stationed them on every bus.[4] On September 26, 1975, 400 protestors held a rally at Southern High School, which was broken up by police tear gas, followed by a rally of 8,000 the next day, who marched led by a woman in a wheelchair to prevent police reprisals while cameras were running.[4] Despite the protests, Louisville's busing program continued.[4]

Congressional opposition to busing continued. Delaware senator Joe Biden said ''I don't feel responsible for the sins of my father and grandfather,''[13] and that busing was ''a liberal train wreck.''[14] In 1977, senators William Roth and Biden proposed the ''Biden-Roth'' amendment. This amendment "prevented judges from ordering wider busing to achieve actually-integrated districts."[15] Despite Biden's lobbying of other senators[16] and of getting the Judiciary Committee Chairman's support, senator James Eastland,[17][18] "Biden-Roth" narrowly lost.

After 2007 [ edit ] Civil rights advocates see the 2007 ruling of the Roberts court as the inevitable consequence of gradual court decisions dating back to the early 1970s to ease judicial supervision and limit important tools to achieve integrated schools. Even those school districts that voluntarily created race-conscious programs are under pressure to abandon these efforts as the white parents are refusing to participate in any pupil assignment programs. In some cases, white parents filed reverse discrimination lawsuits in court. Wherever the courts have backed away from mandating school districts to implement desegregation plans, resegregation of Blacks and Latinos has increased dramatically.[19] In 1988, 44 percent of southern black students were attending majority-white schools. In 2005, 27 percent of black students were attending majority white schools. By restricting the tools by which schools can address school segregation, many fear that the PICS decision will continue to accelerate this trend.[20] The ruling reflects the culmination of the conservatives' central message on education that "race should be ignored, inequalities should be blamed on individuals and schools, and existing civil rights remedies should be dismantled".[21] In 2001 Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) which was promptly signed by President George W. Bush. The law put a premium on student testing, not integration, to measure academic progress. Financial penalties were incurred on schools if students did not demonstrate adequate academic performance. While initially supported by Democrats, critics say, the law has failed to adequately address the achievement gap between whites and minorities and that there are problems with implementation and inflexible provisions.[1]

Criticism [ edit ] Support for the practice is influenced by the methodology of the study conducted. In a Gallup poll taken in the early 1970s, very low percentages of whites (4 percent) and blacks (9 percent) supported busing outside of local neighborhoods.[4] However, a longitudinal study has shown that support for desegregation busing among black respondents has only dropped below 50% once from 1972-1976 while support among white respondents has steadily increased suggesting that the Gallup poll numbers may be skewed.[22] This increased support may be due the diminished impact of desegregation policies over time.[23] A 1978 study by the RAND Corporation set out to find why whites were opposed to busing and concluded that it was not because they held racist attitudes, but because they believed it destroyed neighborhood schools and camaraderie and increased discipline problems.[4] It is said that busing eroded the community pride and support that neighborhoods had for their local schools.[4] After busing, 60 percent of Boston parents, both black and white, reported more discipline problems in schools.[4] In the 1968, 1972, and 1976 presidential elections, candidates opposed to busing were elected each time, and Congress voted repeatedly to end court-mandated busing.[24]

Critics point out that children in the Northeast were often bused from integrated schools to less integrated schools.[4] The percentage of Northeastern black children who attended a predominantly black school increased from 67 percent in 1968 to 80 percent in 1980 (a higher percentage than in 1954).[4]

Busing is claimed to have accelerated a trend of middle-class relocation to the suburbs of metropolitan areas.[4] Many opponents of busing claimed the existence of "white flight" based on the court decisions to integrate schools.[4] Such stresses led white middle-class families in many communities to desert the public schools and create a network of private schools.[4]

Ultimately, many black leaders, from Wisconsin State Rep. Annette Polly Williams, a Milwaukee Democrat, to Cleveland Mayor Michael R. White led efforts to end busing.[25]

In 1978, a proponent of busing, Nancy St. John, studied 100 cases of urban busing from the North and did not find what she had been looking for;[4] she found no cases in which significant black academic improvement occurred, but many cases where race relations suffered due to busing, as those in forced-integrated schools had worse relations with those of the opposite race than those in non-integrated schools.[4] Researcher David Armour, also looking for hopeful signs, found that busing "heightens racial identity" and "reduces opportunities for actual contact between the races".[4]A 1992 study led by Harvard University Professor Gary Orfield, who supports busing, found black and Hispanic students lacked "even modest overall improvement" as a result of court-ordered busing.[26]

Another mystery was why Asian students, segregated in some school systems, nevertheless thrived academically.[27]

During the 1970s, 60 Minutes reported that some members of Congress, government, and the press who supported busing most vociferously sent their own children to private schools, including Senator Edward Kennedy, George McGovern, Thurgood Marshall, Phil Hart, Ben Bradlee, Senator Birch Bayh, Tom Wicker, Philip Geyelin, and Donald Fraser.[4] Many of the judges who ordered busing also sent their children to private schools.[4]

Effects [ edit ] Busing integrated school age ethnic minorities with the larger community.[clarification needed ] The Milliken v. Bradley Supreme Court decision that busing children across districts is unconstitutional limited the extent of busing to within metropolitan areas. This decision made suburbs attractive to those who wished to evade busing.[citation needed ]

Some metropolitan areas in which land values and property-tax structures were less favorable to relocation saw significant declines in enrollment of whites in public schools as white parents chose to enroll their children in private schools. Currently, most segregation occurs across school districts as large cities have moved significantly toward racial balance among their schools.[28]

Recent research by Eric Hanushek, John Kain, and Steven Rivkin has shown that the level of achievement by black students is adversely affected by higher concentrations of black students in their schools.[29] Additionally, the impact of racial concentration appears to be greatest for high-achieving black students.[30]

Historical examples [ edit ] Boston, Massachusetts [ edit ] In 1965 Massachusetts passed into law the Racial Imbalance Act, which ordered school districts to desegregate or risk losing state educational funding. The first law of its kind in the nation, it was opposed by many in Boston, especially less-well-off white ethnic areas, such as the Irish-American neighborhoods of South Boston & Charlestown, Boston.[31]

Springfield, Massachusetts [ edit ] Unlike Boston, which experienced a large degree of racial violence following Judge Arthur Garrity's decision to desegregate the city's public schools in 1974, Springfield quietly enacted its own desegregation busing plans. Although not as well-documented as Boston's crisis, Springfield's situation centered on the city's elementary schools. Much of the primary evidence for Springfield's busing plans stemmed from a March 1976 report by a committee for the Massachusetts Commission on Civil Rights (MCCR). According to the report, 30 of the city's 36 elementary schools were grouped into six separate districts during the 1974''75 school year, and each district contained at least one racially imbalanced school. The basic idea behind the "six-district" plan was to preserve a neighborhood feeling for school children while busing them locally to improve not only racial imbalances, but also educational opportunities in the school system.[32]

Kansas City, Missouri [ edit ] In 1985, a federal court took partial control of the Kansas City, Missouri School District (KCMSD). Since the district and the state had been found severally liable for the lack of integration, the state was responsible for making sure that money was available for the program. It was one of the most expensive desegregation efforts attempted and included busing, a magnet school program, and an extensive plan to improve the quality of inner city schools. The entire program was built on the premise that extremely good schools in the inner-city area combined with paid busing would be enough to achieve integration.

Las Vegas, Nevada [ edit ] In May 1968, the Southern Nevada chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) filed a lawsuit against the Clark County School District (CCSD). The NAACP wanted the CCSD to acknowledge publicly, and likewise, act against the de facto segregation that existed in six elementary schools located on the city's Westside.[33] This area of Las Vegas had traditionally been a black neighborhood. Therefore, the CCSD did not see the need to desegregate the schools, as the cause of segregation appeared to result from factors outside of its immediate control.

The case initially entered the Eighth Judicial District Court of Nevada, but quickly found its way to the Nevada Supreme Court. According to Brown II, all school desegregation cases had to be heard at the federal level if they reached a state's highest court. As a result, the Las Vegas case, which became known as Kelly v. Clark County School District, was eventually heard by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. On May 10, 1972, the Ninth Circuit handed down its decision in favor of the NAACP, which therefore required the CCSD to implement a plan for integration. The CCSD then instituted its Sixth Grade Center Plan, which converted the Westside's six elementary schools into sixth-grade classrooms where nearly all of the school district's sixth graders (black and white alike) would be bused for the 1972''73 school year.[33]

Los Angeles, California [ edit ] In 1963, a lawsuit, Crawford v. Board of Education of the City of Los Angeles,[34] was filed to end segregation in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The California Supreme Court required the district to come up with a plan in 1977. The board returned to court with what the court of appeal years later would describe as "one of if not the most drastic plan of mandatory student reassignment in the nation".[35] A desegregation busing plan was developed, to be implemented in the 1978 school year. Two suits to stop the enforced busing plan, both titled Bustop, Inc. v. Los Angeles Board of Education, were filed by the group Bustop Inc., and were petitioned to the United States Supreme Court.[36] The petitions to stop the busing plan were subsequently denied by Justice Rehnquist and Justice Powell. California Constitutional Proposition 1, which mandated that busing follow the Equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution, passed in 1979 with 70 percent of the vote. The Crawford v. Board of Education of the City of Los Angeles lawsuit was heard in the Supreme Court in 1982.[37] The Supreme Court upheld the decision that Proposition 1 was constitutional, and that, therefore, mandatory busing was not permissible.

Nashville, Tennessee [ edit ] In comparison with many other cities in the nation, Nashville was not a hotbed of racial violence or massive protest during the civil rights era. In fact, the city was a leader of school desegregation in the South, even housing a few small schools that were minimally integrated before the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. Despite this initial breakthrough, however, full desegregation of the schools was a far cry from reality in Nashville in the mid-1950s, and thus 22 plaintiffs, including black student Robert Kelley, filed suit against the Nashville Board of Education in 1955.

The result of that lawsuit was what came to be known as the "Nashville Plan", an attempt to integrate the public schools of Nashville (and later all of Davidson County when the district was consolidated in 1963). The plan, beginning in 1957, involved the gradual integration of schools by working up through the grades each year starting in the fall of 1957 with first graders. Very few black children who had been zoned for white schools showed up at their assigned campus on the first day of school, and those who did met with angry mobs outside several city elementary schools. No white children assigned to black schools showed up to their assigned campuses.

After a decade of this gradual integration strategy, it became evident that the schools still lacked full integration. Many argued that Housing Segregation was the true culprit in the matter. In 1970 the Kelley case was reintroduced to the courts. Ruling on the case was Judge Leland Clure Morton, who, after seeking advice from consultants from the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, decided the following year that to correct the problem, forced busing of the children was to be mandated, among the many parts to a new plan that was finally decided on. This was a similar plan to that enacted in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in Charlotte, North Carolina, the same year.

What followed were mixed emotions from both the black and white communities. Many whites did not want their children to share schools with black children, arguing that it would decrease the quality of their education. While a triumph for some, many blacks believed that the new plan would enforce the closure of neighborhood schools such as Pearl High School, which brought the community together. Parents from both sides did not like the plan because they had no control over where their children were going to be sent to school, a problem that many other cities had during the 1970s when busing was mandated across the country. Despite the judge's decision and the subsequent implementation of the new busing plan, the city stood divided.

As in many other cities across the country at this time, many white citizens took action against the desegregation laws. Organized protests against the busing plan began before the order was even official, led by future mayoral candidate Casey Jenkins. While some protested, many other white parents began pulling their children out of the public schools and enrolling them in the numerous private schools that began to spring up almost overnight in Nashville in the 1960s and 1970s. Many of these schools continued to be segregated through the 1970s. Other white parents moved outside of the city limits and eventually outside the Davidson County line so as not to be part of the Metropolitan District and thus not part of the busing plan.

In 1979 and 1980, the Kelley case was again brought back to the courts because of the busing plan's failure to fully integrate the Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools (MNPS). The plan was reexamined and reconfigured to include some concessions made by the school board and the Kelley plaintiffs and in 1983 the new plan, which still included busing, was introduced. However, problems with "white flight" and private schools continued to segregate MNPS to a certain degree, a problem that has never fully been solved.[38]

Pasadena, California [ edit ] In 1970 a federal court ordered the desegregation of the public schools in Pasadena, California. At that time, the proportion of white students in those schools reflected the proportion of whites in the community, 54 percent and 53 percent, respectively. After the desegregation process began, large numbers of whites in the upper and middle classes who could afford it pulled their children from the integrated public school system and placed them into private schools instead. As a result, by 2004 Pasadena became home to 63 private schools, which educated one-third of all school-aged children in the city, and the proportion of white students in the public schools had fallen to 16 percent. In the meantime, the proportion of whites in the community has declined somewhat as well, to 37 percent in 2006. The superintendent of Pasadena's public schools characterized them as being to whites "like the bogey-man", and mounted policy changes, including a curtailment of busing, and a publicity drive to induce affluent whites to put their children back into public schools.[39]

Prince George's County, Maryland [ edit ] In 1974, Prince George's County, Maryland, became the largest school district in the United States forced to adopt a busing plan. The county, a large suburban school district east of Washington, D.C., was over 80 percent white in population and in the public schools. In some county communities close to Washington, there was a higher concentration of black residents than in more outlying areas. Through a series of desegregation orders after the Brown decision, the county had a neighborhood-based system of school boundaries. However, the NAACP argued that housing patterns in the county still reflected the vestiges of segregation. Against the will of the Board of Education of Prince George's County, the federal court ordered that a school busing plan be set in place. A 1974 Gallup poll showed that 75 percent of county residents were against forced busing and that only 32 percent of blacks supported it.

The transition was very traumatic as the court ordered that the plan be administered with "all due haste". This happened during the middle of the school term, and students, except those in their senior year in high school, were transferred to different schools to achieve racial balance. Many high school sports teams' seasons and other typical school activities were disrupted. Life in general for families in the county was disrupted by things such as the changes in daily times to get children ready and receive them after school, transportation logistics for extracurricular activities, and parental participation activities such as volunteer work in the schools and PTA meetings.

The federal case and the school busing order was officially ended in 2001, as the "remaining vestiges of segregation" had been erased to the court's satisfaction. Neighborhood-based school boundaries were restored. The Prince George's County Public Schools was ordered to pay the NAACP more than $2 million in closing attorney fees and is estimated to have paid the NAACP over $20 million over the course of the case.

Richmond, Virginia [ edit ] In April 1971, in the case Bradley v. Richmond School Board, Federal District Judge Robert R. Merhige, Jr., ordered an extensive citywide busing program in Richmond, Virginia. When the massive busing program began in the fall of 1971, parents of all races complained about the long rides, hardships with transportation for extracurricular activities, and the separation of siblings when elementary schools at opposite sides of the city were "paired", (i.e., splitting lower and upper elementary grades into separate schools). The result was further white flight to private schools and to suburbs in the neighboring counties of Henrico and Chesterfield that were predominately white. In January 1972, Merhige ruled that students in Henrico and Chesterfield counties would have to be bused into the City of Richmond in order to decrease the high percentage of black students in Richmond's schools. This order was overturned by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals on June 6, 1972, barring forced busing schemes that made students cross county/city boundaries. (Note: Since 1871, Virginia has had independent cities which are not politically located within counties, although some are completely surrounded geographically by a single county. This distinctive and unusual arrangement was pivotal in the Court of Appeals decision overturning Merhige's ruling). The percentage of white students in Richmond city schools declined from 45 to 21 percent between 1960 and 1975 and continued to decline over the next several decades. By 2010 white students accounted for less than 9 percent of student enrollment in Richmond.[40] This so-called "white flight" prevented Richmond schools from ever becoming truly integrated.[41] A number of assignment plans were tried to address the non-racial concerns, and eventually, most elementary schools were "unpaired".

Wilmington, Delaware [ edit ] In Wilmington, Delaware, located in New Castle County, segregated schools were required by law until 1954, when, due to Belton v. Gebhart (which was later rolled into Brown v. Board of Education on appeal), the school system was forced to desegregate. As a result, the school districts in the Wilmington metropolitan area were split into eleven districts covering the metropolitan area (Alfred I. duPont, Alexis I. duPont, Claymont, Conrad, De La Warr, Marshallton-McKean, Mount Pleasant, New Castle-Gunning Bedford, Newark, Stanton, and Wilmington school districts). However, this reorganization did little to address the issue of segregation, since the Wilmington schools (Wilmington and De La Warr districts) remained predominantly black, while the suburban schools in the county outside the city limits remained predominantly white.

In 1976, the U.S. District Court, in Evans v. Buchanan, ordered that the school districts of New Castle County all be combined into a single district governed by the New Castle County Board of Education.[42] The District Court ordered the Board to implement a desegregation plan in which the students from the predominantly black Wilmington and De La Warr districts were required to attend school in the predominantly white suburb districts, while students from the predominantly white districts were required to attend school in Wilmington or De La Warr districts for three years (usually 4th through 6th grade). In many cases, this required students to be bused a considerable distance (12''18 miles in the Christina School District) because of the distance between Wilmington and some of the major communities of the suburban area (such as Newark).

However, the process of handling an entire metropolitan area as a single school district resulted in a revision to the plan in 1981, in which the New Castle County schools were again divided into four separate districts (Brandywine, Christina, Colonial, and Red Clay).[43] However, unlike the 1954 districts, each of these districts was racially balanced and encompassed inner city and suburban areas. Each of the districts continued a desegregation plan based upon busing.

The requirements for maintaining racial balance in the schools of each of the districts was ended by the District Court in 1994, but the process of busing students to and from the suburbs for schooling continued largely unchanged until 2001, when the Delaware state government passed House Bill 300, mandating that the districts convert to sending students to the schools closest to them, a process that continues as of 2007[update]. In the 1990s, Delaware schools would utilize the Choice program, which would allow children to apply to schools in other school districts based on space.

Wilmington High, which, many felt, was a victim of the busing order, closed in 1998 due to dropping enrollment. The campus would become home to Cab Calloway School of the Arts, a magnet school focused on the arts that was established in 1992. It would also house Charter School of Wilmington, which focuses on math and science, and opened up in 1996.

Delaware currently has some of the highest rates in the nation of children who attend private schools, magnet schools, and charter schools, due to the perceived weaknesses of the public school system.[citation needed ]

Re-segregation [ edit ] According to the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, the desegregation of U.S. public schools peaked in 1988; since then, schools have become more segregated because of changes in demographic residential patterns with continuing growth in suburbs and new communities. Jonathan Kozol has found that as of 2005, the proportion of black students at majority-white schools was at "a level lower than in any year since 1968".[44] Changing population patterns, with dramatically increased growth in the South and Southwest, decreases in old industrial cities, and much increased immigration of new ethnic groups, have altered school populations in many areas.

School districts continue to try various programs to improve student and school performance, including magnet schools and special programs related to the economic standing of families. Omaha proposed incorporating some suburban districts within city limits to enlarge its school-system catchment area. It wanted to create a "one tax, one school" system that would also allow it to create magnet programs to increase diversity in now predominately white schools. Ernest Chambers, a 34-year-serving black state senator from North Omaha, Nebraska, believed a different solution was needed. Some observers said that in practical terms, public schools in Omaha had been re-segregated since the end of busing in 1999.[45]

In 2006, Chambers offered an amendment to the Omaha school reform bill in the Nebraska State Legislature which would provide for creation of three school districts in Omaha according to current racial demographics: black, white, and Hispanic, with local community control of each district. He believed this would give the black community the chance to control a district in which their children were the majority. Chambers' amendment was controversial. Opponents to the measure described it as "state-sponsored segregation".[46]

The authors of a 2003 Harvard study on re-segregation believe current trends in the South of white teachers leaving predominately black schools is an inevitable result of federal court decisions limiting former methods of civil rights-era protections, such as busing and affirmative action in school admissions. Teachers and principals cite other issues, such as economic and cultural barriers in schools with high rates of poverty, as well as teachers' choices to work closer to home or in higher-performing schools. In some areas black teachers are also leaving the profession, resulting in teacher shortages.[47]

Education conservatives argue that any apparent separation of races is due to patterns of residential demographics not due to court decisions. They argue that the Brown decision has been achieved and that there is no segregation in the way that existed before the ruling. They further argue that employing race to impose desegregation policies discriminates and violates Brown ' s central warning of using racial preferences.[1]

See also [ edit ] Civil rights movement in Omaha, NebraskaMilliken v. BradleyMorgan v. HenniganSchool segregation in the United StatesReferences [ edit ] ^ a b c Jost, Kenneth (April 23, 2004). "School Desegregation". CQ Researcher. 14 (15): 345''372. ^ a b c d Patterson, James (2001). Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (Pivotal Moments in American History). USA: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-515632-3. ^ Theoharis, George (October 23, 2015). " ' Forced busing' didn't fail. Desegregation is the best way to improve our schools". The Washington Post . Retrieved January 15, 2019 . ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa ab ac Frum, David (2000). How We Got Here: The '70s. New York, New York: Basic Books. pp. 252''264. ISBN 0-465-04195-7. ^ Jost, K (April 23, 2004). "School Desegregation". CQ Researcher. 14 (15): 345''372. ^ Morgan v. Hennigan 1974 ^ "Walking into History: The Beginning of School Desegregation in Nashville". ^ Jost, K. (April 23, 2004). "School Desegregation". CQ Researcher. 14 (15): 345''372. ^ Jost, Kenneth (2007). "Racial Diversity in Public Schools". CQ Researcher. 17 (32): 745''767. ^ Kiviat, Barbara J. (2000) "The Social Side of Schooling", Johns Hopkins Magazine, April 2000, accessed 30 December 2008. ^ Hanushek, Eric A. (1998), "Conclusions and Controversies about the Effectiveness of School Resources", Economic Policy Review, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 4(1): pp. 11-27, accessed 30 December 2008 ^ McMillen, Neil R. (1971). The Citizen's Council: Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction, 1954''1964. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. p. 301. ISBN 0-252-00177-X. ^ Viser, Matt (7 March 2019). "Biden's tough talk on 1970s school desegregation plan could get new scrutiny in today's Democratic Party". The Washington Post . Retrieved 12 April 2019 . [Biden] added, ''I don't feel responsible for the sins of my father and grandfather. I feel responsible for what the situation is today, for the sins of my own generation. And I'll be damned if I feel responsible to pay for what happened 300 years ago.'' ^ SOKOL, JASON (4 August 2015). "How a Young Joe Biden Turned Liberals Against Integration". Politico . Retrieved 12 April 2019 . Biden called busing ''a liberal train wreck.'' ^ SMITH, ASHER (11 April 2019). "JOE BIDEN'S RECORD ON RACIAL INTEGRATION IS INDEFENSIBLE". Current Affairs . Retrieved 12 April 2019 . the bill required judges to tailor their court orders to remedy only the adverse effects of existing segregation, i.e. it prevented judges from ordering wider busing to achieve actually-integrated districts ^ Zeleny, Jeff (11 April 2019). "Letters from Joe Biden reveal how he sought support of segregationists in fight against busing". CNN . Retrieved 12 April 2019 . My bill strikes at the heart of the injustice of court-ordered busing. It prohibits the federal courts from disrupting our educational system in the name of the constitution where there is no evidence that the governmental officials intended to discriminate," Biden wrote to fellow senators on March 25, 1977. "I believe there is a growing sentiment in the Congress to curb unnecessary busing. ^ Jeff Zeleny (11 April 2019). "Joe Biden: Letters reveal how he sought support of segregationists in fight against busing". MSN News . Retrieved 12 April 2019 . Two weeks later, Biden followed up with a note to Eastland "to thank you again for your efforts in support of my bill to limit court ordered busing." ^ BEN MATHIS-LILLEY (11 April 2019). "Biden Praises Jeb Bush as Old Letters Show He Sought Support From Famous Segregationist". Slate . Retrieved 12 April 2019 . Wrote Biden to Eastland: ''My bill strikes at the heart of the injustice of court-ordered busing.'' ^ Orfield, G. & Lee, C. (2007). Historic reversals, accelerating resegregation, and the need for new integration strategies. Los Angeles: The Civil Rights Project. ^ "Brennan Center for Justice". ^ Orfield, G (2009). Reviving the goal of an integrated society: A 21st century challenge. Los Angeles: The Civil Rights Project. p. 4. ^ Administrator (2014-07-02). "Public Opinion on Civil Rights: Reflections on the Civil Rights Act of 1964". Roper Center . Retrieved 2019-01-15 . ^ Woodward, Jennifer R. (Winter 2011). "How Busing Burdened Blacks: Critical Race Theory and Busing for Desegregation in Nashville-Davidson County". The Journal of Negro Education. 80 (1): 22''32. JSTOR 41341103. ^ Frum, David (2000). How We Got Here: The '70s. New York: Basic Books. p. 265. ISBN 978-0-465-04195-4. ^ "North Carolina Education", Adversity.net. Retrieved on June 28, 2007. ^ Orfield, Gary; Franklin Monfort (1992). Status of School Desegregation: The Next Generation. Alexandria, VA: National School Boards Association. ISBN 978-0-88364-174-3. ^ Michael R. Olneck and Marvin Lazerson, "Education" pp. 313, 317, in "Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups", ed. Stephan Thernstrom, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1980 ^ Rivkin, Steven G., and Finis Welch. 2006. "Has school desegregation improved academic and economic outcomes for blacks?" In Handbook of the Economics of Education, edited by Eric A. Hanushek and Finis Welch. Amsterdam: North Holland: 1019''1049. ^ Eric A. Hanushek, John F. Kain, and Steve G. Rivkin. 2009. "New evidence about Brown v. Board of Education: The complex effects of school racial composition on achievement", Journal of Labor Economics, 27, no. 3 (July): 349-383. ^ Eric A. Hanushek, and Steven G. Rivkin. 2009. "Harming the best: How schools affect the black-white achievement gap", Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 28, no. 3 (Summer): 366-393. ^ Fox, Margalite (January 27, 2012). "Kevin H. White, Mayor Who Led Boston in Busing Crisis, Dies at 82". The New York Times . Retrieved January 29, 2010 . ^ Massachusetts Commission on Civil Rights, "The Six-District Plan: Integration of the Springfield, Mass., Elementary Schools", University of Maryland Law School Library, pp.1-50. ^ a b Matthew, Ronan, A History of the Las Vegas School Desegregation Case: Kelly et al. v. Clark County School District (Las Vegas: UNLV, 1998), pp. 28, 33, 94. ^ Crawford v. Board of Ed. of Los Angeles 458 U.S. 527 (1982) ^ Crawford v. Board of Educ. of the City of Los Angeles, 200 Cal. App. 3d 1397, 1402 (1988). ^ Bustop, Inc. v. Los Angeles Bd. of Ed., 439 U.S. 1380 (1978) ^ David S. Ettinger, "The Quest to DESEGREGATE Los Angeles Schools Archived 2008-02-28 at the Wayback Machine", Los Angeles Lawyer, March 2003 ^ Richard A. Pride and J. David Woodard, The Burden of Busing: The Politics of Desegregation in Nashville, Tennessee, University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville: 1985. ^ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2007-06-16 . Retrieved 2007-01-07 . CS1 maint: Archived copy as title (link) ^ http://www.richmond.com/news/latest-news/report-schools-segregation-by-race-income-worsening/article_a05050c1-9ea8-5ebd-b00a-239aab565e7f.html ^ "School Busing - The Civil Rights Movement in Virginia", Virginia Historical Society ^ Samuel B. Hoff, "Delaware's Constitution and Its Impact on Education" ^ iccjournal.biz ^ Kozol, J. "Overcoming Apartheid", The Nation, December 19, 2005. Retrieved April 11, 2017 ^ Johnson, T. A. (2009-02-03) "African American Administration of Predominately Black Schools: Segregation or Emancipation in Omaha, Nebraska", Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association for the Study of Black Life and History in Charlotte, NC. ^ "Law to Segregate Omaha Schools Divides Nebraska", The New York Times. April 15, 2006. Retrieved April 12, 2009. ^ Jonnson, P. (January 21, 2003) "White teachers flee black schools", Christian Science Monitor. Retrieved 4/12/09. Further reading [ edit ] David S. Ettinger, "The Quest to Desegregate Los Angeles Schools," Los Angeles Lawyer, vol. 26 (March 2003).Brian Daugherity and Charles Bolton (eds.), With All Deliberate Speed: Implementing Brown v. Board of Education. Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 2008. ISBN 1-557-28868-2.Tracy E. K'Meyer, From Brown to Meredith: The Long Struggle in School Desegregation in Louisville, Kentucky, 1954-2007. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. ISBN 1-469-60708-5.Matthew Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-691-09255-9.J. Anthony Lukas, Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985. ISBN 0-394-41151-1.Lillian B. Rubin, Busing and Backlash: White Against White in an Urban School District. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1972. ISBN 0-520-02198-3.Amy Stuart Wells, Both Sides Now: The Story of School Desegregation's Graduates. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009. ISBN 0-520-25677-8.External links [ edit ] The Legacy of School Busing NPRMoney And School Performance: Lessons from the Kansas City Desegregation Experiment by Paul Ciotti. Policy Analysis, CATO Institute.A Boston judge's experiment in social engineering has unraveled neighborhoods and frustrated black achievement. Hoover Institution.25 Years of Forced Busing. Good Riddance to a Bad Idea, at Adversity.netJohn Joseph Moakley Oral History Project, Garrity Decision Oral History Interviews. Suffolk University Archives; Boston, MA.The Freedom House, Inc. records 1941''1996 (M16) are available at Northeastern University Libraries, Archives and Special Collections Department.The Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity records 1961''2005 (M101) are available at Northeastern University Libraries, Archives and Special Collections Department.Digitized primary sources related to busing for school desegregation in Boston from various libraries and archives are available via Digital Commonwealth.Busing in Boston: A research guide. Moakley Archive & Institute, Suffolk University.

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Archived Version

Fri, 28 Jun 2019 11:04

Senate Democrats are not fans of legislation on reparations for slavery, which has become a hot topic in the 2020 presidential campaign.

Democratic lawmakers acknowledge that slavery is a terrible stain on the nation's history and that African Americans were subjected to unjust and racist laws for decades after abolition.

But the question of figuring out who should pay for economic harm accrued over hundreds of years is a political land mine.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein Dianne Emiel FeinsteinSenate Democrats wish talk on reparations would go away Democratic senator introduces bill to ban gun silencers Negotiators face major obstacles to meeting July border deadline MORE (Calif.), the senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said she understands why some thought leaders, such as author Ta-Nehisi Coates, are calling for reparations, but warned the issue is divisive.

''I understand why. I also understand the wound that it opens and the trials and tribulations it's going to bring about. Some things are just better left alone and I think that's one of those things,'' she said.

''This is a major blemish on American democracy that has lasted for over 100 years now,'' she said of slavery and discriminatory laws that followed the Civil War. ''It's not going to change and we have to learn from it and I think we have.''

Many Democrats don't want to talk about whether reparations should be considered.

''No comment,'' said Sen. Jack Reed John (Jack) Francis ReedSenate Democrats wish talk on reparations would go away Trump urged to quickly fill Pentagon post amid Iran tensions Overnight Defense: Shanahan exit shocks Washington | Pentagon left rudderless | Lawmakers want answers on Mideast troop deployment | Senate could vote on Saudi arms deal this week | Pompeo says Trump doesn't want war with Iran MORE (D-R.I.), who punctuated his answer with a slice of his hand.

Sen. Ron Wyden Ronald (Ron) Lee WydenSenate Democrats wish talk on reparations would go away Overnight Health Care '-- Sponsored by Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids '-- Senate panel advances bipartisan package on health costs | Grassley, Wyden in talks on deal to limit drug price increases | Court asks if blue states have standing in ObamaCare suit Senate passes .5B border bill, setting up fight with House MORE (D-Ore.) said he was too busy to weigh in on the complex topic.

''I can't deal with a big issue when I'm on the fly,'' he said as he hustled to a meeting in the Capitol.

Sen. Patrick Leahy Patrick Joseph LeahyTop Democrat urges Pelosi to take Senate border bill Political interference at DOJ threatens the rule of law, and Congress needs to act Senate Democrats wish talk on reparations would go away MORE (D-Vt.) said ''I saw something in the press about it. I haven't even looked at it.''

''I'll be happy to look at it,'' he added.

Support for reparations has steadily grown since June 2014 when Coates, as a writer for The Atlantic magazine, wrote his landmark essay: ''The Case for Reparations.''

The subject gained more prominence last week when Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee Sheila Jackson LeeSenate Democrats wish talk on reparations would go away O'Rourke: Cash reparations policy 'stops the conversation' on the issue EXCLUSIVE: Trump on reparations: 'I don't see it happening' MORE (D-Texas), a member of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and sponsor of the House reparations measure, held a hearing on reparations at which Coates testified.

On the campaign trail, Sen. Cory Booker Cory Anthony BookerTrump campaign manager gloats after Biden-Harris exchange during Democrats' debate Buttigieg opens second night of Democratic debate with first answer in Spanish Warren, Booker, Castro see favorability jump after first Democratic debate: poll MORE (D-N.J.) has spearheaded the push for reparations. He is the sponsor of the Senate bill that would set up a commission to study the impact of slavery and discrimination against African Americans and make recommendations on reparation proposals to the descendants of slaves.

Booker's bill has 14 Senate co-sponsors, including five presidential hopefuls: Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand Kirsten Elizabeth GillibrandDemocrats whack Trump in second debate Sanders, Harris, Biden only Dem debaters to favor eliminating private health insurance Live coverage: 2020 candidates face off in second night of Democratic debates MORE (D-N.Y.), Kamala Harris Kamala Devi HarrisHarris spikes in Google search after Biden confrontation Trump campaign manager gloats after Biden-Harris exchange during Democrats' debate Harris attacks Biden's record on civil rights in debate MORE (D-Calif.), Elizabeth Warren Elizabeth Ann WarrenSanders, Harris, Biden only Dem debaters to favor eliminating private health insurance Overnight Health Care '-- Sponsored by Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids '-- What to watch for in tonight's debate | Warren uses debate stage to embrace 'Medicare for All' | Gottlieb elected to Pfizer board | Democrats investigate Trump Medicaid changes Warren, Booker, Castro see favorability jump after first Democratic debate: poll MORE (D-Mass.), Bernie Sanders Bernie SandersBernie Sanders says he would move to 'rotate' Supreme Court justices if elected Delaney mocks Democrats at second debate: 'These people are terrible at interrupting' Trump comments on Democratic debates during G-20 meeting with Merkel MORE (I-Vt.) and Michael Bennet Michael Farrand BennetDem candidates rip Trump on China ahead of crucial trade summit Democrats whack Trump in second debate Michael Bennet taken by surprise with debate question: 'Was that directed to me?' MORE (D-Colo.).

But many other Democrats are keeping their distance.

''I haven't seen it and I don't have any opinion about it,'' Sen. Bob Menendez Robert (Bob) MenendezSenate passes .5B border bill, setting up fight with House Senate to vote on blocking Trump's Saudi arms deal as soon as this week There is a severe physician shortage and it will only worsen MORE (D-N.J.) said of Booker's legislation.

Other Democrats say they need to learn more about it.

''Still learning about it but open to the idea, certainly. I find Cory to be one of the more thoughtful people I've ever known,'' said Sen. Martin Heinrich Martin Trevor HeinrichSenate Democrats wish talk on reparations would go away Overnight Energy: Democrats ask if EPA chief misled on vehicle emissions | Dem senators want NBC debate focused on climate change | 2020 hopeful John Delaney unveils T climate plan Democratic senators want NBC primary debate to focus on climate change MORE (D-N.M.).

Sen. Mark Warner Mark Robert WarnerHouse passes sweeping Democrat-backed election security bill Senate Democrats wish talk on reparations would go away Pelosi: Congress will receive election security briefing in July MORE (D-Va.) said of Booker's bill, ''I'm looking at the legislation [on setting up a commission] but have not taken a position on it.''

One Democratic senator said reparations is one more issue getting touted on the campaign trail that Republicans will likely use as ammunition against other Democratic candidates in 2020, along with proposals such as ''Medicare for All,'' the Green New Deal and free college education.

The lawmaker, who requested anonymity, said Democrats would be better off focusing on topics that unite voters and where they have an advantage over Republicans, like protecting people with pre-existing medical conditions.

''In a presidential campaign where people are eyeing different constituencies based on where they're trying to run and where they're trying to do well and break through the pack, that makes a lot of sense. I don't think that has much of a chance in the Congress we're in,'' said the senator.

''If you're just talking presidential Democratic primaries, there's interest in these issues and hearing it explained. When you start getting into specific Senate races, I don't know how that helps, the contrast of a presidential candidate being for something and a Democratic Senate candidate not taking a position,'' the lawmaker said, adding that Republican Senate candidates are going to ''have a lot of issues like that'' to pull from the presidential race.

The lawmaker expressed concern that with more than 20 candidates running for the Democratic nomination, the party's message is going to be all over the place.

''Central for us is trying to get one message and be disciplined, because the president is going to be incredibly disciplined,'' the senator said. ''They're starting messaging on things they haven't even accomplished but making it sound like they accomplished things.''

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell Addison (Mitch) Mitchell McConnellProgressives, centrists in open warfare after House caves on Trump border bill Senate set to vote on Trump's power to attack Iran On The Money: House sends Trump border aid bill after Pelosi caves | McConnell dismisses one-year stopgap floated by White House | Mnuchin pushing Trump to put Secret Service under Treasury control MORE (R-Ky.) says his strategy to keep GOP control of the Senate is to tie Democratic candidates to liberal proposals being pushed by Harris, Booker, Warren, Sanders and other White House hopefuls.

McConnell told reporters in April that Republicans need to say to voters, ''if you're uncomfortable with things like the Green New Deal and 'Medicare for None,' the best way to avoid that is to have a Republican Senate.''

McConnell last week dismissed reparations as unworkable.

''I don't think reparations for something that happened 150 years ago, for whom none of us currently living are responsible, is a good idea,'' he said.

It's a good issue for Republicans because it unites the GOP and divides Democrats.

Sen. Tim Scott Timothy (Tim) Eugene ScottSenate Democrats wish talk on reparations would go away The Hill's Morning Report - Democrats frustrated by Hope Hicks's silence Only black GOP senator Tim Scott calls reparations a 'non-starter' MORE (R-S.C.), the only African American Republican in the Senate, last week dismissed reparations as a ''non-starter.''

In an interview with The Hill this week, President Trump Donald John TrumpTrump campaign manager gloats after Biden-Harris exchange during Democrats' debate Biden pushes back on Obama's climate record Dem candidates rip Trump on China ahead of crucial trade summit MORE indicated he's not in favor of reparations.

''I think it's a very unusual thing,'' Trump said of the possibility of reparations. ''You have a lot of '-- it's been a very interesting debate. I don't see it happening, no.''

National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman Todd Young Todd Christopher YoungSenate Democrats wish talk on reparations would go away Overnight Defense: Officials brief Congress after Iran shoots down drone | Lawmakers fear 'grave situation' | Trump warns Iran | Senate votes to block Saudi arms sales | Bombshell confession at Navy SEAL's murder trial The 7 GOP senators who voted to block all or part of Trump's Saudi arms sale MORE (Ind.) said reparations is targeted squarely at the most liberal voters.

''I think it will excite the far left of the Democratic Party, which is exactly what it's designed to do,'' he said.

Sen. Christopher Coons Christopher (Chris) Andrew CoonsDemocrats want White House hopefuls to cool it on Biden attacks Senators revive effort to create McCain human rights commission Senate Dem to reintroduce bill with new name after 'My Little Pony' confusion MORE (D-Del.), a co-sponsor of Booker's bill on reparations, said slavery ''has left a long and real and lasting impact'' that needs to be addressed.

But he also acknowledged ''there are real complexities around confronting this issue.''

''Figuring out a viable path forward in terms of who would be compensated and how and from what source of funding is a very thorny question,'' he said.

Pre-Trump Terrorism videos

Cambridge Analytic and Privacy

Now Trump is fucking with their revenue

Link to Article

Archived Version

Sun, 30 Jun 2019 11:11

Want personalized recommendations?Join TED Recommends and get the perfect ideas selected just for you.

Get startedLanguage SelectorTED.com translations are made possible by volunteertranslators. Learn more about theOpen Translation Project.

I write you to fill you in on somethings I thought both of you might find

informative from an industry and part of the country you don't hear much from

on the news. Should you choose to mention any of this on the show please keep

me anonymous or call me the social media spy. I also apologize for the length

of this email. I have been meaning to write in for years.

I have worked in the insurance industry for over a decade, about five or six

years ago the company I work for started a program based on a product being

offered by the private investigation companies we use to find fraudulent

claims. Companies started offering a social media search on our claimants.

These searches cost 300 to 500 bucks per search. Some bigwigs tried out the

service but it was quite clear PI's were using interns with 5 minutes to type a

few names into Google then send the search results. It was clearly a fucking

joke to charge us extra. A manager where I work came up with the idea of us

doing this sort of research in house. We have lists of people's names,

dependants, addresses as well as medical info, all legally received with HIPPA

authorization. They figured we might find fraudulent claims without needing

PIs. The program was a hit. The first year we save the company over 10 million

in fraudulent payouts.

So for the last 5 or 6 years I have been, what my wife jokes, a "professional

Facebook stalker." There is not a huge amount of fraudulent claims but

when the happen the money in them is usually significant. We estimate about a half

to one percent of claims are fraud.

We do all this legally with publicly posted info online. I have caught doctors

selling drugs illegally, people claiming they are sick but opening businesses,

all the way to people having their wives or husbands calling us and sending

fake medical records.

Second, YouTube used to let us pull videos that claimants posted publicly of them doing

things they clearly shouldn't be able to do. Example, someone claims they have

a bad back but has several videos of themselves water skiing or lifting 50

pound bags of dirt. In the past year we had to stop doing that, YouTube

actually threatened to block us and possibly Sue us because they claim that

violates a recent update in their terms of service. We can get away with

screenshots and links back to video if nessesary.

Third, Facebook is in more trouble than the public knows or is being reported. Try

searching for your friends and family on Facebook recently. It is almost

impossible to narrow down to someone in a large city or has a common name.

Facebook used to have something called Graph Search. It was a back end hidden

thing that would let you find useful info on just about anyone using the

service. Lots of outside companies, Pipl, Social Technology Corp, and others

were using this public info as a business model but Graph Search was taken away

in the past month under privacy concerns. Several years ago we used to also

find people using just an email address or a phone numbers but Facebook got rid

of that too for privacy concerns. Facebook has a real image problem both

publicly and business wise. As we do research on people, we are finding only

older folks are using Facebook, usually 45 to 65 to be exact. Usually people

that are not tech savvy. Younger people may have accounts and occasionally post

but the older people are the everyday users. Like Twitter everything is just an

echo chamber of reposts and politics. People are not using these services to

communicate anymore. They are quickly becoming the new AOL.

From industry articles I have read this graph Search being removed has some big

problems. Facebook sold itself to college researchers, businesses, medical

companies as giving them publicly available data so they could do studies as other

papers. With it now gone people a scattering like cockroaches to find other

vendors of this data. The thought is that Facebook will come back with the

service again in a few months but now charge for entry. It won't make them any

money, I can guarantee that right now.

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Archived Version

Sun, 30 Jun 2019 12:02

Authored by Dagny Taggart via Our Organic Prepper blog,

In these Orwellian times, when it is revealed that yet another government agency is spying on us in yet another way, most of us aren't one bit surprised. Being surveilled nearly everywhere we go (and even in our own homes) has become the norm, unfortunately.

Yesterday, it was revealed that the NSA improperly collected Americans' call and text logs in November 2017 and in February and October 2018 '' just months after the agency claimed it was going to delete the 620 million-plus call detail records it already had stockpiled.

But this article isn't about that.

It is about something far more insidious.

When it comes to spying on people, the government has competition.The Chinese government is currently implementing a social credit system to monitor its 1.3 billion citizens (China already has 200 million public surveillance cameras). Facial recognition technology and personal data from cell phones and digital transactions are being used to collect intimate details about people's lives, including their purchasing habits and whom they socialize with.

The gathered data is used to create mandatory social credit ratings for every citizen. These ratings will score citizens' ''general worthiness'' and provide those with higher scores opportunities like access to jobs, loans, and travel. Those with lower scores will not have access to those opportunities.

While the United States government has yet to implement such a system, companies in the country are, reports The Hill:

Consumer advocates are pushing regulators to investigate what they paint as a shadowy online practice where retailers use consumer information collected by data brokers to decide how much to charge individual customers or the quality of service they'll offer.

#REPRESENT, a public interest group run by the Consumer Education Foundation in California, filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on Monday asking the agency to investigate what the group is calling ''surveillance scoring'' of customers' financial status or creditworthiness. (source)

Companies are using Secret Surveillance Scores to evaluate you.The opening paragraphs of the 38-page complaint are chilling:

Major American corporations, including online and retail businesses, employers and landlords are using Secret Surveillance Scores to charge some people higher prices for the same product than others, to provide some people with better customer services than others, to deny some consumers the right to purchase services or buy or return products while allowing others to do so and even to deny people housing and jobs.

The Secret Surveillance Scores are generated by a shadowy group of privacy-busting firms that operate in dark recesses of the American marketplace. They collect thousands or even tens of thousands of intimate details of each person's life '' enough information, it is thought, to literally predetermine a person's behavior '' either directly or through data brokers. Then, in what is euphemistically referred to as ''data analytics,'' the firms' engineers write software algorithms that instruct computers to parse a person's data trail and develop a digital ''mug shot.'' Eventually, that individual profile is reduced to a number '' the score '' and transmitted to corporate clients looking for ways to take advantage of, or even avoid, the consumer. The scoring system is automatic and instantaneous. None of this is disclosed to the consumer: the existence of the algorithm, the application of the Surveillance Score or even that they have become the victim of a technological scheme that just a few years ago would appear only in a dystopian science fiction novel. (source)

These scores are used to discriminate based on income.Written by lawyers Laura Antonini, the policy director of the Consumer Education Foundation, and Harvey Rosenfield, who leads the foundation, the complaint highlights four areas in which companies are using surveillance scoring: pricing, customer service, fraud prevention, and housing and employment.

''This is a way for companies to discriminate against users based on income and wealth,'' Antonini told The Hill.

''It can range from monetary harm or basic necessities of life that you're not getting.''

Antonini and Rosenfield argue that the practices outlined in the complaint are illegal '' and that consumers are largely unaware that they're being secretly evaluated in ways that can influence how much they pay online.

''The ability of corporations to target, manipulate and discriminate against Americans is unprecedented and inconsistent with the principles of competition and free markets,'' the complaint reads. ''Surveillance scoring promotes inequality by empowering companies to decide which consumers they want to do business with and on what terms, weeding out the people who they deem less valuable. Such discrimination is as much a threat to democracy as it is to a free market.''

Stores are using this scoring system to charge you higher prices.Here's more detail, from The Hill:

The filing points to a 2014 Northeastern University study exploring the ways that companies like Home Depot and Walmart use consumer data to customize prices for different customers. Rosenfield and Antonini replicated the study using an online tool that compares prices that they're charged on their own computers with their own data profiles versus the prices charged to a user browsing sites through an anonymized computer server with no data history.

What they found was that Walmart and Home Depot were offering lower prices on a number of products to the anonymous computer. In the search results for ''white paint'' on Home Depot's website, Rosenfield and Antonini were seeing higher prices for six of the first 24 items that popped up.

In one example, a five-gallon tub of Glidden premium exterior paint would have cost them $119 compared with $101 for the anonymous computer.

A similar pattern emerged on Walmart's website. The two lawyers found the site was charging them more on a variety of items compared with the anonymous web tool, including paper towels, highlighters, pens and paint.

One paper towel holder cost $10 less for the blank web user. (source)

To see screenshots of different ''personalized'' prices shown for items from Home Depot and Walmart, please see pages 12-16 of the complaint. The examples presented demonstrate just how much these inflated prices for common household goods can really add up.

The travel industry is particularly sneaky.A few days ago, we reported on hidden fees that could be costing you big bucks. The travel industry is a particularly large offender when it comes to sneaky fees, and they are also implicated in this scheme:

Travelocity. Software developer Christian Bennefeld, founder of etracker.com and eBlocker.com, did a sample search for hotel rooms in Paris on Travelocity in 2017 using his eBlocker device, which ''allows him to act as if he were searching from two different'' computers. Bennefeld found that when he performed the two searches at the same time, there was a $23 difference in Travelocity's prices for the Hotel Le Six in Paris.

CheapTickets. The Northeastern Price Discrimination Study found that the online bargain travel site CheapTickets offers reduced prices on hotels to consumers who are logged into an account with CheapTickets, compared to those who proceed as ''guests.'' We performed our own search of airfares on CheapTickets without being logged in. We searched for flights from LAX to Las Vegas for April 5 through April 8, 2019. Our searches produced identical flight results in the same order, but Mr. Rosenfield's prices were all quoted at three dollars higher than Ms. Antonini's.

Other travel websites. The Northeastern Price Discrimination Study found that Orbitz also offers reduced prices on hotels to consumers who were logged into an account (Orbitz has been accused of quoting higher prices to Mac users versus PC users because Mac users have a higher household income); Expedia and Hotels.com steer a subset of users toward more expensive hotels; and Priceline acknowledges it ''personalizes search results based on a user's history of clicks and purchases. (source)

There is an industry that exists to evaluate you and sell your data to companies.The complaint also describes an industry that offers retailers evaluations of their customers' ''trustworthiness'' to determine whether they are a potential risk for fraudulent returns. One such firm '' called Sift '' offers these evaluations to major companies like Starbucks and Airbnb. Sift boasts on its website that it can tailor ''user experiences based on 16,000+ real-time signals '' putting good customers in the express lane and stopping bad customers from reaching the checkout.''

The Hill contacted Sift for comment, and the company was not able to respond. But, back in April, a Sift spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal that it rates customers on a scale of 0 to 100, likening it to a credit score for trustworthiness.

While credit scores can wreak havoc on a person's ability to make big purchases (and sometimes, gain employment), they at least are transparent. Surveillance scoring is not. There is NO transparency for consumers, and Rosenfield and Antonini argue that companies are using them to engage in illegal discrimination while users have little recourse to correct false information about them or challenge their ratings.

We are being spied on and scored on a wide variety of factors.''In the World Privacy Forum's landmark study ''The Scoring of America: How Secret Consumer Scores Threaten Your Privacy and Future,'' authors Pam Dixon and Bob Gellman identified approximately 44 scores currently used to predict the actions of consumers,'' the complaint explains:

These include:

The Medication Adherence Score, which predicts whether a consumer is likely to follow a medication regimen;

The Health Risk Score, which predicts how much a specific patient will cost an insurance company;

The Consumer Profitability Score, which predicts which households may be profitable for a company and hence desirable customers;

The Job Security score, which predicts a person's future income and ability to pay for things;

The Churn Score, which predicts whether a consumer is likely to move her business to another company;

The Discretionary Spending Index, which scores how much extra cash a particular consumer might be able to spend on non-necessities;

The Invitation to Apply Score, which predicts how likely a consumer is to respond to a sales offer;

The Charitable Donor Score, which predicts how likely a household is to make significant charitable donations;

The Pregnancy Predictor Score, which predicts the likelihood of someone getting pregnant. (source)

The government isn't doing anything to stop these practices.Back in 2014, the Federal Trade Commission held a workshop on a practice they call ''predictive scoring'' but the agency has done little since to reign in the practice. Antonini said that their complaint is pushing the agency to reexamine the industry and investigate whether it violates laws against unfair and deceptive business practices, according to The Hill:

''It's far, far worse than when they looked at it in 2014,'' she said. ''There's an exponentially larger amount of data that's being collected about the American public that's in the hands of data brokers and companies. Their ability to process that data and write algorithms have also improved exponentially.'' (source)

We seem to be past the point of expecting our data to remain private, The Introduction to the complaint begins with a passage that sums up reality for us now:

This Petition does not ask the Commission to investigate the collection of Americans' personal information. The battle over whether Americans' personal data can be collected is over, and, as of this moment at least, consumers have lost. Consumers are now victims of an unavoidable corporate surveillance capitalism.

Rather, this Petition highlights a disturbing evolution in how consumers' data is deployed against them. (source)

We can't go anywhere without being surveilled now.It is now impossible to shop in any large chain stores without being spied on. Stores are starting to use ''smart coolers'', which are refrigerators equipped with cameras that scan shoppers' faces and make inferences on their age and gender. And, a recent article from Futurism describes how security cameras are no longer being used solely to reduce theft:

''Instead of just keeping track of who's in a store, surveillance systems could use facial recognition to determine peoples' identities and gathering even more information about them. That data would then be out there, with no opportunity to opt out. (source)

A new ACLU report titled ''The Dawn of Robot Surveillance'' describes how emerging AI technology enables security companies to constantly monitor and collect data about people.

''Growth in the use and effectiveness of artificial intelligence techniques has been so rapid that people haven't had time to assimilate a new understanding of what is being done, and what the consequences of data collection and privacy invasions can be,'' the report concludes.

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Sat, 29 Jun 2019 13:00

Since reading David Wallace Wells'

''The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming'' earlier this year, followed by some deep discussions on the issue of climate change with my friend and colleague

Adam Aron from UCSD, I no longer feel we can just sit back and hope someone else will fix the problem. And it's becoming increasingly clear that if we as individuals want to do something about climate change, changing our travel habits is probably the single most effective action we can take. Jack Miles made this case in his recent Washington Post article, "

For the love of Earth, stop traveling'':

According to former U.N. climate chief Christiana Figueres, we have only three years left in which to ''bend the emissions curve downward'' and forestall a terrifying cascade of climate-related catastrophes, much worse than what we're already experiencing. Realistically, is there anything that you or I can do as individuals to make a significant difference in the short time remaining?The answer is yes, and the good news is it won't cost us a penny. It will actually save us money, and we won't have to leave home to do it. Staying home, in fact, is the essence of making a big difference in a big hurry. That's because nothing that we do pumps carbon dioxide into the atmosphere faster than air travel. Cancel a couple long flights, and you can halve your carbon footprint. Schedule a couple, and you can double or triple it.I travel a lot - I have almost 1.3 million lifetime miles on United Airlines, and in the last few years have regularly flown over 100,000 miles per year. This travel has definitely helped advance my scientific career, and has been in many ways deeply fulfilling and enlightening. However, the toll has been weighing on me and Miles' article really pushed me over the edge towards action. I used the

Myclimate.org carbon footprint calculator to compute the environmental impact of my flights just for the first half of 2019, and it was mind-boggling: more than 23 tons of CO2. For comparison, my entire household's yearly carbon footprint (estimated using

https://www3.epa.gov/carbon-footprint-calculator/) is just over 10 tons!

For these reasons, I am committing to eliminate (to the greatest degree possible) academic air travel for the foreseeable future. That means no air travel for talks, conferences, or meetings -- instead participating by telepresence whenever possible. I am in a fortunate position, as a tenured faculty member who is already well connected within my field. By taking this action, I hope to help offset the travel impact of early career researchers and researchers from the developing world for whom air travel remains essential in order to get their research known and meet fellow researchers in their field. I wish that there was a better way to help early career researchers network without air travel, but I just haven't seen anything that works well without in-person contact. Hopefully the growing concern about conference travel will also help spur the development of more effective tools for virtual meetings.

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Sun, 30 Jun 2019 11:57

Adapted from ''SUPERPOWER: One Man's Quest to Transform American Energy'' by Wall Street Journal reporter Russell Gold, to be published by Simon & Schuster, Inc., on June 25.

When Michael Skelly first visited the Oklahoma panhandle in 2009, he gazed at a giant grid with squares of corn and grassland. There were few houses, one every mile or so. Half had been abandoned decades ago by homesteaders who gave up to the elements. This pancake-flat landscape, he thought, held the key to overturning one of the greatest misconceptions of the climate-change crisis.

For years, the wind and the sun were widely dismissed as niche sources of power that could never fill America's vast need for energy. But now the cost of solar and wind power had fallen so much that the U.S. could substantially reduce harmful emissions while also lowering the price of electricity. Put it all on a big enough grid, one that could use the ample sunshine from the desert Southwest to keep Atlanta's office towers cool, or the persistent wind in the Great Plains to run Midwestern factories, and you'd address the often-repeated critique of renewable energy: The sun isn't always shining and the wind isn't always blowing. On a big enough grid, that's not an issue. There is wind somewhere and the clouds don't cover the entire U.S.

In Oklahoma, Skelly knew the wind rarely stopped blowing. A midcentury travelogue joked that homes had a ''crowbar hole'...designed to check on the weather. You shove a crowbar through the hole: if it bends, the wind velocity outside is normal; if the bar breaks off, 'it is better to stay in the house.' ''

You could build renewable energy here, he thought, on a scale that could change the country and maybe even the planet.

There was a snag and it was a big one. We have 21st-century technology to produce the power, but we still have a 20th-century power grid that can't move it from the windy and sunny parts of the country to the urban markets. The American power grid isn't set up for it. It's old-fashioned and parochial when it needs to be continental and forward-looking. It's like the nation's roads before President Dwight D. Eisenhower championed the construction of the Interstate Highway System seven decades ago.

Like Eisenhower, Skelly had a plan: He wanted to begin building a new power grid that could carry inexpensive renewable electricity from places such as the Oklahoma panhandle to the east and west. An electricity superhighway that would save customers money while reducing pollution and carbon emissions. An interstate system for electrons.

Skelly had a history of getting things done. When he was in the Peace Corps in Costa Rica in the mid-1980s, he helped set up a microcredit program to let fishermen develop new markets for their catch. One lesson Skelly took from the project was the importance and influence of money. After getting a degree from Harvard Business School, he returned to Costa Rica in 1992, this time to build a tram to take tourists into the rain-forest canopy. He had never built anything before.

When he needed a heavy-lift helicopter to move the towers for the rain-forest tram, Skelly flew to neighboring Nicaragua and looked up a friend from Harvard, a former Sandinista guerrilla with connections to the head of the country's air force, Col. Manuel Salvatierra. Skelly parked himself in Salvatierra's office for a week until he had a deal to rent a military helicopter. It delivered the towers into the rain forest and the tram got built.

Renewables on the Grid

In 2000, Skelly moved to Houston for his first job in the wind industry, developing wind farms for what became Zilkha Renewable Energy. The industry was at the tail end of a lengthy metamorphosis. It went through decades of debacles'--wind turbines that broke down constantly and solar panels that produced ridiculously expensive electrons. But wind turbines had grown larger and more durable'--and their costs were falling. The solar industry had begun an era of globalized production that was driving down costs. Renewable energy was not just for dreamers who wore sandals. It was starting to attract Wall Street capital and be taken seriously.

At the same time, the operators of the nation's regional grids were moving cautiously. They worried that a sudden drop in wind could destabilize the grid. Slowly, they grew comfortable adding more renewable energy. In 2003, there were 1.2 gigawatts of wind power on the Texas power grid, offering roughly the equivalent amount of power as one of the two units at the South Texas Project, a nuclear plant near the Gulf of Mexico.

''I remember folks saying, at that point in time, that we would have to do some things radically different if we got about 15 gigawatts,'' said Dan Woodfin, the grid's senior director of system operations. But Texas reached 15 gigawatts, or 15,000 megawatts, in 2015, and the sky didn't fall. There are now more than 22,000 megawatts of wind and nearly 2,000 megawatts of solar on the Texas grid'--and the number keeps growing.

Other grid operators had similar experiences. Nick Brown, president of the Southwest Power Pool, the grid operator for several Great Plains states, testified before Congress a couple of years ago that his organization was handling 17,000 megawatts of wind without any issues. ''I will tell you as an engineer, with training in operations and planning, if you had asked me 10 years ago if we would have been able to reliably accommodate even half of that, I would have said no. Period. End of discussion,'' he said.

In the early 2000s, as chief development officer for Zilkha Renewable, Skelly helped plan and build wind farms from New York to Washington state. Zilkha Renewable grew quickly. In 2005, it was bought by Goldman Sachs , which sold it a couple of years later to Energias de Portugal SA for $2.15 billion, a handsome profit.

It was becoming clear that there was no shortage of wind, and that it was the grid that was the barrier to the dream of alternative energy. There was plenty of wind in the Great Plains and solar in the southwestern U.S., but that's not where demand for power was located. That power needed to be moved from one part of the country to another. For Skelly, the next adventure was tackling the grid itself.

He essentially wanted to build several long extension cords. One end would be plugged into the Oklahoma panhandle; the other end would reach east until it crossed the Mississippi River. As his plan took shape, the price of wind and solar generation kept falling to the point where it cost less than power generated by conventional coal or natural gas.

Academics were starting to ask what would happen if the U.S. added lots of low-cost renewable energy and managed to move it around. One 2016 study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's research laboratory concluded that by 2030, the U.S. could cut its carbon-dioxide emissions by 80%, using only existing technologies. And the cost of power wouldn't rise. In fact, it would be cheaper. That scenario didn't rely on some hoped-for storage breakthrough, just the construction of a network of transmission lines similar to Skelly's plans.

A different group of researchers, at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, examined whether it was even possible to run the U.S. on 30% renewable energy. (In 2016, wind and solar generated about 8% of electricity; now it's about 10.5%.) They built the largest and most sophisticated model of the U.S. electricity system on a supercomputer called Peregrine to find out. Their answer? It was both doable and wouldn't raise power prices or destabilize the grid. But to get the biggest carbon reduction and lowest generating cost, they, too, found that the U.S. needed to build a new overlay of transmission lines'--a system of moving large amounts of power from one point of the existing grid to another.

''We have put to bed the 'Is this possible?' question,'' said Aaron Bloom, who led the NREL researchers. Thirty percent was doable, they concluded. ''The question is 50% and beyond.''

Skelly figured that if he could build an Oklahoma-to-Tennessee line, the proof of concept would unlock more private investment. He co-founded Clean Line Energy Partners, secured institutional funding and set out to realize his vision.

Chickens and Eggs

He soon discovered hidden booby traps. One had been set all the way back in 1935 by a company then called Arkansas Power & Light . Back then, it found inexpensive sources of power'--waste steam from a lumber mill, for instance, or a seam of coal'--and constructed transmission lines to spread the electricity to nearby cities. As it expanded, Arkansas Power agreed to electrify the state's farming communities in exchange for a state-regulated monopoly franchise. Once secure, the company pushed for rules to ensure no one else could follow.

Skelly wanted to build a transmission line across Arkansas, but the rules required Clean Line to be a utility. However, to be a utility, it needed to own or operate power equipment. It was a Catch-22 of Arkansas Power's devising. The state had successfully dug a moat around the utility, and hadn't built a drawbridge. It was a ''chicken-and-egg paradox,'' in the words of a state regulator, one that would haunt Skelly and his colleagues for years.

Then there was the land issue. In a few places, Clean Line might need the federal government to use eminent domain to be able to build the transmission line. Some Arkansans weren't happy with that. Julie Morton, a former television weather reporter, wasn't interested in Skelly's arguments about national grids, reduced carbon emissions and low power prices. ''Arkies,'' she said, ''we're as poor as dirt, but we have land, and that is our core. When you start messing with that, you are messing with our heart and soul.'' She didn't want Skelly and Clean Line acquiring any right-of-way easements.

What started as an idea, with Skelly and a couple of others hunched over a kitchen table, soon grew into a company with dozens of employees. Skelly told them never to refer to the company as a startup. They would encounter powerful utilities and politicians in coming years, he said, and as Clean Line employees they needed to take themselves seriously.

The company made good progress. Clean Line gathered state approvals and prepared to file for a federal blessing. Fifteen wind developers expressed interest in building in the Oklahoma panhandle to deliver power on the proposed extension cord. Skelly approached the Tennessee Valley Authority, a federal power agency. In 2009, he told them he could deliver electricity at $70 a megawatt-hour. By 2014, wind technology had improved so quickly that he was talking to the TVA about $40. His offer price would soon be significantly cut again, to below what the TVA paid for coal power.

Skelly was regularly visiting TVA's headquarters and received a warm reception from the TVA head. Negotiations seemed to be going well. But the TVA was getting a decidedly different message from Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Republican who had a longstanding dislike for wind turbines. He had bought a vacation property on Nantucket Island, off the Massachusetts coast, in 2001. The week he closed on the property, news broke about Cape Wind, a plan to build 170 wind turbines in the middle of Nantucket Sound. A year later, after being elected to the U.S. Senate, he introduced a bill that would make life difficult for offshore wind developers. Over the next few years, he kept up his campaign against them. ''The windmills we are talking about today are not our grandmother's windmills,'' he warned. Sen. Alexander would make sure that Skelly and Clean Line didn't have it easy.

But as the months passed, Skelly and Clean Line made huge progress. The audacious plan to build the largest renewable-energy project in North America, and deliver it power-hungry customers in the southeast, was coming together.

The Week From Hell

Then, in February 2015, Arkansas's two Republican senators mounted an attack, initiating what came to be known around the Clean Line offices as ''the week from hell.''

Sens. John Boozman and Tom Cotton introduced a bill designed to make it impossible for Skelly to build a single transmission line. The senators said that while decisions of eminent domain were sometimes unavoidable when building power lines, they should be in the hands of local officials, not Washington bureaucrats. Sen. Boozman said he was hearing from constituents opposed to the line and wanted to give state officials a veto over it. ''We felt like it was important that they had a say in it,'' he said.

Skelly was trying to connect different grids and share power in a way that created stability and enabled clean, inexpensive power to flow across state lines. But while he was envisioning an interstate, the senators wanted to allow every state to put up roadblocks. Their legislation would require the federal government to get approval from the governor or public-service commission of each affected state before it could use eminent domain to build a transmission line with a private company.

A few days later, the Arkansas senators' proposed bill scared off a needed Clean Line investor. A couple of managers at New York private fund Global Infrastructure Partners called Skelly. ''They said to put the pencils down. We are done. This isn't going to work out,'' Skelly said. ''Investors hate regulatory risk. And we served up a plateful that week.''

Back in 1954, when President Eisenhower laid out his interstate plan in Detroit's Cadillac Square, he took off his hat and waved it. ''We are pushing ahead with a great road program,'' he told the crowd, ''a road program that will take this nation out of its antiquated shackles of secondary roads all over this country and give us the types of highways that we need.'' Within a few years, cars and trucks zipped without stop from state to state.

For Michael Skelly, it wouldn't quite turn out that way. He wasn't the president; he just had a big, bold idea. It was the type of infrastructure project that the U.S. struggles with, even when privately financed. Along the way, he found that the obstacles to a cleaner, cheaper electricity future have more to do with politics than technological limits.

With three senators speaking out against it, the project had a whiff that repelled investors. Another setback came in Missouri, where regulators blocked needed approvals to proceed with a separate transmission line there. But then a major victory in Washington: The Energy Department decided to participate in the project after years of deliberation.

Skelly expected to come to terms with landowners for at least 95% of the parcels. Eminent domain would be required for the rest. If he had been building a natural-gas pipeline, he would have finished the process in a matter of months.

He still needed the TVA to buy a portion of his wind power. Clean Line offered a 20-year deal at record-low prices. Bill Johnson, then the TVA's president, didn't show the deal to his board and said TVA's analysis showed that Clean Line didn't save the utility any money over the proposed contract. He declined to make the analysis available.

In the end, tantalizingly close to being built, Skelly's project stalled. In late 2017, Clean Line agreed to sell the Oklahoma portion of its project to Florida utility and power developer NextEra Energy. Other buyers snapped up other projects, which look likely to be built. The company Skelly had helped build would be stripped for parts like a car in a junkyard.

His vision of a supergrid of direct-current power lines zipping cheap energy around had faltered. Someone else would have to carry that project over the finish line.

In the months after the company folded, Skelly talked to various people about what he would do next. ''I am feeling a little heartbroken,'' he said.

'-- ''Superpower: One Man's Quest to Transform American Energy'' is based on more than 100 interviews and thousands of pages of documents.

Write to Russell Gold at russell.gold@wsj.com

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Sat, 29 Jun 2019 04:49

With the world waiting for the first headlines from the Trump-Xi meeting, the most important and unexpected news of the day hit moments ago, when Europe announced that the special trade channel, Instex, that will allow European firms to avoid SWIFT and bypass American sanctions on Iran, is now operational.

Following a meeting between the countries who singed the Iran nuclear deal, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which was ditched by US, French, British and German officials said the trade mechanism which was proposed last summer and called Instex, is now operational.

As a reminder, last September, in order to maintain a financial relationship with Iran that can not be vetoed by the US, Europe unveiled a "Special Purpose Vehicle" to bypass SWIFT. The mechanism would facilitate transactions between European and Iranian companies, while preventing the US from vetoing the transactions and pursuing punitive measures on those companies and states that defied Trump. The payment balancing system will allow companies in Europe to buy Iranian goods, and vice-versa, without actual money-transfers between European and Iranian banks.

The statement came after the remaining signatures of JCPOA gathered in Vienna for a meeting that Iranian ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi called "the last chance for the remaining parties...to gather and see how they can meet their commitments towards Iran."

European and Iranian officials attend a meeting of the JCPOA Joint Commission in Vienna, Austria, June 28, 2019 Until today, Tehran was skeptical about EU's commitment to the deal and threatened to exceed the maximum amount of enriched uranium allowed it by the deal after US had imposed a series of sanctions on the country.

Meanwhile, opponents of Instex - almost exclusively the US - have argued that the mechanism is flawed because the Iranian institution designated to work with Instex, the Special Trade and Finance Instrument, has shareholders with links to entities already facing sanctions from the U.S.

The announcement sent oil sharply lower, with crude futures falling about $1/bbl in closing minutes before settlement, extending daily loss, as it means Iran now has a fully functioning pathway to receive payment for oil it exports to anyone it chooses.

The announcement will likely send president Trump off the rails, because in late May Bloomberg reported that as part of Trump's escalating battle with "European allies" over the fate of the Iran nuclear accord, he was "threatening penalties against the financial body created by Germany, the U.K. and France to shield trade with the Islamic Republic from U.S. sanctions" including the loss of access to the US financial system.

According to Bloomberg, the Treasury Department's undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, Sigal Mandelker, sent a letter on May 7 warning that Instex, the European SPV to sustain trade with Tehran, and anyone associated with it could be barred from the U.S. financial system if it goes into effect.

''I urge you to carefully consider the potential sanctions exposure of Instex,'' Mandelker wrote in an ominous letter to Instex President Per Fischer. "Engaging in activities that run afoul of U.S. sanctions can result in severe consequences, including a loss of access to the U.S. financial system."

Germany, France and the U.K. finalized the Instex system in January, allowing companies to trade with Iran without the use of U.S. dollars or American banks, allowing them to get around wide-ranging U.S. sanctions that were imposed after the Trump administration abandoned the 2015 Iran nuclear deal last year.

''This is a shot across the bow of a European political establishment committed to using Instex and its sanctions-connected Iranian counterpart to circumvent U.S. measures,'' said Mark Dubowitz, the chief executive officer of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington.

Here is a simpler summary of what just happened: this was the first official shot across the bow of the USD status as a global reserve currency, and not by America's adversaries but by its closest allies. And once those who benefit the most from the status quo openly revolt against it, the countdown to the end of the USD reserve status officially begins.

* * *

When asked to comment on the letter, the Treasury Department issued a statement saying ''entities that transact in trade with the Iranian regime through any means may expose themselves to considerable sanctions risk, and Treasury intends to aggressively enforce our authorities.''

The US ire was sparked by the realization - and alarm - that cracks are appearing in the dollar's reserve status, opponents of Instex argue - at least for public consumption purposes - that the mechanism is flawed because the Iranian institution designated to work with Instex, the Special Trade and Finance Instrument, has shareholders with links to entities already facing sanctions from the U.S.

Separately, during a visit to London on May 8, Mike Pompeo also warned that there was no need for Instex because the U.S. allows for humanitarian and medical products to get into Iran without sanction.

''When transactions move beyond that, it doesn't matter what vehicle's out there, if the transaction is sanctionable, we will evaluate it, review it, and if appropriate, levy sanctions against those that were involved in that transaction,'' Pompeo said. ''It's very straightforward.''

In conclusion, one month ago we said that "In 2018, Europe made a huge stink about not being bound by Trump's unilateral breach of the Iranian deal, and said it would continue regardless of US threats. But now that the threats have clearly escalated, and Washington has made it clear it won't take no for an answer, it will be interesting to see if Europe's resolve to take on Trump - especially in light of the trade war with China - has fizzled. "

The answer, it appears is that Europe felt unexpectedly emboldened, just hours before Trump's meeting with Xi, and that it is ready and willing to call Trump's bluff; it goes without saying, that if the US does indeed retaliate and proceed with sanctions against European banks, than the global trade war is about to turn far, far uglier.

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Sat, 29 Jun 2019 04:49

BRUSSELS, June 28 (Reuters) - Britain, France and Germany have a special trade channel up and running with Iran that aims to circumvent U.S. economic sanctions, the EU said in a statement.

"France, Germany and the United Kingdom informed participants that INSTEX had been made operational and available to all EU Member States and that the first transactions are being processed," the EU said in a statement, referring to the channel's formal name.

Iran has also established an entity to trade with Europe, while some more EU countries are joining INSTEX as shareholders, the statement said, following talks between the remaining signatories to the Iran nuclear deal - Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany - after the United States pulled out.

(Reporting by Robin Emmott)

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Sat, 29 Jun 2019 04:48

SPV to facilitate non-dollar trade with Iran

The Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges (INSTEX) is a special-purpose vehicle (SPV) established in January 2019 by France, Germany and the United Kingdom to facilitate non-dollar trade with Iran.[1] The SPV is headquartered in Paris, France, and is headed by German national Per Fischer, who formerly served as Head of Financial Institutions at Commerzbank, between 2003 and 2014.[2]. As of May 2019, the use of the SPV is limited to humanitarian purposes; for example, the purchase of otherwise embargoed foods or medicines[3].

On 11 February 2019, Russian deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov said that Russia will seek to participate in INSTEX.[4]

On June 28, 2019, the EU released a statement stating that INSTEX has been made operational and that the first transactions are being processed.[5]

See also [ edit ] Central Bank of IranReferences [ edit ]

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Sat, 29 Jun 2019 16:05

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Sun, 30 Jun 2019 15:10

In every major city in America where carriers are rolling out 5G, there's someone like Keith Hubbard, manager of a 16-person fiber technician team for AT&T . His job: to set up shop in a trailer in the middle of a busy street, after other teams have already dug up the street or sidewalk and laid fiber-optic cable under it. On sweltering summer days in Atlanta, where his team is based, his technicians must perform surgery on a 1¼- inch bundle of glass fibers. In a typical cable there are 864 insulated strands, splayed out like a head of hair, and each is a high-bandwidth conduit to some business, home or cell tower. Cut the wrong strand, and people lose internet access.

Thousands of engineers and planners like Mr. Hubbard, along with diggers of trenches and installers of antennas, must coordinate to link more fiber-optic cable, in more places in the U.S. than ever before. All so we can do more stuff on mobile devices.

This is the paradox of 5G, the collection of technologies behind next-generation wireless networks: They require a gargantuan quantity of wires. This is because 5G requires many more small towers, all of which must be wired to the internet. The consequences of this unavoidable reality are myriad. The 5G build-out, which could take more than a decade, could disrupt our commutes, festoon nearly every city block with antennas, limit what cities can charge for renting spots on their infrastructure to carriers on which to place their antennas, and result in an unequal distribution of access to high-speed wireless, at least at first.

Of course, it's also a bonanza for the companies that supply this fiber-optic cable. Verizon announced a $1 billion purchase of fiber from Corning Inc. in spring 2017. This amounts to 12.5 million miles of cable a year'--enough to circle the Earth 500 times'--for three years, says a Verizon spokeswoman. And that's just Verizon's biggest fiber deal.

Buying the fiber is the easy part for the carriers. ''The secret nobody likes to talk about is when you're deploying a network, the equipment'--fiber, cable'--is actually a small cost compared to the cost of digging holes,'' says Claudio Mazzali, senior vice president of technology at Corning Optical Communications, a subsidiary of Corning. That high cost also includes getting city permits, striking deals with landowners and installing the antennas themselves.

In a 2017 report, Deloitte Consulting LLP principal Dan Littmann estimated that it will take combined carrier spending of between $130 billion and $150 billion in order for most Americans'--including those in rural areas'--to have a choice of providers of high-speed broadband and 5G wireless.

The level of investment required to achieve widespread 5G has also been used, by Federal Communications Commission chief Ajit Pai and others, to argue for the necessity of a merger between Sprint and T-Mobile. (Sprint's CEO, meanwhile, has argued that the company's 5G technology and rollout is perfectly fine on its own, while T-Mobile's CEO insists the two companies will be stronger together.)

Marachel Knight, the senior vice president in charge of rolling out 5G at AT&T, says her company estimates it will take a decade to completely build out its 5G network.

The Long RolloutSome analysts and industry insiders think even a decade isn't long enough, warning that a lack of cash and local cooperation could slow 5G rollout or even stall it completely outside the richest, densest cities.

Meanwhile, local municipalities are suing the FCC to overturn rules designed to make it easier for carriers to install new, smaller cellular antennas of the sort required to make 5G happen. Some in Congress are also working on legislation that could overturn the rules, which are seen by many as favoring telecoms to the point that cities will essentially be subsidizing the 5G build-out.

The driving force behind this enormous build-out is that 5G networks don't work like previous wireless cellular networks. Where 2G, 3G and even 4G rely on large towers with powerful antennas that can cover many square miles, the shorter-range, higher-frequency radio waves used by 5G networks'--essential to their ability to deliver the 10- to 100-times faster speeds they promise'--mean that 5G networks must have small cells placed much closer together.

Typically these small cells must be placed about 800 to 1,000 feet apart, says AT&T's Ms. Knight. Small-cell antennas are typically the size of a pizza box, but can be much larger, and require both a fiber-optic connection to the internet and access to power. They go wherever there's space: on buildings, new 5G-ready telephone poles and, often, retrofitted lampposts.

In 2018, the U.S. had 349,344 cell sites, according to CTIA, a wireless industry trade organization. The organization estimates that'--to achieve full 5G coverage'--carriers will have to roll out an additional 769,000 small cells by 2026.

Battling CitiesThis rollout could mean three or four different carriers will be arriving at your street, each trying separately to dig to bury fiber. (And yes, fiber-optic cable almost always has to be buried.)

These companies acknowledge there might be less disruption if they coordinated, laying fiber at the same time, in the same trenches. But so far, that happens on an ad-hoc basis, when crews on the ground notice crews from a competing company digging on the same day, or when local'--and overtaxed'--permitting offices notice a coincidence in dig requests, say representatives from both AT&T and Verizon.

Some states and cities are enacting ''dig once'' policies'--in other words, all the fiber goes into one trench or pipe'--says Mr. Littmann. In some cases, this means that new roads must include underground conduits suitable for future fiber cable installation, so they needn't be dug up every time.

City leaders across the country complain they don't have the staff to handle all these permits, and it's hard for them to charge more to support the added strain: The FCC limited how much cities can charge companies to install small cells and dictates that they must decide whether to allow or disallow them within 60 days.

In response to these new FCC rules, the Conference of Mayors issued a statement saying the agency ''has embarked on an unprecedented federal intrusion into local (and state) government property rights that will have substantial and continuing adverse impacts.''

Gerard Lavery Lederer, an attorney representing municipalities that are attempting to overturn the new FCC rules, agrees that some communities are having a hard time keeping up with all the permits, and are prevented by state laws from charging enough to be able to afford to hire more people to handle them, even though most of the 5G build-out is only at the planning stage. ''The real onslaught has not yet begun,'' he says.

Costly DecisionsMeanwhile, the time and expense of covering an entire city mean Corning's customers are deploying in parts of cities where they can recoup their expenses fastest, says Mr. Mazzali. A Wall Street Journal analysis of where small cells are going up in New York City found companies prioritizing the wealthiest neighborhoods, threatening to widen the digital divide between those who do and do not have access to high-speed wireless internet.

''We deploy based on many things, including density of people, usage and strategic locations,'' says Mike Haberman, vice president of technology and planning at Verizon. ''Then there are other things that dictate deployments such as local rules and the ability to access locations.'' AT&T also starts with capacity needs and customer demand in deciding where to roll out 5G first, says a company spokesman.

But for a technician like Mr. Hubbard, America's next-generation ''wireless'' network is history's most expensive, elaborate and dense network of fiber-optic cables.

''We connect so many different ways underground and from each office, it's like a big spider web of different routes and different cables,'' says Mr. Hubbard.

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Write to Christopher Mims at christopher.mims@wsj.com

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Sun, 30 Jun 2019 15:24

The HPV vaccine is far more effective than expected, with benefits extending beyond those who receive the vaccine, a study published Wednesday finds.

The new study, published in The Lancet, suggests that the more people who receive the vaccine, the better. That's because vaccination not only reduces rates of HPV infection and the presence of precancerous cells in the cervix in people who receive the vaccine, it also reduces rates of HPV-related diseases in people who were not vaccinated.

The findings come as a U.S. federal advisory panel recommended Wednesday that the HPV vaccine be given to both men and women up to age 26.

HPV, or human papillomavirus, is the leading cause of cervical cancer. The virus can also cause other cancers, including cancers of the penis, head and neck, as well as conditions like genital warts.

The HPV vaccine was first introduced in 2006. Since then, more than 115 countries and territories have implemented it in their vaccination programs. The World Health Organization recommends that girls ages 9 to 13 receive two doses of the vaccine.

''The impact of the HPV vaccination has actually exceeded expectations,'' said Lauri Markowitz, associate director of science for HPV at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who worked on the study. "The trials showed that HPV vaccines are very effective, and data from the real world has confirmed that.''

Indeed, the reductions in HPV infections and precancerous cells ''are a first sign that vaccination could eventually lead to the elimination of cervical cancer as a public health problem,'' the study's lead author, M(C)lanie Drolet, an epidemiologist at Laval University in Canada, said in a statement.

The Lancet study expanded upon a 2015 meta-analysis that had looked at the real-world effects of the vaccine. The new analysis was updated to include a total of 65 studies, which spanned eight years and included more than 60 million people living in 14 countries. Each study measured either changes in the number of new HPV infections, genital warts diagnoses or cases of abnormal cells associated with cervical cancer in countries before and after they adopted routine HPV vaccination in girls. (Two countries included in the analysis, the U.S. and Australia, also recommend the vaccine for boys.)

The impact of the HPV vaccination has actually exceeded expectations.

The researchers found that, in these countries, there was a significant decrease in the prevalence of two strains of HPV that cause 70 percent of cervical cancers, HPV 16 and 18. (There are more than 100 strains of HPV, 14 of which are known to cause cancer. The HPV vaccine protects against up to 9 strains.) In addition, there was a decrease in the prevalence of precancerous cells in the cervix, which can develop into cancer.

What's more, in countries where at least half the population that was targeted for vaccination had actually received the vaccine, researchers saw evidence of herd immunity, meaning there was a decrease in the prevalence of HPV-related diseases even among those who weren't vaccinated. This is because vaccination leads to fewer HPV hosts.

These countries also saw a decrease in genital warts diagnoses among unvaccinated boys and older women. And among girls within the age groups targeted for vaccination, there were fewer diagnoses of three HPV strains that the vaccine does not specifically protect against, a phenomenon called cross-protection. Countries in which people in multiple age groups received the vaccine also saw a greater decrease in HPV-related disease.

"This paper shows that with a broader age range that's targeted, you'll find greater impact in your vaccination program,'' Markowitz told NBC News.

Lagging vaccination ratesDespite the widespread benefits of the vaccine, however, HPV vaccination rates in the U.S. are still lagging behind those of other adolescent immunizations. The U.S. was the first country to implement HPV vaccination for both genders, but the CDC has found that many parents and health care providers don't yet see a need to vaccinate boys. Parents have also expressed concerns about the vaccine and its costs, the CDC found.

According to Debbie Saslow, managing director of HPV and gynecological cancers at the American Cancer Society, the lagging rates are not entirely because parents are against vaccinating their kids; rather, the way some doctors are presenting the vaccine also plays a role.

Two required vaccinations, for tetanus and meningitis, are administered at the same time as HPV, around age 12. Saslow said HPV is usually presented as an optional third vaccine at that time, and one that patients can delay another year.

''Providers often think they're recommending all three vaccines, but they're actually making the third, the HPV vaccine, optional,'' Saslow told NBC News. ''They're just suggesting it or doctors are setting it apart from the other two in some way.''

The fact that HPV is a sexually transmitted infection could also be a hard concept for parents to come to terms with. Saslow said beliefs about sex may be a factor that deters parents from opting to have their children vaccinated against HPV.

''Despite all that, vaccination rates are continuing to grow,'' she said.

Indeed, the number of adolescents in the U.S. who received at least one dose of the HPV vaccine has increased by 5 percent each year since 2013. The CDC recommends everyone receive the first dose by age 12. Though adults up to age 45 can still be vaccinated, the vaccine may be less effective. And while the WHO does recommend that girls 9 to 13 get vaccinated against HPV, it does not yet recommend that all genders receive the vaccination. That could change in response to study results that continue to show the vaccine has substantial impact on public health.

Cancer preventionThat impact on public health is cancer prevention. Ultimately, that's the ''main goal of the HPV vaccination program," Markowitz said. "We're seeing an impact on one of the HPV outcomes that is close to a cancer outcome.'' (Because cervical cancer can take decades to develop, it's not yet possible to study the effects of the vaccine on cervical cancer rates, Drolet noted in the statement.)

In particular, the study found the HPV vaccine led to a reduction in the rates of abnormal pap smear findings. Pap smears are used to detect abnormal cells in the cervix that can sometimes develop into cancer. Five to nine years after a population was vaccinated against HPV, the researchers found a more than 50 percent reduction in cases of these pre-cancerous cells in girls 15 to 19. In vaccinated women 20 to 24, there were one-third fewer cases of these cells.

A separate study, published in April in The BMJ, found a 90 percent reduction in cases of pre-cancerous cells in young women in Scotland within the first decade of introducing the HPV vaccine.

But vaccination is only one piece of cervical cancer prevention; screening is also necessary.

Whether or not a person has received the HPV vaccine, getting cervical cells regularly tested '-- through Pap tests and HPV screening '-- is still a crucial to reducing cases of cervical cancer and early detection, said Diane Harper, senior associate director of the Michigan Institute for Clinical and Health Research. Rates of invasive cervical cancer dropped significantly in the U.S. when cancer screening was introduced in the 1940s, and there were less than half the number of cases in 2007 that there were in 1973, largely due to screening.

''Vaccination and screening together make a program,'' Harper told NBC News. ''Very few HPV cases progress into cancer, but the only way we're going to find those that do is through the screening program.''

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Sat, 29 Jun 2019 03:08

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Politics Comments January 01, 2018 9:23 PM ETHuma Abedin forwarded sensitive State Department emails, including passwords to government systems, to her personal Yahoo email account before every single Yahoo account was hacked, a Daily Caller News Foundation analysis of emails released as part of a lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch shows.

Abedin, the top aide to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, used her insecure personal email provider to conduct sensitive work. This guarantees that an account with high-level correspondence in Clinton's State Department was impacted by one or more of a series of breaches '-- at least one of which was perpetrated by a ''state-sponsored actor.''

The U.S. later charged Russian intelligence agent Igor Sushchin with hacking 500 million Yahoo email accounts. The initial hack occurred in 2014 and allowed his associates to access accounts into 2015 and 2016 by using forged cookies. Sushchin also worked for the Russian investment bank Renaissance Capital, which paid former President Bill Clinton $500,000 for a June 2010 speech in Moscow.

A separate hack in 2013 compromised three billion accounts across multiple Yahoo properties, and the culprit is still unclear. ''All Yahoo user accounts were affected by the August 2013 theft,'' the company said in a statement.

Abedin, Clinton's deputy chief of staff, regularly forwarded work emails to her personal humamabedin@yahoo.com address. ''She would use these accounts if her (State) account was down or if she needed to print an email or document. Abedin further explained that it was difficult to print from the DoS system so she routinely forwarded emails to her non-DoS accounts so she could more easily print,'' an FBI report says.

Abedin sent passwords for her government laptop to her Yahoo account on Aug. 24, 2009, an email released by the State Department in September 2017 shows.

Long-time Clinton confidante Sid Blumenthal sent Clinton an email in July 2009 with the subject line: ''Important. Not for circulation. You only. Sid.'' The message began ''CONFIDENTIAL'... Re: Moscow Summit.'' Abedin forwarded the email to her Yahoo address, potentially making it visible to hackers.

The email was deemed too sensitive to release to the public and was redacted before being published pursuant to the Judicial Watch lawsuit. The released copy says ''Classified by DAS/ A/GIS, DoS on 10/30/2015 Class: Confidential.'' The unredacted portion reads: ''I have heard authoritatively from Bill Drozdiak, who is in Berlin'.... We should expect that the Germans and Russians will now cut their own separate deals on energy, regional security, etc.''

The three email accounts Abedin used were abedinh@state.gov, huma@clintonemail.com, and humamabedin@yahoo.com. Though the emails released by the State Department partially redact personal email addresses, the Yahoo emails are displayed as humamabedin[redacted].

Clinton forwarded Abedin an email titled ''Ambassadors'' in March 2009 from Denis McDonough, who served as foreign policy adviser to former President Barack Obama's campaign and later as White House chief of staff. The email was heavily redacted before being released to the public.

Stuart Delery, chief of staff to the deputy attorney general, sent a draft memo titled ''PA/PLO Memo'' in May 2009, seemingly referring to two Palestinian groups. The content was withheld from the public with large letters spelling ''Page Denied.'' Abedin forwarded it to her Yahoo account.

Abedin routed sensitive information through Yahoo multiple times, such as notes on a call with the U.N. secretary-general, according to messages released under the lawsuit.

Contemporaneous news reports documented the security weaknesses of Yahoo while Abedin continued to use it. Credentials to 450,000 Yahoo accounts had been posted online, a July 2012 CNN article reported. Five days later, Abedin forwarded sensitive information to her personal Yahoo email.

Abedin received an email ''with the subject 'Re: your yahoo acct.' Abedin did not recall the email and provided that despite the content of the email she was not sure that her email account had ever been compromised,'' on Aug. 16, 2010, an FBI report says.

The FBI also asked her about sending other sensitive information to Yahoo. ''Abedin was shown an email dated October 4, 2009 with the subject 'Fwd: US interest in Pak Paper 10-04' which Abedin received from [redacted] and then forwarded to her Yahoo email account'.... At the time of the email, [redacted] worked for Richard Holbrooke who was the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan (SRAP). Abedin was unaware of the classification of the document and stated that she did not make judgments on the classification of materials that she received,'' the report said.

The U.S. charged Sushchin with hacking half a billion Yahoo accounts in March 2017, in one of the largest cyber-breaches in history, the Associated Press reported. Sushchin was an intelligence agent with Russia's Federal Security Service '-- the successor to the KGB '-- and was also working as security director for Renaissance Capital, Russian media said.

''It is unknown to the grand jury whether [Renaissance] knew of his FSB affiliation,'' the indictment says.

Renaissance Capital paid Bill Clinton $500,000 for a speech in 2010 that was attended by Russian officials and corporate leaders. The speech received a thank-you note from Russian President Vladimir Putin. Renaissance Capital is owned by Russian oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov, who also owned the Brooklyn Nets basketball team. He unsuccessfully ran for Russian president against Putin in 2012.

Sushchin's indictment says ''the conspirators sought access to the Yahoo, Inc. email accounts of Russian journalists; Russian and U.S. government officials,'' and others. Information about the accounts such as usernames and password challenge questions and answers were stolen for 500 million accounts, the indictment says. The indictment does not mention Abedin's account.

A hacker called ''Peace'' claimed to be selling data from 200 million Yahoo users.

The user data also included people's alternate email addresses, that were often work accounts tying a Yahoo user to an organization of interest. The hackers were able to generate ''nonces'' that allowed them to read emails ''via external cookie minting'' for some accounts.

The New York Times reported that in the 2013 hack, which affected all Yahoo accounts, ''Digital thieves made off with names, birth dates, phone numbers and passwords of users that were encrypted with security that was easy to crack. The intruders also obtained the security questions and backup email addressed used to reset lost passwords '-- valuable information for someone trying to break into other accounts owned by the same user, and particularly useful to a hacker seeking to break into government computers around the world.''

Yahoo published a notification on Sept. 22, 2016, saying: ''Yahoo has confirmed that a copy of certain user account information was stolen from the company's network in late 2014 by what it believes is a state-sponsored actor.''

Clinton downplayed the risks of her email use days later, saying it was simply a matter of convenience.

''After a year-long investigation, there is no evidence that anyone hacked the server I was using and there is no evidence that anyone can point to at all, anyone who says otherwise has no basis, that any classified materials ended up in the wrong hands. I take classified materials very seriously and always have,'' Clinton said on Oct. 9, 2016, at the second presidential debate,

Abedin's use of Yahoo email is consistent with the determination by the FBI that Clinton associates' emails were, in fact, compromised. ''We do assess that hostile actors gained access to the private email accounts of individuals with whom Secretary Clinton was in regular contact from her private account,'' then-FBI director Jim Comey said in 2016.

ALSO WATCH FOR MORE ON CLINTON CORRUPTION:

Follow Luke on Twitter. Send tips to luke@dailycallernewsfoundation.org. PGP key.

The Daily Caller News Foundation is working hard to balance out the biased American media. For as little as $3, you can help us. Freedom of speech isn't free. Make a one-time donation to support the quality, independent journalism of TheDCNF. We're not dependent on commercial or political support and we do not accept any government funding. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

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Successful rodent chimera experiments, such as this mouse embryo harboring rat heart cells (red), have been hard to re-create with human cells.

BELMONTE LAB, SALK INSTITUTE FOR BIOLOGICAL STUDIES By Kelly ServickJun. 26, 2019 , 11:50 AM

The perpetual shortage of human organs for transplant has researchers turning to farm animals. Several biotech companies are genetically engineering pigs to make their organs more compatible with the human body. But some scientists are pursuing a different solution: growing fully human organs in pigs, sheep, or other animals, which could then be harvested for transplants.

The idea is biologically daunting and ethically fraught. But a few teams are chipping away at a key roadblock: getting stem cells of one species to thrive in the embryo of another. Last month, a U.S. group reported in a preprint that it had grown chimpanzee stem cells in monkey embryos. And newly loosened regulations in Japan have encouraged researchers to seek approval for experiments to boost the survival of human cells in the developing embryos of rodents and pigs. Insoo Hyun, a bioethicist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, says the work is being done responsibly. Efforts such as the new chimp-monkey chimeras represent "baby steps forward, gathering data as you go," he says. "And I think that's a wise approach."

Ultimately, the researchers envision reprogramming a person's cells to a primitive developmental state that can form most any tissue and injecting these induced pluripotent stem (IPS) cells into another species's embryo. The embryo would be implanted in the uterus of a surrogate, and allowed to grow to full size to serve as an organ donor. The IPS cells could come from the person awaiting transplant or, in a potentially faster and less costly approach, human organs could be grown in advance from cells from other donors, matched for key immune signaling proteins to prevent rejection.

So far, the feat has been modeled only in rodents. In 2010, stem cell biologist Hiromitsu Nakauchi and his team at the University of Tokyo reported growing rat pancreases in mice that couldn't form pancreases of their own. In 2017, Nakauchi and colleagues treated diabetes in mice by giving them transplants of insulin-producing mouse pancreas tissue grown in a rat.

But the success in rodents hasn't held up between larger and more evolutionarily distant animals. In 2017, cell biologist Jun Wu and colleagues in Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte's lab at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, California, reported that when they injected pig embryos with human IPS cells and implanted the embryos into sows, about half of the resulting fetuses were stunted and slow growing. Those that were normal size had very few human cells after a month of gestation.

Wu, who is now at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, has since explored how human stem cells interact in a lab dish with stem cells from nonhuman primates, rats, mice, sheep, and cows. He's found what he calls "a very exciting phenomenon: a competition between cells of different species." Pitted against cells of distantly related animals, human cells tend to die off, and the team is now trying to understand the mechanism. "I think we are almost there," Wu says.

But competition isn't the only problem. Primate IPS cells are also more developmentally advanced, or "primed," than the "na¯ve" rodent stem cells used in the earlier successful chimera experiments. They are therefore less likely to survive in a chimeric embryo, says Nakauchi, who also has a lab at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. To help primate IPS cells thrive, his Stanford team and collaborators endowed them with a gene that prevents cell death. In the experiments reported last month, they tested how the modified cells would fare in the embryo of a closely related primate species.

To avoid raising ethical concerns, the team decided not to use human IPS cells. If a nonhuman primate embryo with added human cells were allowed to develop in a surrogate and many human cells survived and proliferated, the result would be an unprecedented primate chimera. "People are concerned that the boundary between humans and animals could become blurred," says Misao Fujita, a bioethicist at Kyoto University in Japan who recently conducted a survey of attitudes toward animal-human chimeras in the Japanese public. Respondents were particularly worried that such animals could have enhanced intelligence or carry human sperm and egg cells.

Nakauchi's team instead modified IPS cells from the closest human relative, the chimpanzee, and put them into rhesus macaque embryos. They found that, compared with unmodified chimpanzee IPS cells, the cells with the survival-promoting gene were more likely to persist in the 2 days after they were inserted into a 5-day-old monkey embryo. It's hard to keep a monkey embryo alive in a dish for much longer than a week, Nakauchi says, but his team plans to grow its chimeras further by implanting them into the uteruses of female macaques "in the near future."

Nakauchi also has submitted proposals to a government committee in Japan to put the survival-promoting gene into human stem cells and inject them into mouse, rat, and pig embryos'--but not nonhuman primates'--that lack a gene critical to pancreas development. The researchers hope that, as in the earlier rodent experiments, the human cells will begin to form the missing pancreas. His team would implant the embryos in surrogate animals but remove them for study before they reach full term. The proposals are an initial test for new legal guidelines in Japan, which in March lifted an outright ban on culturing human-animal chimeras past 14 days or putting them into a uterus.

Other groups are honing different recipes for chimera-friendly stem cells. In January, a team from Yale University and the Axion Research Foundation in Hamden, Connecticut, described culturing monkey IPS cells with chemicals that prompted gene expression patterns like those of mouse embryonic stem cells, which are more likely to survive in a chimera. In April, Yale University stem cell biologist Alejandro De Los Angeles reported that the technique prompted similar gene expression changes in human IPS cells. He's now considering testing how these cells hold up in a mouse or other nonhuman embryo.

Such work faces hurdles in the United States. There is no outright ban, but in 2015 the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, froze its review of grant applications for research that involves putting human pluripotent stem cells'--whether IPS cells or cells from human embryos'--into early embryos of nonhuman vertebrates. After protest from some researchers, the agency in 2016 proposed lifting the broad prohibition while keeping a funding ban on specific chimera experiments, including inserting human stem cells into early nonhuman primate embryos and breeding chimeric animals that may have human egg or sperm cells. The proposal is "still under consideration," according to an NIH spokesperson.

The moratorium "has had a very significant impact on the progress of this field," says Pablo Ross, a reproductive biologist at the University of California, Davis, who does chimera research. "Some of the concerns that are raised are to be taken seriously, but I think we have the tools to do that, and [these concerns] shouldn't prevent us from pursuing this goal."

Because of the slow pace of chimera research, even some of its proponents predict that xenotransplantation'--the use of nonhuman tissue, such as modified pig organs, for transplants'--will beat their approach to the clinic. "Xenotransplantation is close to prime time now," Wu says, and "we are lagging behind." But the possibility of creating organs that are a better match for their human recipients keeps his lab and others poring over stem cells and embryos, hoping to narrow the species divide.

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The Dalai Lama has suggested that any female that succeeds him as Buddhist leader must be attractive, despite receiving backlash for similar comments he made in 2015.

In the wide-ranging interview with the BBC, the guru made a series of additional controversial remarks touching on migration in Europe, the Chinese government and the first two years of President Donald Trump's term.

One of the more troubling comments came while discussing an interview in 2015, in which he stated that if a female was to become the next Dalai Lama, she would have to be "very attractive, otherwise not much use."

The BBC's South Asia correspondent Rajini Vaidyanathan asked the Dalai Lama if he understood why the response had offended women. But rather than apologize, the Buddhist leader replied: "If [a] female Dalai Lama comes then she should be more attractive."

He added, "If [a] female Dalai Lama," then paused and pulled an unattractive face, before continuing, "I think, [people would] prefer not [to] see her, that face."

Challenged that a person's character is more important than their physical appearance, he replied, "Yes, I think both." The Dalai Lama also told the BBC that gender equality was important and that he supported women's rights and equal pay in the workplace.

The Dalai Lama also took the opportunity to hit out at President Donald Trump, lamenting his lack of moral principle and calling on the U.S. to take global responsibility.

The Dalai Lama remains a significant thorn in the side of the Chinese government in Beijing. Living in exile in northern India, he remains a potent symbol of anti-authoritarian resistance and the Tibetan independence movement. China has controlled the region since 1951.

Though he has enjoyed good relationships with past presidents including Barack Obama and George W. Bush, the Dalai Lama has never met nor spoken by phone with Trump. The president's disregard for one of the world's most famous spiritual leaders is evidence of China's growing diplomatic clout.

Though the Dalai Lama said he had "no worries" about a Trump presidency following his election victory in 2016, his opinion of the 45th president has clearly soured in the years since.

He described Trump as having a "lack of moral principle" and stated that the president's "America first" ideology is "wrong." Instead, he argued, America "should take the global responsibility" rather than close its borders and bow out of international agreements like the Paris climate accord.

The Dalai Lama'--himself a refugee'--also doubled down on controversial comments he has made about mass migration to European nations. He has previously argued that while Europe should accept migrants and refugees, it should do so with the goal of educating and training new arrivals with a view to returning them to their countries of origin to promote development there.

He stood by his previous assertion that Europe is for Europeans, though once again said nations should take in migrants in need. Asked whether people should be allowed to stay if they wish to, the Dalai Lama said a "limited number is OK."

"But [for the] whole [of] Europe [to] eventually become [a] Muslim country? Impossible. Or [an] African country, also impossible," he added while laughing.

Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama is pictured at a book launch in Mcleod Ganj on March 20, 2019 in Dharamshala, India. Pallava Bagla/Corbis/Getty

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Want personalized recommendations?Join TED Recommends and get the perfect ideas selected just for you.

Get startedLanguage SelectorTED.com translations are made possible by volunteertranslators. Learn more about theOpen Translation Project.

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Comedian and talk show host Bill Maher is unorthodox on the left, although he is on the left, and sometimes that results moments of clarity that make his fellow Democrats livid and draw scattered cheers from non-Democrats. It happened last week on the topic of "concentration camps," and it happened on Friday night's show when he brought up 2020 candidate Julian Castro during his monologue for HBO's "Real Time".

In it, he challenged more than one sacred cow on the left, including abortion and transgender identity. That's on top of the mere heresy of challenging one of the few, proud, 2400 Democrats running to defeat Trump next year.

During the Democrat primary debate this week, Castro absurdly said that he supports federal funding for transgender women to have abortions..

"Now if only they had a uterus," said Maher.

"Julin Castro won the 'Woke Olympics' on the first night when he said, 'Trans females should have the right to an abortion.' I agree. Now if only they had a uterus," said Maher, with the crowd laughing along.

"Try selling that in the red states," he said. In a mocking tone he outlined the position, "'If a man identifies as a woman, then we stand with her right not only to imagine that she's pregnant, but to terminate that pregnancy, which is not possible.'"

It may seem obvious to say the pregnancy would be imaginary, but that deference to reality is almost always taken and treated as an attack on transgender issues, where immutable physical and biological truths are not only ignored, but considered hate speech.

On Thursday, Castro clarified in a tweet that while he said "trans female" he actually meant to say "trans men, trans masculine, and non-binary folks" that need federally funded abortions. That type of error, too, is normally treated as hate speech by the militant LGBTQ activist community. The "Twitter mob", as Maher so accurately characterized them.

"They were going nuts that first night," said Maher in his monologue. "They were trying to out-Spanish each other."

He had some great jokes about almost all of the candidates, all of whom richly deserved them after the spectacle Americans witnessed on Wednesday and Thursday.

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Sat, 29 Jun 2019 20:30

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Sat, 29 Jun 2019 15:12

Follow Matt on TwitterThe classiness just continues from the women's soccer star Megan Rapinoe of Team USA.

Rapinoe has been outspoken about her hatred for President Trump, and was the first white star athlete to take a knee for the National Anthem.

She was asked by a reporter on Tuesday if she was excited to be going to the white house, this was her response.

''I'm not going to the Fucking White House'' she replied.

The reporter laughed and Rapinoe added ''We're not going to be invited anyway.''

What are your thoughts of someone this UN-American representing an American National Team?

Brick Tamland See author's posts

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Sat, 29 Jun 2019 14:21

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Sat, 29 Jun 2019 06:47

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Sat, 29 Jun 2019 06:45

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Sat, 29 Jun 2019 06:30

By Spencer Feingold

Reddit is expanding its operation in New York City with increased ad sales teams and additional engineers, the company announced Tuesday.

''We need a hub in New York where our agency partners are and where a lot of leading marketers are,'' Jen Wong, Reddit's Chief Operating Officer, told Cheddar in an interview Wednesday.

The online aggregator and discussion platform also announced this week the hiring of Mary Ann Belliveau as the new senior director of brand partnerships to lead the East Coast sales operations. Belliveau is a major hire for Reddit and brings decades of digital marketing experience from her time at Twitter and Google.

''People are consumers, everybody needs something,'' Belliveau told Cheddar, adding that Reddit is a particularly interesting platform to introduce branded content on because of its often very specific subreddit communities. ''We want an ads platform that is effective for marketers, that finds the right target audience for them."

Reddit, which was founded in 2005, has grown to serve over 330 million monthly active users in nearly 150,000 active communities. The San Francisco based platform saw more than 153 million posts and over 1.2 billion comments in 2018. The site also recorded over 27 billion votes, which is what determines a post's placing within a subreddit '-- the more up-votes a post receives, the higher it is on the page.

''We have a balance between humans and involving users and empowering them to access their ideas as well as giving them tools and technology,'' Wong said.

In improving the site's technology, Reddit is also implementing machine learning software to its ads strategies and consumer experience.

''Machine learning for ads optimization is a new frontier for Reddit, and we're growing the NYC engineering team to take advantage of the deep pool of talent NYC has to offer,'' Shariq Rizvi, Reddit's vice president of ads product and engineering, said in a statement.

Wong added the technology will also help the site's moderators block hateful and harmful content '-- which has long been a controversial aspect of nefarious subreddit groups.

For full interview click here.

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Sat, 29 Jun 2019 03:12

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Sat, 29 Jun 2019 03:06

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Fri, 28 Jun 2019 20:12

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Fri, 28 Jun 2019 14:22

During an exclusive network interview with California Senator Kamala Harris on Friday, CBS This Morning co-host and Democratic donor Gayle King couldn't help sounding like an adoring fan as she gushed over the liberal lawmaker's debate performance. The anchor wondered how Harris would ''capitalize on that momentum.''

''Your performance last night is certainly what people are talking about this morning. I'm hearing words like, 'A star is born'... 'She is fervent but deploys her anger precisely like a flashlight,''' King proclaimed while touting rave reviews of Harris taking on former Vice President Joe Biden during the debate over the issues of segregation and busing. King continued: ''Voters in Iowa and New Hampshire are telling CBS News today that you had a strong performance. How do you intend to capitalize on that momentum?''

Referring to a picture of Harris as a child attending an integrated school in California for the first time, King excitedly touted apparel being sold on Harris's campaign website: ''Clearly the t-shirts is one way, I understand that those are already on sale.'' Apparently the Senator didn't spend as much time shopping on her website as King: ''Oh, I don't know about the t-shirts. I know we've got a little '' visit KamalaHarris.org '' I know we have a shot.''

Other softballs were lobbed to Harris earlier in the exchange from King's co-hosts. Anthony Mason began with: ''You said last night you do not believe Joe Biden is a racist, but do you think that his remarks about segregationist senators and his past policy on bussing effectively disqualify him as a candidate?''

Moments later, Tony Dokoupil provided this open-ended opportunity for her to respond:

Senator Harris, your campaign clearly had an idea that this topic might come up. They had a picture ready, they sent out a tweet. From your perspective, I'm curious to know, what do you hope voters who may have been hearing about you for the first time and hearing from you for the first time, what should voters take away from that exchange with Joe Biden?

King slightly challenged Harris when she noted: ''Senator Harris, we just heard Ed O'Keefe say you're being accused of delivering a low blow last night. What do you say to that?'' The Democrat predictably replied: ''You know, Gayle, it was about just speaking truth.''

The toughest question came from Dokoupil late in the nearly seven-minute segment when he tried to nail down Harris's position on health care:

DOKOUPIL: Senator, another defining moment in the debate was when every candidate was asked to raise their hand if they would abolish private insurance. In that moment you raised your hand, but afterwards, your campaign says actually that's not your position. So what is your position on private insurance?

HARRIS: So the question was would you be willing to give up your private insurance for such a plan.

DOKOUPIL: That's not how it what was asked. That's what you heard, right?

HARRIS: That's certainly what I heard. And in terms of '' I am in support of Medicare-for-all.

Clearly King has found a new 2020 contender to root for after initially urging her pal Oprah Winfrey to jump in the race.

Here is a transcript of the questions to Harris during the June 28 interview:

7:07 AM ET

ANTHONY MASON: And we continue the conversation this morning with Senator Harris. She's with us from Miami in her only network TV interview after the debate. Senator, good morning.

SEN. KAMALA HARRIS [D-CA]: Good morning.

MASON: Let me start, you said last night you do not believe Joe Biden is a racist, but do you think that his remarks about segregationist senators and his past policy on bussing effectively disqualify him as a candidate?

(...)

TONY DOKOUPIL: Senator Harris, your campaign clearly had an idea that this topic might come up. They had a picture ready, they sent out a tweet. From your perspective, I'm curious to know, what do you hope voters who may have been hearing about you for the first time and hearing from you for the first time, what should voters take away from that exchange with Joe Biden?

(...)

GAYLE KING: Senator Harris, we just heard Ed O'Keefe say you're being accused of delivering a low blow last night. What do you say to that?

HARRIS: You know, Gayle, it was about just speaking truth.

(...)

KING: Your performance last night is certainly what people are talking about this morning. I'm hearing words like, ''A star is born,'' ''She is fervent '' she is fervent but deploys her anger precisely like a flashlight.'' Voters in Iowa and New Hampshire are telling CBS News today that you had a strong performance. How do you intend to capitalize on that momentum? Clearly the t-shirts is one way, I understand that those are already on sale.

HARRIS: Oh, I don't know about the t-shirts. I know we've got a little '' visit KamalaHarris.org '' I know we have a shot.

(...)

MASON: Senator, Vice President Biden didn't see a change in his polling numbers after his remarks about segregationist senators, even among black voters for that matter, why do you think that is?

(...)

DOKOUPIL: Senator, another defining moment in the debate was when every candidate was asked to raise their hand if they would abolish private insurance. In that moment you raised your hand, but afterwards, your campaign says actually that's not your position. So what is your position on private insurance?

HARRIS: So the question was would you be willing to give up your private insurance for such a plan.

DOKOUPIL: That's not how it what was asked. That's what you heard, right?

HARRIS: That's certainly what I heard. And in terms of '' I am in support of Medicare-for-all.

(...)

KING: Alright, Senator Harris, we're gonna have to leave it there.

HARRIS: And I'll just add, 91% of the doctors in America today are in Medicare, so you won't lose your doctor.

KING: Alright, Senator Harris. You've had the last word, we thank you very much. I'm sure we'll talk with you a little bit later on as this campaign continues.

HARRIS: I appreciate it, thank you.

KING: Thank you for joining us this morning.

HARRIS: Absolutely, thank you guys. Have a good day.

KING: You too.

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Fri, 28 Jun 2019 12:02

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