The House Select Committee did an excellent job last evening of providing the big picture on the plot to shred U.S. democracy in service to Donald Trump’s megalomaniac desires. But the question that any good investigator of an unsolved crime scene must ask is this: who benefits from this crime? And to understand who, besides Donald Trump, would be the chief beneficiaries of a coup that installed Trump for an illegitimate second term as President, one has to follow the money trail. That money trail leads to Charles Koch, the billionaire Chairman and CEO of Koch Industries, one of the largest private corporations in the world.
Along with the heirs of his late brother, David, Charles Koch is a majority owner of Koch Industries, a global conglomerate which has interests in fossil fuels, refineries, chemicals, paper products and extensive trading operations.
For more than four decades, Charles Koch has also been involved in a shadowy network of front groups that seek to gut the federal government of its regulatory powers over corporations – particularly those involving fossil fuels. To further Koch’s anti-regulatory goals, Charles Koch and Koch Industries were heavily vested in making sure that Trump had another four years as President.
One of the Koch front groups that played a major role in the 2016 election that put Donald Trump in the White House in the first place was Freedom Partners. (It quietly shut down in 2019 after the press started reporting on its role.) When the group was still active in 2018, we had taken a hard look at its Board of Directors. We found that all but one of its Board Members was a current or former Koch company employee. According to the Center for Media and Democracy, Freedom Partners ended up with 12 of its former employees working in the Trump Administration.
Freedom Partners Action Fund, a related organization that ran attack ads against Democrats, had received at least $14 million from Charles Koch and his trust before it shuttered its operations.
Freedom Partners outlined their marching orders for the Trump administration in a formal memo. Their well-placed toadies in the Trump administration delivered: the Trump administration quickly withdrew from the Paris Climate Accord. It passed a massive tax cut for corporations. It gutted federal regulations and put industry lobbyists and straw men in charge of the very federal agencies that oversaw those industries.
To handle any legal pushback, Koch Industries’ law firm, Jones Day, sent 12 of its law partners to staff up key positions in the Trump administration on the very day Trump was inaugurated. Jones Day has since removed the press release it issued at the time but you can read the reporting on it at the American Bar Association Journal.
In Toxic Debt: An Environmental Justice History of Detroit, Josiah Rector, who teaches at the University of Houston, instead looks northward to Detroit and its environs. As a graduate student at Wayne State University in Detroit a decade ago, he first came across records that charted the city’s rich and often overlooked history of environmental justice organizing. It was also in Detroit that Rector, a white newcomer in a city that is nearly 80 percent Black, witnessed one of the most naked displays of environmental injustice in recent memory.
Beginning in 2014, the City of Detroit shut off the water of more than a quarter-million people. Starting at the same time, authorities in nearby Flint made a series of cost-cutting decisions that resulted in lead-laced water being pumped into thousands of homes. Astonishingly, Detroit’s water has been so foul for so long that its rate of childhood lead poisoning is twice as high as Flint’s—despite the fact that the city is surrounded by the largest freshwater system in the world. During Rector’s time there, moreover, Detroit recorded the highest rate of childhood asthma among the nation’s largest cities. A 2017 study estimates that air pollution causes 7 percent of all deaths in Detroit—more than twice the city’s rate of homicide.
After interviewing activists and immersing himself in the region’s archives, Rector concluded that the “existing literature on environmental justice did not give me the conceptual vocabulary I needed to make sense of what I was seeing in Detroit,” both past and present. A decade later, he has written a book that advances two major interventions. First, it pushes back the environmental justice movement’s genesis to midcentury union organizing. Second, and just as significantly, it firmly connects the effects of debt and austerity—that is to say, capitalism—to environmental racism.
“While most environmental justice studies examine communities on the ‘fence line’ of billowing smokestacks and toxic waste dumps,” Rector writes, “finance and real estate have been no less historically implicated in racialized environmental injustice than heavy industry.” Toxic Debt concretely documents this history by recovering the voices, names, and actions of individuals whose fights have been forgotten or buried.
During my career in corporate America I remember running into the senior executives who ruled by the Welch principles-they all seem disconnected from reality, firing their bottom 10% of their rated employees and outsourcing the most critical work to India or Bulgaria. Here is clip from Gelles at the NYT who just wrote a book on this brute:
Almost immediately after Mr. Welch retired in September 2001 with a $417 million severance package, G.E. went into a tailspin from which it would never recover.
His pupils, though, went on to run dozens of other major companies, including Home Depot, Albertson’s, Chrysler and Boeing. Most of them failed.
And in the decades since Mr. Welch assumed power, the economy at large has come to resemble his skewed priorities. Wages stagnated and jobs moved overseas. C.E.O. pay went stratospheric and buybacks and dividends boomed. Factories closed and companies found ways to pay fewer taxes.
Beyond his enduring influence on the economy, Mr. Welch also redefined what it meant to be a boss, personifying an aggressive, materialistic style of management that endures to this day.
“Jack was the rock star C.E.O. of my era,” said Lynn Forester de Rothschild, one of the rare female media moguls of the 1980s. “We all thought Jack was doing everything right and that success was defined by meeting quarterly earnings to the penny.”
In retirement, Mr. Welch continued to hold sway over the business world as an elder statesman, penning books and columns, and appearing on cable news to praise the executives he had groomed and continue his assault on taxation and regulation.
Mr. Welch also pursued an unexpected retirement pastime: He became an internet troll. His old friend Donald J. Trump seemed to lead the way on many conspiracy theories that Mr. Welch embraced. But by 2012, Mr. Welch was picking fights of his own with his online adversaries, trying to own the libs on Twitter and promulgating conspiracy theories about the Obama administration.
It was a career defined by a ruthless devotion to maximizing short-term profits at any cost, and punctuated by a foray into misinformation. And it opened the door to an era where billionaire C.E.O.s are endowed with vast power and near total impunity.
G.E., too, is still reckoning with Mr. Welch’s legacy. For two decades after he retired, a succession of C.E.O.s tried and failed to return the company to its former glory. Then last year, G.E. management admitted defeat and made an announcement — the company would be broken up for good.
You’ve probably guessed by now that this is not an idle history lesson. I am thinking about “the slave power” because I am thinking about the ways that narrow, destructive factions can capture the counter-majoritarian institutions of the American system for their own ends. I am thinking of how they can then use the levers of government to impose their vision of society and civil life against the will of the majority. And I am thinking of this in the context of guns, gun violence and the successful movement, thus far, to make the United States an armed society.
Two weeks ago, a gunman killed 10 people at a grocery store in Buffalo. Three days ago, a gunman killed 21 people, including 19 children, at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.
Although there has been, in the wake of both atrocities, the requisite call for new gun control laws, no one believes that Congress will actually do much of anything to address gun violence or reduce the odds of gun massacres. The reason is that the Republican Party does not want to. And with the legislative filibuster still in place (preserved, as it has been for the past year, by at least two Democratic senators), Senate Republicans have all the votes they need to stop a bill — any bill — from passing.
The filibuster, however, is only one part of the larger problem of the capture of America’s political institutions by an unrepresentative minority whose outright refusal to compromise is pushing the entire system to a breaking point.
Large majorities of Americans favor universal background checks, bans on “assault-style” weapons, bans on high-capacity magazines and “red flag” laws that would prevent people who might harm themselves or others from purchasing guns.
But the American political system was not designed to directly represent national majorities. To the extent that it does, it’s via the House of Representatives. The Senate, of course, represents the states. And in the Senate (much to the chagrin of many of the framers), population doesn’t matter — each state gets equal say. Fifty-one lawmakers representing a minority of voters can block 49 lawmakers representing a majority of them (and that’s before, again, we get to the filibuster).
Add the polarization of voters by geography — a rural and exurban Republican Party against an urban and suburban Democratic Party — and the picture goes from bad to perverse. Not only can Republicans, who tend to represent the most sparsely populated states, win a majority of the Senate with far less than a majority of votes nationally, but by using the filibuster, a small number of Republican senators representing an even smaller faction of voters can kill legislation supported by most voters and most members of Congress.
The Senate might have been counter-majoritarian by design, but there is a difference between a system that tempers majorities and one that stymies them from any action at all. We have the latter, and like Congress under the failed Articles of Confederation, it makes a mockery of what James Madison called the “republican principle,” which is supposed to enable a majority of the people to defeat the “sinister views” of a minority faction by “regular vote.”
Rather than suppress the “mischiefs of faction,” our system empowers them. Few Americans want the most permissive gun laws on offer. But those who do have captured the Republican Party and used its institutional advantages to both stop gun control and elevate an expansive and idiosyncratic view of gun rights to the level of constitutional law.
The result is a country so saturated in guns that there’s no real hope of going back to the status quo ante. If anything, American gun laws are poised to get even more permissive. If the Supreme Court rules as expected in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, it will strike down a law that requires a license for carrying a concealed firearm.
To the Syrians who have suffered its attacks, the Kremlin’s lies about Ukraine must sound horribly familiar. Insisting that the victims of bombings are “crisis actors”, spreading falsehoods about chemical weapons, justifying the mass murder of civilians by claiming that anyone who resists is a “Nazi” (in Ukraine) or a “head-chopper” (in Syria): its disinformation tactics have been tested and honed.
This organised lying has more or less destroyed the US left, and severely damaged the European left. As the activist Terry Burke documented in 2019, effective leftwing opposition to Donald Trump collapsed amid furious internal disputes about Syria and Russian interference in US politics, triggered by prominent figures reciting Kremlin falsehoods. Some of them turned out to be paid by the Russian government.
Such lies are also familiar to Ukrainians. During the Holodomor (the famine in the 1930s exacerbated by Joseph Stalin’s policies), in which between 3 and 5 million people are believed to have died, the Kremlin line was that the peasants had plenty of food but were hiding it. In some cases, they were deliberately starving themselves to death. I guess you could call it method crisis acting.
The current Russian disinformation machine has been widely blamed for what we now see as an “epistemic crisis” – the collapse of a shared acceptance of the means by which truth is discerned.
We should contest and expose the Kremlin’s lying. But to suggest that the public assault on truth is new, or peculiarly Russian, is also disinformation. For generations, in countries such as the UK there was no epistemic crisis – but this was not because we shared a commitment to truth. It was because we shared a commitment to outrageous lies.
As I’ve mentioned the Holodomor, let’s take a look at another exacerbated famine: in Bengal in 1943-1944. About 3 million people died. As in Ukraine, natural and political events made people vulnerable to hunger. But here too, government policy transformed the crisis into a catastrophe. Research by the Indian economist Utsa Patnaik suggests the inflation that pushed food out of reach of the poor was deliberately engineered under a policy conceived by that hero of British liberalism, John Maynard Keynes. The colonial authorities used inflation, as Keynes remarked, to “reduce the consumption of the poor” in order to extract wealth to support the war effort. Until Patnaik’s research was published in 2018, we were unaware of the extent to which Bengal’s famine was constructed. Britain’s cover-up was more effective than Stalin’s.
Yesterday I read the news on the internet, on a Ted Goia email, that Jessica Williams, the extremely talented jazz pianist, had passed away. The news has been slow coming but I'll link to several sites that have examples of her work or interviews with her. We are fortunate in that she is very well represented via her broad discography. Years ago when I attempted to learn about her talents I read that she actually grew up in Baltimore and attended Peabody Prep which stunned me as I had never heard her name mentioned here in Baltimore. Part of that reason is that she left for Philadelphia nd then San Francisco in the mid-70's. That still meant I could have run into her when I was an undergraduate at Hopkins and going to the Ballroom. From the an announcement at KNKX:
Two-time Grammy nominee Jessica Williams was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and classically trained at the Peabody Conservatory of Music. In her teens, Williams moved to Philadelphia and began playing with drummer Philly Joe Jones.
Relocating to San Francisco in 1977, Williams became the house pianist at the famous Keystone Korner jazz club. She also worked with Eddie Harris, Dexter Gordon, Tony Williams, Stan Getz, Airto Moreira and Flora Purim, Charlie Rouse, John Abercrombie, Charlie Haden, Leroy Vinnegar, and others.
Williams received two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Rockefeller Grant for composing, the Alice B. Toklas Grant for Women Composers, and the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. She was an honored guest on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross, and on Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz. She also wrote musical scores for PBS and HBO programs.
Williams recorded more than 40 albums over her career, eight of them on the Seattle-based Origin Records label.
Celebrated for her absolute control of the keyboard, her wit, and her solid sense of swing, the influence of Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane was evident in many of Williams' performances and recordings.
Williams settled in Portland, Oregon in 1993, and then later in Yakima, Washington. She created a her own record label and music publishing company in an effort to retain control of her creative output.
Severe spinal problems sent Williams through major surgery in 2012. The medical procedures and recovery were lengthy, complicated and expensive; she ended up having to sell her beloved Yamaha piano.
A cancer diagnosis came in 2017. Williams tried to stay positive and active, posting on her website, "I have decided that the best thing I can do for myself is to do what I do, and be who I am. I love my music, and I will soon release new music and begin performing again. There are many things to do, and I will start slow, but speed alone is not music — soul and passion are. I am not done."
Jessica Williams' music will be featured on Jim Wilke's Jazz Northwest program on KNKX this Sunday, March 20, at 2 p.m.
She had recently moved to the Bay Area, and was all but unknown even among jazz insiders—but not for long. She would occasionally play piano at the Keystone Korner during the break between the headline acts, and her powerful command of the keyboard was immediately apparent to listeners. This wasn’t tinkly intermission piano, but something quite extraordinary.
You could hear the magic in her playing. Her tone control and ease of execution were the first things that hit you. But Williams also had a remarkable ability to enter into what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls the ‘flow state’—a openness to the possibilities of the immediate moment that is the ideal mindset for jazz improvisation.
I’d always believed that music was an ecstatic vocation, and here was someone demonstrating it right before my eyes. It might just be an intermission between sets, but Jessica had blocked out all the noise and conversation, and was flying off into some higher sphere of music-driven nirvana.
I became an ardent fan, and bought copies of the few indie albums featuring Williams that were now showing up in record stores. I had heard of her quirks and eccentricities—and even just seeing her in live performance I could tell that Jessica Williams would not be a typical teacher. But that didn’t deter me. Her approach to the keyboard—with that singing tone, harmonic richness, and melodic freedom—was very closely aligned with what I was pursuing in my own music.
I tracked her down at gigs, and we eventually had several conversations. Her first reaction was that she had no idea how to teach what she did. Her music just happened. She didn’t have a method to share.
My glib response was: “No worries. We will do stop-and-cop.”
“What’s that?” she asked.
“I’ll watch you play the piano. And at certain junctures, I will ask you to stop. And I’ll cop what you just did. That’s the stop-and-cop method—and it always works.”
Jessica eventually agreed to be my teacher—but now things really got strange. She set certain conditions: (1) I had to provide the piano and a place for the lesson, (2) I had to drive her to and from the lesson, and (3) the lesson had to be in the middle of the night. 3 AM was the best time for her.
Yes, jazz education was a little different back then. The students at Berklee have no idea.
I’m married to a great guy named Atherton and I finally quit playing jazz and married him after knowing him for 34 years. I did not take my site down- it was stolen from me 5 years ago during the cyber war between Trump and Truth began.I lost $200,000 and I had a nervous breakdown.But I’m fine now.I’m a good cook and my husband is a health care provider.He watches over me. He’s my fourth and final marriage!As for jazz, I made some really beautiful music with the best musicians in the world and I got to live in Italy and France and Denmark. I’ve been to Tokyo and I played in South Korea. I quit smoking and drinking 27 years ago.I’m not a jazz musician anymore but I love good music.Now is my time to enjoy myself!All light and love to you !Jessica Jennifer Williams pianist and composer.
But I really use Jessica Jennifer Williams as a work and medical name but everyone else calls me Angie or Angela Emily Atherton because that’s my chosen aka and my husband is named Atherton and so after all these years my life is safe and good. I went through a lot of operations and then I was attacked viciously by jazz musicians and critics. The audience was cool but a lot of people hated on me with their prejudices. A white trans girl playing with Hutch or Getz or Dexter Gordon or Philly Joe Jones or Pharoah. And many more. It’s hell for trans people and for women. Enjoy the music and know that you are still just one person among billions who loved me and it’s still me. I’m changing every day and its been my entire life and I love it.
But what if a society being interrogated had no written words—and their mode of expression was itself a kind of elaborate lock? So it is with the Inca and their endlessly enigmatic counting tool, the quipu. The device comprises a series of colored cords hanging from a topmost strand. Tied into the pendant cords are a variety of knots that, depending on their type and position, encode various pieces of information, including values from a base-ten numbering scheme. Perhaps the mightiest empire of the New World, located in what is now Peru, substituted talking knots for an alphabet.
“If we want to understand the Inca from their own point of view, the only sources available to us—i.e., the only ‘primary sources’—are the quipus,” writes anthropologist Gary Urton. A Harvard professor of pre-Columbian studies, Urton received $4,750 from NEH in 1993 to study the world’s largest archives of both quipu samples and Spanish documentation from the New World. Two grants of $30,000 each followed, which helped support the research that has made him an authority on the mysterious objects and their function. “I am studying the quipus,” he said, “in an effort to recuperate the Inca viewpoint on their world.”
That viewpoint was imperiled following the arrival of Spanish colonizers, led by Francisco Pizarro in 1526. The Inca were conquered, subjugated, and often enslaved. Wave after wave of European diseases killed off many of those who weren’t slain in battle. Only centuries later did we gain an appreciation of the people extinguished by the conquistadors’ swords. The site of Machu Pichu, located in the Inca heartland of Peru, is today one of the most visited attractions in South America, and examples of the sophisticated culture’s textile and ceramic output fill museums.
Quipus tell a story that is no less important: They were critical instruments of factotums and bureaucrats, an imperial language of record-keeping that helped tally censuses and tribute payments from far-flung communities to the capital city of Cuzco. Urton and others believe that some could contain even more complex ciphers, such as narrative histories or the names of deities. Unfortunately, their messages have frustrated modern interpreters. Though the Spanish transcribed a small number of quipu readings, none of them match the roughly 870 samples that still survive. The search goes on for the “Rosetta quipu,” as Urton puts it. If one could be found, it would represent more than an anthropological coup—it would forever unfasten the knot of a language lost to time.
This morning while drinking our coffee I told my wife that we will look back at these last 4-5 days and consider it a new stage-probably more relevant for our children but much like 9/11 it will color the future in a different light. Here's an article from Richard Fontaine at The Atlantic:
Just days ago, Russia was widely seen in Washington, D.C., and major European capitals as a sullen and revisionist power, led by a president discontented with his country’s place in the world, but who generally chose pragmatism and opportunism over blundering savagery. This sentiment has transformed overnight, and Moscow is now viewed by Western leaders as a clear and present danger. Putin’s war of aggression in Ukraine is the obvious, but not the only, evidence. Russia threatened “military and political consequences” against Finland and Sweden should they join NATO, and put nuclear forces on alert. Just days ago, European leaders visited Moscow to discuss the international deal that sought to end his last territorial assault in Ukraine, in 2014. No more—governments now have no trust in or tolerance for the Putin regime.
The world’s economies, save China, have combined to inflict harm on the Russian economy with remarkable speed, fomenting a financial crisis and enacting restrictions on Russian imports that will touch all of its citizens. The sanctions on Russia’s central bank alone may well force the country into a default on its sovereign debt. Previous worries about risks that could hurt countries pulling out of COVID-induced recession have been cast aside. So too have concerns that economic upheaval could provoke unrest inside Russia, with unknown implications.
Germany’s long-underweight military role and low defense budgets are also things of the past. Olaf Scholz, the recently elected chancellor, announced a onetime increase in defense spending of 100 billion euros, and committed to spending 2 percent of German GDP on defense annually. As a result, Putin’s aggression accomplished in days what decades of haranguing by American presidents could not. “We must put a stop to warmongers like Putin,” Scholz said. “That requires strength of our own.” In security terms, this may well mark the birth of a new, post–post–Cold War Germany.
Neutrality is on the wane, too. Finland and Sweden are firmly aligned with the West and against Moscow, and the invasion may tip them into NATO membership. Policy makers in both countries are openly discussing the possibility—hence Moscow’s preemptive threat—and for the first time a majority of Finns favor joining the alliance. Even if Helsinki and Stockholm do not sign up as allies, they have already begun collaborating with NATO more closely than ever before. Both, for example, are sending arms to Ukraine.
Even neutral Switzerland—Switzerland!—will freeze Russian assets as a result of Moscow’s aggression. “Russia’s attack is an attack on freedom, an attack on democracy, an attack on the civil population, and an attack on the institutions of a free country,” the country’s president, Ignazio Cassis, said over the weekend. “This cannot be accepted.” Large-scale protests on the streets of Bern, expressing popular revulsion at the invasion, helped focus minds in a country that has essentially been militarily neutral since 1516.The sudden shifts extend beyond Europe. The sanctions now imposed on Russia are global, with Japan, South Korea, Australia, Canada, Singapore, and more joining the anti-aggression bloc. Turkey, which previously maintained warm relations with Russia, has denounced Moscow’s “unjust and unlawful war” and will block the passage of Russian warships through to the Black Sea. The UN General Assembly will convene an emergency session, for the first time in 40 years, to discuss the crisis.