Institutionalize racism into our federal government

I don’t pay attention to what goes on in popular music – classical is my thing. A couple interviews in Pridesource prompted me to listen to a couple songs – songs with definitely queer lyrics. Ben Platt became famous as the lead in Dear Evan Hanson that was a big hit on Broadway and ran for long enough that Platt became obviously too old for the teenage character he was playing. He has acted elsewhere and recently released his third studio album. The album cover shows Platt and his soon to be husband in a 1950s convertible making out. The song on this album I listened to is “Andrew.” It is a lament of a gay boy who has a crush on his straight male friend, an Andrew. The friend doesn’t seem aware the gay boy would be delighted with a kiss, but the gay boy knows he won’t ever get one. It’s all a cruel joke with no one to blame. Lyrics here. The other singer is Orville Peck. He sings country and is openly gay. He also just released an album, one of collaborations with other country singers. He’s been performing wearing a mask because it helps him feel more comfortable and vulnerable, though in his interview he said with each album the mask feels less important. The song is “Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other.” This song was written way back in 1981 by Latin country musician Ned Sublette. Willie Nelson sang it as a solo back in 2006 – he’s quite the ally. This version is Peck and Nelson alternating verses – Peck has rich sonorous voice. The first verse, which Peck sings, is:

Well, there's many a strange impulse out on the plains of West Texas There's many a young boy who feels things he can't comprehend And a small town don't like it when somebody falls between sexes No, a small town don't like it when a cowboy has feelings for men

And the second half of Nelson’s verse:

Well, a cowboy may brag about things that he's done with his women But the ones who brag loudest are the ones that are most likely queer

Both songs are easily found on YouTube. I finished the book Dearborn, by Ghassan Zeineddine. Dearborn is the suburb directly to the west of Detroit. The city used to have a highly racist mayor at a time when Detroit was becoming increasingly black. The Detroit metro area has the highest population of Arabs outside the Middle East and many of them moved to Dearborn. The city has such a large Arab population the mayor is now Arab and it was the center of protests against Biden for his support of Israel in the Gaza war. The book is ten stories of Arab-Americans living in Dearborn. The people in these stories came from Lebanon or had ancestors who did, so many stories feature why they left – a civil war and a war with Israel would do it. Some of the newer arrivals are afraid of being caught by ICE. A few are hoping for the big sign of success – their company is successful enough they can put their face on a billboard. Some women tell of when they were a teenager and a young man showed up at the house and proposed marriage. Single men and women are expected to live with their parents, no matter their age, until they are married. After the 9/11 attacks they become wary of the FBI. There is even a story of a transgender person, a father and husband who would rather dress as a woman – and quite glad Muslim women can wear garments that cover all but the eyes. I very much enjoyed these stories. I was surprised to learn in the author’s biography that he probably never lived in Dearborn. When he mentions locations and street names I thought all but one were accurate. The one that wasn’t referenced a nursing home on Ford Rd. at the highway. There are two places where a highway is near or crosses Ford Rd. I don’t see a nursing home at either of them. A few days ago I wrote about the mattering movement, the effort to help children and youth feel they matter. On Saturday on NPR reporter Cory Turner visited one elementary school in the Livingston Union School District in California’s Central Valley. The reason for the visit is a kindergarten class that has exceptionally low absenteeism, not just in the post pandemic era of lots of children missing lots of school days, but for several years before. Sujie Shin of the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence says there is a basic question related to a child’s success in school: “Is there an adult at school that cares about you - yes or no? That's it.” In another kindergarten class across town Diana Dickey greets each child. When one child is not there they move the child’s photo inside a big heart. That tells children when they’re not there they are missed. Another kindergarten cheers when all students are there. When one boy feels apprehensive about coming another boy waits and they walk in together. The parents are delighted with the school and that their children want to go and are disappointed they don’t go on weekends. Turner said:

By building a school culture where the children feel valued, Mrs. Dickey says students also learn to value and help each other.

The children feel valued. They learn to value each other. That’s the mattering movement. It is giving the students a grounding in mental health. My Sunday movie was Absolute Beginners, episodes 1 and 2 out of six. It is a film out of Poland, so Netflix dubbed it and actor’s lips don’t match the English. This time other actors are credited with the dubbing. Niko and Lena are two high school seniors trying to get into film school. They have been friends since quite young, almost brother and sister, and their parents share a cottage at a seaside resort. When the story begins they have a week to make the film that they’ll submit with the application. But as they get to the sex scene Niko refuses. Also at the resort is a basketball training camp. Igor is the captain of the team. He has a troubled past he hasn’t talked about yet. Scouts will be at the weekend game, a chance for him to go on to something better. Igor has a girlfriend Malwina, whom he’s known all of four days. She’s the daughter of the couple who own the restaurant and feels she will get left behind when Igor moves on. As the second episode ends Lena’s parents say they need to sell their share of the cottage and Niko’s parents don’t have enough to buy them out. Also, Lena tells Igor she has just the right part for him in her movie, the obvious implication is that Igor will replace Niko in the sex scene. I wrote about Justice Alito flying two flags as symbols of support for the 2021 Capitol attack. Daily Kos community member davidkc asks the important question: If that flag flying was in 2021 why is the Washington Post reporting it now? WaPo had an article written three years ago. They didn’t publish it. In it they described the upside-down American flag as a “political charged symbol.” Yet, they said the argument between Martha-Ann Alito and a neighbor that supposedly prompted her to display the inverted flag was not clearly “rooted in politics.” Which prompts many of us to say: Huh? My friend and debate partner sent me a link to this article, written by Aaron Pellish of CNN, about Chase Oliver winning the nomination for president of the Libertarian Party. My friend sent it to me because Oliver is gay. A gay presidential candidate! He’s also quite young – 38. This article says Oliver’s win signifies an embrace of “wokeness,” though I can’t tell if the person saying that thinks that’s a good thing or bad thing. Back in 2017, when I was working to collect signatures for the anti-gerrymandering proposal that passed in 2018, I spent an afternoon at a table outside the convention for the Libertarian Party of Michigan. The state chair and a few others signed. The convention as a whole voted to reject it. From what little I could hear from my table and from what I’d read elsewhere my feelings of the Libertarians is quite simple. They are so anti-tax their philosophy comes across as “I got mine. Too bad you don’t got yours.” Dartagnan of the Kos community wrote about one aspect of the proposed nasty guy administration and the Project 2025 document supporting it. This piece would “institutionalize racism and racial bias into our federal government.” It would accomplish that by redefining “racism,” which would redefine all the laws that mention racism and are meant to alleviate oppression of non-white people. Dartagnan wrote:

For them, “racism” is quite literally reimagined and reconfigured as anything that they perceive as a threat to the continued hegemony of white Americans. We are already seeing an implicit reappraisal of “racism” and civil liberties in several Republican-dominated states, as white people seek to preserve and maintain the racial dominance they have enjoyed in this country since the days of its founding.

Racism becomes defined as oppression by non-white people against white people. So “affirmative action” becomes “affirmative discrimination.”

In recent years, the Republican Party has consciously and deliberately abandoned almost all efforts to present itself as anything but a group devoted to maintaining white power and white supremacy. The political weapon they choose to wield: blame. White Americans—particularly middle- and working-class white Americans—are routinely indoctrinated by right-wing media to believe that their inability to make economic headway in American society is due to the encroachment of other races upon their “status” as white people.

Examples of the lies they use in their blame: Other races are willing to accept lower pay so white people’s pay can’t be increased. Black people are blamed for the high cost of health care, Medicare, and Social Security. Racial preferences hold white people back. Corporate DEI programs discriminate against whites. Nothing in those examples are true, though they are still potent. I’ll try a rewrite those examples to be closer to the truth: Corporations underpay non-white people and use that as an excuse to deny wage increases to white people. Corporations insert themselves between patients and their health care. Rich people block being taxed fairly and Social Security is denied enough money. As for racial preferences and DEI programs white people interpret non-whites being treated equal to themselves as discrimination.

Put bluntly, white people do not need such protections. Civil rights laws were not passed to rectify injustice against white people, because white people—particularly white men—are the nation’s most wealthy, most politically dominant, and by far the most privileged American citizens. Anti-discrimination laws will probably never change that dynamic, but they do preserve some degree of equal opportunity and protection from this country’s apparently immutable racism. Nevertheless, emboldened by a right-wing Supreme Court demonstrably hostile to racial equity, Project 2025’s proponents see this as their moment.

Project 2025 establishes white supremacy as national policy. Aldous Pennyfarthing of Kos quoted an Associated Press article:

A new report released Tuesday by States United Action, a group that tracks election deniers, said nearly one-third of the lawmakers in Congress supported in some way Trump’s bid to overturn the 2020 results or otherwise cast doubt on the reliability of elections. Several more are hoping to join them, running for election this year to the House and Senate.

Pennyfarthing adds:

More specifically, States United Action found that 170 representatives and senators of the total 535 Congress members are election deniers of some kind. Meanwhile, the group determined that two new Senate candidates and 17 new House candidates fall into the same category.

Clio2 of the Kos community wrote this month’s installment of LGBTQI+ Literature. The topic is autobiographies of intersex women. Amazingly, three such autobiographies were published last year. They are by Pidgeon Pagonis, Caster Semenya, and Alicia Roth Weigel. I had heard of Semenya before, but not the other two. Pagonis described surgeries to “fix” her, to remove the male portions of her anatomy. The surgeries were done without her informed consent (for some of them she was too young to consent). Things were not explained well to her parents either. All of the surgeries were cosmetic and not necessary. Pagonis is not working to get such intersex surgeries banned. While growing up in South Africa Semenya discovered she could run really fast. Soon she was entered into races, which was a big help to her family’s finances. When she began to break records she was subjected to a full gynecological exam. Only then did she learn “she had no uterus, no fallopian tubes, and a pair of undescended testicles that produced an elevated level of testosterone in her blood compared with most women.” And the sports community put her through hell. Even so, she brought home a silver medal from one Olympics and a gold from the next. Weigel also had surgery at a young age to remove undescended testicles. Her parents were told it should be done because they might become cancerous (the truth and logic of that is doubtful). After learning about intersex at 27 she became an advocate against the gender binary. That made her a public figure and a target for threats. Clio2 wrote:

Under the orders of -- perhaps not coincidentally, male -- authority figures, each of them subjected to drastic, involuntary medical interventions designed to remodel their bodies, surgically and/or chemically. In order to conform them more closely to a certain conceptual archetype of female. To render them, in effect, "female enough." ... A notion that also is deployed to buttress "traditional" power relations, including racism and the subordination of women. In line with which interest, exceptions must be erased. While "protecting children" is invoked as cover for "protecting the status quo."

A quote from Pagonis’ book:

We are raised to believe that you should just be able to glance at someone for a split second and know not only what lies between their legs but between their ears....[T]here is also supposed to be an inherent synchronicity between the two.

Weigel noted the contradiction of bills in which trans kids who want gender-affirming care are denied that care and in the same bill intersex kids who haven’t asked for such care yet have it forced on them. The demand to “fix” intersex kids is a piece of the demand to prohibit treating trans kids and the demand to “cure” gay people. And that is all wrapped up in misogyny, racism, and all the other things where one group oppresses another.

Anti-government people are rescued by a government

Amazing. I don’t have any current news to write about. Today I didn’t open any browser tabs for articles to save until I could write about them. And I don’t have any left over from earlier this week. So I’m delving into articles I saved a while back, starting with this one from January. Kio Herrera of Prism Reports, posted on Daily Kos, discussed the lingering effects of busing in Boston to address educational inequity. Busing was implemented in 1974 and the effect are still felt nearly 50 years later. Kim Janey is Boston’s first black woman to be mayor. Back in the early 1970s she attended a community school established by black people because the Boston Public Schools for children of color were underfunded and crumbling. That community school gave Janey a solid foundation. When the integration order came many of the black students went to schools serving mostly working class families, so the schools weren’t much better. There was a big change at the black schools that now had white students – they were renovated and now had enough teaching materials. The big effect of the ruling was white flight. Yeah, we’re used to hearing about that. But there was also black flight. They may not have fled to the suburbs, but they left Boston Public Schools. White families went to parochial schools, black families to charter schools. That left the public schools worse off and just as segregated. The forced busing ended in 1988 and it hadn’t ended the racial divide in the public schools. Looking back 50 years later, some consider what might have been done differently. Instead of busing students, the schools with mostly black students could have been renovated and given budgets equal to the white schools. Also they could have gotten rid of the notion that black students need white students to succeed. Back in February Kos of Kos wrote about Rio Verde Foothills, a community of rugged libertarians northeast of Scottsdale, Arizona. They avoided creating a town government (and associated taxes) through loopholes in the law. This is desert. People who live in a desert need a source of water. For a while Scottsdale offered a tap at the edge of town and trucks took water from the tap to tanks buried in their yards. Scottsdale said this can’t be a permanent solution. Rio Verde Foothills ignored the problem – until Scottsdale cut them off. And the residents complained that Scottsdale was being unpatriotic. They don’t want to have their own government but they do want some other government to cater to their needs. There is a solution. Incorporate into a town and form a government. That gives them more options in getting water. It also mandates paved roads, street lights, taxation, and rules. Scottsdale agreed to a three year extension of the deal, provided Scottsdale can get more water from other sources. Yeah, those anti-government people are rescued by a government. Kos also included a summary of the book A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear. Libertarians took over Grafton, New Hampshire. The fire department, schools, and library withered away. The new residents didn’t follow regulations on food disposal. And that attracted bears. Strange that lawlessness has consequences. In April Hunter of Kos discussed a book that seems to be a hard right response to Drag Queen Story Hour and the inclusive books shared there. This book is The Island of Free Ice Cream by Jack Posobiec (and probably written by someone else) released in 2021. Posobiec is known for spreading far right hoaxes and probably worse. The lead character is Asher, a fox who – as Hunter frequently reminds us – doesn’t wear pants. No explanation is given. Asher is a whiz at making things, including ice cream, for the town of Rushington (no, the book isn’t subtle with names). Then wolves (communists) come to town and give ice cream away for free. Asher tried to convince the town this isn’t good, but the town voted and Asher was sent away. Yeah, a post-vote purge. And an attempted murder. After a few more adventures Asher does battle with the wolves. And Hunter gets to the point of the book, to which Hunter added photos of the Capitol attack.

The animals of Rushington had an election! But bad people won! And now the bad people will be in charge forever unless the good, kind, and strictly free-market devoted animals of Rushington start murdering their enemies! There we go. There's the "lesson" of Posobiec's book for young tots. Sometimes elections are bad, kids, and your only recourse is to grab some metal poles and start beating people to death.

Hunter concludes:

Seriously, we’re in the middle of a nationwide conservative "grooming" freakout over a book about a real-life same-sex penguin couple raising a chick. A book in which a pants-hating titan of the free market commits genocide, though, is what conservatives are now presenting as the wholesome alternative? No, and ick. If conservative parents want to teach their kids such things then they should do it in the privacy of their own homes, not in schools or library book rooms. Keep this violent furry filth away from the rest of us.

I've got mine

Many pundits have said that with such high unfavorable ratings of both major candidates this is a good year for the alternatives, such as the Libertarian and Green party candidates. I'm pleased that Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party seems stuck at under 9%, though it would be good if he pulled a few more votes from Trump.

The editors of Shareblue take a look at four parts of the Libertarian platform, though it can be summed up rather easily: I've got mine. Too bad you don't have yours.

Taxes: Johnson is saying we should eliminate all income, property, and business taxes and fund the government with a consumption (sales) tax. But the consumption tax is the most regressive tax – the poor have to spend (and be taxed) on a much higher percent of their income than the rich for daily living. For a poor person, about 100% of their income would be taxed. For a rich person that might be 1% of their income.

Minimum wage: Johnson doesn't support it. Want more money? Switch jobs or become an entrepreneur! But some people don't have the education to switch jobs (see below) and there aren't enough higher paying jobs for everyone who wants one. As for being your own boss, because of racism and classism many people can't get a business loan.

Education: Johnson says college should not be free (something Sanders pushed, and Clinton has taken up). As for public schools, Johnson wants to abolish the federal Dept. of Education. Too bad if you're in a state that routinely underfunds its schools and refuses to teach sound science (such as evolution) or demands teaching abstinence-only sex ed.

Healthcare: Johnson has said there is no way a government can have a system that manages health care. He must not have tangled with an insurance company denying coverage. Johnson insists a, "market-based approach should be the foundation of any solution." But it is easy to show that proper health care is incompatible with the profit motive. (Several other things incompatible with the profit motive are here).

The Libertarian Party platform doesn't work for marginalized people – and not even for the young of the well-to-do who are just starting out on their own.

The Libertarians say they are fiscally conservative and socially liberal. I'm sure they mean they approve (or at least don't disapprove) of same-sex marriage. But socially liberal means more than that. Just one example: it means everyone gets a good K-12 education and doesn't have huge college debts weighing them down. So fiscally conservative and socially liberal can't mix.

Drip, drip, drip...

The contaminated water in Flint, Michigan is now making national news. There are lots of news sources to fill in the details of that nightmare and lots of opinion about how it wouldn't have happened in a rich white city.

Though as for that last bit...

Oliver Milman, writing for The Guardian, reports:

Water authorities across the US are systematically distorting water tests to downplay the amount of lead in samples, risking a dangerous spread of the toxic water crisis that has gripped Flint, documents seen by the Guardian show.
…
Documents seen by the Guardian show that water boards in cities including Detroit and Philadelphia, as well as the state of Rhode Island, have distorted tests by using methods deemed misleading by the Environment Protection Agency.

That bit about Detroit definitely caught my attention. The Detroit water system, now the Great Lakes Water Authority supplies water to all of the Detroit Metro Area – and now including Flint again. Does that bit about Detroit mean the city, or the entire Detroit area water system?

Is my water also contaminated?

My water has always been a bit off. It can turn the bowl of a toilet orange (not too bad when I had a yellow toilet) and has a slightly musty taste. About 20 years ago the city partnered with a company to test the water of individual homes. I put out a sample of water to be tested, then found out they wouldn't give me the results unless they could also give me a sales pitch for their filtering products. I decided their results must be unreliable and said no.

Perhaps 3 years ago I had enough of the musty taste and bought a pitcher with a water filter. I still get water straight from the tap when I brush teeth (the pitcher is in the kitchen), though it looks like that needs to change. But does the filter trap lead or enough other harmful stuff? My nutritionist sells a super-duper model (with matching price) but it is big and I don't have space in my kitchen. She has also suggested I buy a filter for the shower. It might be time to do that.

The Guardian saw data gathered by Dr. Yanna Lambrinidou of Virginia Tech. The article also included this:

Lambrinidou warned that the issue of misleading test results was widespread. “There is no way that Flint is a one-off,” she said.“There are many ways to game the system. In Flint, they went to test neighbourhoods where they knew didn’t have a problem. You can also flush the water to get rid of the lead. If you flush it before sampling, the problem will go away.

“The EPA has completely turned its gaze away from this. There is no robust oversight here, the only oversight is from the people getting hurt. Families who get hurt, such as in Flint, are the overseers. It’s an horrendous situation. The system is absolutely failing.”

Do we thank years of the GOP trying to squeeze the gov't by not budgeting enough money? Is the EPA scared because of GOP rants on excessive regulations and has long been targeting the agency? Is this what Libertarians mean when they promote small gov't so it doesn't intrude on our freedom? Are we all supposed to have our own water purification system, responsible for the safety of our own water?

Approaching Lord of the Flies

Edwin Lyngar, in an article for Salon, says he used to be a fan of libertarianism. Then he went to Honduras, which has embraced libertarian politics. He found that every business has its private armed security force. All the rich live in citadels topped with barbed wire. The infrastructure is crumbling – enterprising people fill potholes, then stand beside them hoping for tips. The description gets worse.

Lyngar wrote:

In America, libertarian ideas are attractive to mostly young, white men with high ideals and no life experience that live off of the previous generation’s investments and sacrifice. I know this because as a young, white idiot, I subscribed to this system of discredited ideas: Selfishness is good, government is bad. Take what you want, when you want and however you can. Poor people deserve what they get, and the smartest, hardworking people always win. So get yours before someone else does. … Eliminate all taxes, privatize everything, load a country up with guns and oppose all public expenditures, you end up with Honduras.

And

One can dismiss the core of near-sociopathic libertarian ideas with one simple question: What kind of society maximizes freedom while providing the best outcomes for the greatest number of human beings? You cannot start with the assumption that a Russian novel writer from the ’50s is a genius, so therefore all ideas about government and society must fit between the pages of “Atlas Shrugged.” That concept is stupid, and sends you on the opposite course of “good outcomes for human beings.” The closer you get to totally untamed, uncontrolled privatization, the nearer you approach “Lord of the Flies.”

Best outcomes for the greatest number of people? America isn't having that discussion.

Enough commonality

Some of us are (or were) annoyed with Ralph Nader pulling enough votes in Florida in 2000 to prevent Al Gore from becoming president (though you can read about the spoiler controversy in his Wikipedia entry). That didn't stop me from buying Nader's book The Seventeen Solutions about ways to improve America. I haven't read it yet, partly from a feeling of futility -- what good are great solutions if the GOP won't allow any to be implemented?

There is now a glimmer of hope for that last point. And, yes, that comes from another book by Ralph Nader, Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State. From the Amazon description:

Large segments from the progressive, conservative, and libertarian political camps find themselves aligned in opposition to the destruction of civil liberties, the economically draining corporate welfare state, the relentless perpetuation of America’s wars, sovereignty-shredding trade agreements, and the unpunished crimes of Wall Street against Main Street. Nader shows how Left-Right coalitions can prevail over the corporate state and crony capitalism.

Alas, the user reviewers aren't helpful in explaining what the book is about. Even so, I'm delighted in the major point. There are many, on both the Left and Right who are annoyed with the corporate takeover of America. Though the two sides have differences in philosophy of what government should be and do, there is enough commonality of that important goal that we should and need to unite for that goal. If we do, we will be unstoppable.

An interview with Nader on NPR fills in some of the details missing from the Amazon reviews. One detail is how to go about forging Left-Right alliances. Sidestep the manipulative ideologies of both sides and look at details. Nader gives an example:

What I do is I go down where people live and work and say, look, you're a Republican. You don't like federal regulation. Right, I don't like federal regulation. You have a car? Yeah. Well, if the auto company discovers a serious dangerous defect in your car after you bought it and the auto company doesn't recall it, would you favor the government requiring General Motors or Ford or VW to recall it? Most of them say yes.

Security, fraud protection, and nothing else

What is the function of government? This is a hot topic by Libertarians and those that want smaller government, or don't want to pay for the government we have now. According to Libertarians, government is to only be responsible for a standing army, local security, and a court system. And that court system is to protect individuals against aggression, theft, breach of contract, and fraud.

Perhaps 25 years ago when I worked as a computer programmer there was a fellow programmer in our office for several months who talked a lot about Libertarian principles. All the fiction he read was from one author who set his stories in worlds that followed Libertarian ideals. One tried not to get into discussions with this guy because his "discussions" were so one-sided, the speech of a true convert out to change the world.

One of the things he talked about was ownership of roads. Instead of government maintaining roads, we could leave it to private enterprises. This included residential roads in addition to the major thoroughfares. If you drove over the roads belonging to a company you paid them a fee. At the time I thought (but never mentioned to him because I didn't want to face the long-winded reply) such a system would require me to spend a great deal of time writing checks to various road companies. Wouldn't it be easier to consolidate all that into one body that took care of all the roads? That way I could write one check. And, by golly, that sounds a lot like what the government does for me.

Christopher Beam, in the New York Magazine, has a long discussion on Libertarianism. Here's an important point: strip government down to its skivvies and our society doesn't work. If I have a product to sell, where does the money come from? Each bank prints its own, right? No, for that we need a central bank. What to do with people out of a job? Charity, right? What if charities can't handle the load because they don't have enough money? We'll need a welfare system so they don't become so desperate they'll start stealing. What to do if companies can't make enough money educating poor youth? Perhaps government needs to set up schools after all.

The answer of market economy or charity isn't enough and Libertarians have postponed thinking about that problem. Which means they never have to prove their system doesn't work.

Some more issues: Can I trust my doctor if the government doesn't issue licenses? Getting my neighbor's kid vaccinated helps the country as a whole. What if that family can't pay for it? If government is responsible for a public good, such as a standing military, what about clean air? If a private enterprise is responsible for clean air can they ever have the clout to make it happen?