So, Stefan Halper is no newbie to the world of campaign spying and there are some really good ass-covering reasons why the administration really didn’t want Halper’s name out there as the mole inside presidential campaign of Donald John Trump.

Glenn Greenwald, writing in The FBI Informant Who Monitored the Trump Campaign, Stefan Halper, Oversaw a CIA Spying Operation in the 1980 Presidential Election for The Intercept, begins:

An extremely strange episode that has engulfed official Washington over the last two weeks came to a truly bizarre conclusion on Friday night. And it revolves around a long-time, highly sketchy CIA operative, Stefan Halper.

Four decades ago, Halper was responsible for a long-forgotten spying scandal involving the 1980 election, in which the Reagan campaign – using CIA officials managed by Halper, reportedly under the direction of former CIA Director and then-Vice-Presidential candidate George H.W. Bush – got caught running a spying operation from inside the Carter administration. The plot involved CIA operatives passing classified information about Carter’s foreign policy to Reagan campaign officials in order to ensure the Reagan campaign knew of any foreign policy decisions that Carter was considering.

Oops.

I remember 1980. That was the only year that I ever cast a second vote for a presidential candidate. Ronald Wilson Reagan, of course, had an excellent reasons to have a spy inside the Carter campaign. He (or more likely his handlers) knew that an October surprise regarding the Iranian hostage crisis would sink the actor’s bid for the White House. Greenwald continues.

Halper’s history is quite troubling, particularly his central role in the scandal in the 1980 election. Equally troubling are the DOJ and FBI’s highly inflammatory and, at best, misleading claims that they made to try to prevent Halper’s identity from being reported.

To begin with, it’s obviously notable that the person the FBI used to monitor the Trump campaign is the same person who worked as a CIA operative running that 1980 Presidential election spying campaign.

It was not until several years after Reagan’s victory over Carter did this scandal emerge. It was leaked by right-wing officials inside the Reagan administration who wanted to undermine officials they regarded as too moderate, including then White House Chief of Staff James Baker, who was a Bush loyalist.

The NYT in 1983 said the Reagan campaign spying operation “involved a number of retired Central Intelligence Agency officials and was highly secretive.” The article, by then-NYT reporter Leslie Gelb, added that its “sources identified Stefan A. Halper, a campaign aide involved in providing 24-hour news updates and policy ideas to the traveling Reagan party, as the person in charge.” Halper, now 73, had also worked with Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Alexander Haig as part of the Nixon administration.

And:

In contrast to the picture purposely painted by the DOJ and its allies that this informant was some of sort super-secret, high-level, covert intelligence asset, the NYT described him as what he actually is: “the informant is well known in Washington circles, having served in previous Republican administrations and as a source of information for the C.I.A. in past years.”

The question must be asked, however, who decided to put Halper in side the Trump campaign and what was his function?

Greenwald, in this story at least, does not provide the specifics beyond that Halper was working for the FBI and that his job was to gather information for what we know call the Russia investigation.

I have a complicated relationship with food—food as sustenance, food as medicine, food as distraction—but I’ve not thought before so much about food as politics. Yeah, I know about the whole politicians on the campaign trail munching on the ethnic food of the day, but what David Chang is talking about is different.

This weekend I’m re-reading Jan Chozen Bays’ Mindful Eating, but I’m also going to start watching Chang’s Ugly Delicious.

President Donald John Trump is like the society matron who thinks the solution to homelessness for people to just stay in their summerhouse. The levels of callousness boggle the mind and kicking out the medical support beams to please the base is going to make people sick and cost human lives.

Ralph Nader, writing in Trump: Making America Dread Again, explains:

Donald Trump is a well-known, self-described germaphobe. Unfortunately, he is not concerned about other Americans’ exposure to germs and disease. With leading infectious disease scientists from the Centers for Disease Control to the University of Minnesota warning about a global influenza pandemic (“not if, when”), Trump’s warmongering madman, John Bolton, has closed down a seasoned two-man global health security team.

The Washington Post reported last week about “the abrupt departure of Rear Admiral Timothy Ziemer, a respected scientist from the National Security Council,” who was “the top White House official responsible for leading the U.S. response in the event of a deadly pandemic.”

At the time of Admiral Ziemer’s expulsion, a new Ebola outbreak in the Congo had just been reported.

Trump’s flagrant disregard for the safety of the American people has been punctuated by the proposed elimination of the budget reserved for containing an Continue Reading »

I confess to watching parts of that other royal wedding back in 1981. There I said it. I’m not proud of the fact, but I did it and I will never have to do it again, so there. The marriage of the sixth in THE Saxe-Coburg and Gotha Windsor line to the British throne to an American divorcée ought not to be of any interest to any American Patriot—we did fight a bloody war of succession so that didn’t we have to care—but, well, Disney.

Gary Younge, writing in It’s not Harry and Meghan. It’s the monarchy I oppose, for The Guardian, lays out the relevant trivia:

The royal wedding, as we now know it, was born in 1922. The marriage of Princess Mary to Viscount Lascelles was, it is said, less an arranged union than a forced one. Lascelles bet his friends that if he asked King George V’s only daughter to marry him she’d say yes. Mary was not keen. But the king insisted. Whatever private anxiety there might have been was buried deep beneath the public ceremony.

Monarchies elsewhere had fallen foul of popular uprisings; Britain’s royals felt they had to work for their privileges. Five years earlier, during the first world war, the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha had rebranded itself the House of Windsor to establish some distance from their German lineage.

Mary’s wedding was another opportunity to connect with the public. For the first time in a long time a royal wedding was held at Westminster Abbey, with a full procession and coverage by Pathé News. “It is now no longer Mary’s wedding,” wrote her brother, the future George VI. “But (this from the papers) it is the ‘Abbey Wedding’ or the ‘Royal Wedding’ or the ‘National Wedding’ or even the ‘People’s Wedding’.”

Of course, Tiffany Ariana Trump’s wedding will make Harry and Meghan’s nuptials look like a jumping of the broom.

Breanna Edwards, writing in Watching the Racist Lawyer Who Threatened to Call ICE on Spanish Speakers Run Away From Reporters Is My New Favorite Thing Ever for The Root, has the details (and the video, below the fold of her story.)

[Update on 19 May—The karma just keeps rolling on in: New Yorkers respond to lawyer’s racist rant with ‘Latin party’ outside his house]

Writers, like everyone, don’t fit any stereotype. On the spectrum of exposure and fame exploitation, they stretch from the reclusive to the attention whore. Art is on a separate spectrum like sexual identities. Some writers want to be only known by their work. Some want to express their opinion—expertise or not—on anything and everything. Most are somewhere between.

I have written much about Ta-Nehisi Coates and I greatly admire hims as a writer. In his recent dustup with Cornel West he made some decisions, one of which was to ditch Twitter. Good on him. In his most recent piece for The Atlantic he comments on the matter of fame, minor and epci.

In Kanye West in the Age of Donald Trump, Coates writes:

The incentives toward a grand ego were ever present. I was asked to speak on matters which my work evidenced no knowledge of. I was invited to do a speaking tour via private jet. I was asked to direct a music video. I began to understand how and why famous writers falter, because writing is hard and there are “writers” who only do that work because they have to. But it was now clear there was another way—a life of lectures, visiting-writer gigs, galas, prize committees. There were dark expectations. I remember going with a friend to visit an older black writer, an elder statesman. He sized me up and the first thing he said to me was, “You must be getting all the pussy now.”

What I felt, in all of this, was a profound sense of social isolation. I would walk into a room, knowing that some facsimile of me, some mix of interviews, book clubs, and private assessment, had preceded me. The loss of friends, of comrades, of community, was gut-wrenching. I grew skeptical and distant. I avoided group dinners. In conversation, I sized everyone up, convinced that they were trying to extract something from me. And this is where the paranoia began, because the vast majority of people were kind and normal. But I never knew when that would fail to be the case.

Coates takes, as is often his way, the long route; to build a structure that he can inhabit. His story arc here reaches from Michael Jackson to Kanye West. Coasts summits his crescendo with:

What Kanye West seeks is what Michael Jackson sought—liberation from the dictates of that we. In his visit with West, the rapper T.I. was stunned to find that West, despite his endorsement of Trump, had never heard of the travel ban. “He don’t know the things that we know because he’s removed himself from society to a point where it don’t reach him,” T.I. said. West calls his struggle the right to be a “free thinker,” and he is, indeed, championing a kind of freedom—a white freedom, freedom without consequence, freedom without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant; freedom to profit off a people in one moment and abandon them in the next; a Stand Your Ground freedom, freedom without responsibility, without hard memory; a Monticello without slavery, a Confederate freedom, the freedom of John C. Calhoun, not the freedom of Harriet Tubman, which calls you to risk your own; not the freedom of Nat Turner, which calls you to give even more, but a conqueror’s freedom, freedom of the strong built on antipathy or indifference to the weak, the freedom of rape buttons, pussy grabbers, and fuck you anyway, bitch; freedom of oil and invisible wars, the freedom of suburbs drawn with red lines, the white freedom of Calabasas.

It would be nice if those who sought to use their talents as entrée into another realm would do so with the same care which they took in their craft. But the Gods are fickle and the history of this expectation is mixed. Stevie Wonder fought apartheid. James Brown endorsed a racist Nixon. There is a Ray Lewis for every Colin Kaepernick, an O.J. Simpson for every Jim Brown, or, more poignantly, just another Jim Brown. And we suffer for this, because we are connected. Michael Jackson did not just destroy his own face, but endorsed the destruction of all those made in similar fashion.

And there will be consequences:

The consequences of Kanye West’s unlettered view of America and its history are, if anything, more direct. For his fans, it is the quality of his art that ultimately matters, not his pronouncements. If his upcoming album is great, the dalliance with Trump will be prologue. If it’s bad, then it will be foreshadowing. In any case what will remain is this—West lending his imprimatur, as well as his Twitter platform of some 28 million people, to the racist rhetoric of the conservative movement. West’s thoughts are not original—the apocryphal Harriet Tubman quote and the notion that slavery was a “choice” echoes the ancient trope that slavery wasn’t that bad; the myth that blacks do not protest crime in their community is pure Giulianism; and West’s desire to “go to Charlottesville and talk to people on both sides” is an extension of Trump’s response to the catastrophe. These are not stray thoughts. They are the propaganda that justifies voter suppression, and feeds police brutality, and minimizes the murder of Heather Heyer. And Kanye West is now a mouthpiece for it.

It is the young people among the despised classes of America who will pay…

Life ain’t fair and responsibility is a motherfucker, but we must all be responsible to ourselves first before we can even begin to try and help others.

…a former CEO of ExxonMobil calls you out on the ethics and integrity of your leadership.

Rex Wayne Tillerson, who famously called President Donald John Trump a moron worked for 42 years at ExxonMobil, the last 11 as the fossil fuel giant’s chief executive officer said yesterday, addressing the graduating class of the Virginia Military Academy:

If our leaders seek to conceal the truth, or we as people become accepting of alternative realities that are no longer grounded in facts, then we as American citizens are on a pathway to relinquishing our freedom.

A responsibility of every American citizen to each other is to preserve and protect our freedom by recognizing what truth is and is not, what a fact is and is not, and to begin by holding ourselves accountable to truthfulness and demand our pursuit of America’s future be fact-based, not based on wishful thinking, not hoped-for outcomes made in shallow promises, but with a clear-eyed view of the facts as they are and guided by the truth that will set us free to seek solutions to our most daunting challenges.

Tillerson did not name the president in his address.

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) opened a door that has been closed too long in my America. The power structure of the moribund Democratic Party stuck to their guns money and nominated a candidate that couldn’t even defeat Donald John Trump.

I still think Bernie could have won in 2016. His movement lives on in organizations like the Cuyahoga County Progressive Caucus and candidates like Summer Lee, Sara Innamorato, Elizabeth Fiedler and Kristen Seale.

They all won in Pennsylvania’s Democratic Party primary on Tuesday and they did so, in part, with the support of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Gregory Krieg, reporting in Democratic Socialist women score big wins in Pennsylvania for CNN, writes:

The blue wave in Pennsylvania will be tinged with a different shade of red in 2018, as four Democratic state house candidates—all women —backed by the Democratic Socialists of America won primary races across the state on Tuesday.

On the western front, Summer Lee, an African-American lawyer and community organizer, and activist Sara Innamorato, unseated a pair of longtime Democratic officeholders, cousins Paul and Dom Costa. Both Lee and Innamorato were endorsed by Pittsburgh DSA, one of the organization’s most active outposts.

Back east, another pair of candidates, Elizabeth Fiedler and Kristin Seale, won their primaries with the support of Philly DSA. Seale, a first-time candidate and former delegate for Sen. Bernie Sanders at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, will now take on incumbent Republican state Rep. Chris Quinn.

DSA is a leftist political organization that has seen its rank-and-file grow to up to 37,000 dues-paying members, from something like 8,000 since the election of President Donald Trump in November 2016.

The New Yorker‘s Eliza Griswold, writing in The Hard-Left Candidate Taking On the Democratic Establishment in Southwestern Pennsylvania had this to say about Lee:

Summer Lee, a candidate for state representative in southwestern Pennsylvania, runs her campaign out of Milton’s Top Notch Hair Salon, in downtown Braddock. On a recent Saturday morning, three dozen volunteers, most of them bearded, white millennials, were eating bagels and studying canvassing packets, preparing to go door-to-door to convince residents to vote for Lee. Among them was Arielle Cohen, who was wearing a T-shirt that read “A Woman’s Place is in the Revolution,” and Adam Shuck—“like corn or oysters”—who co-chair the Democratic Socialists of America in Pittsburgh, which endorsed Lee at the end of last year. If she wins, Lee will be the first African-American woman elected to the state legislature from southwestern Pennsylvania. But this race is also notable for the way that it pits Lee, who is thirty years old, against Paul Costa, a popular state representative who has been in office for nineteen years and is a member of a Democratic dynasty around Pittsburgh. (One of his brothers, Jay, is a state senator; another, Guy, is a city official; and his cousin, Dom, is a state representative.)

Here in this tiny race is the larger, existential battle over the future of the Democratic Party that is taking place across the country. Will it be centrist, establishment candidates who lead the much-anticipated “blue wave,” or will progressive insurgents sweep them aside? In Texas, Tennessee, California, and Hawaii, a Democratic electorate is pushing back against the Democratic machine’s support of the old guard. Many, like Lee, see the Democratic Party’s faith in centrists, like Costa, as having already failed; the increasingly radical right means that there’s no meaningful middle in which to meet.

So, what does the DSA advocate? That We The People are in charge:

Democratic Socialists believe that both the economy and society should be run democratically to meet human needs, not to make profits for a few. We are a political and activist organization, not a party; through campus and community-based chapters DSA members use a variety of tactics, from legislative to direct action, to fight for reforms that empower working people.

Socialism has deep roots in America and the message of Eugene Debs. Kurt Vonnegut wrote of Debs:

I still quote Eugene Debs (1855–1926), late of Terre Haute, Indiana, five times the Socialist Party’s candidate for President, in every speech:

“While there is a lower class I am in it, while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

In recent years, I’ve found it prudent to say before quoting Debs that he is to be taken seriously. Otherwise many in the audience will start to laugh. They are being nice, not mean, knowing I like to be funny. But it is also a sign of these times that such a moving echo of the Sermon on the Mount can be perceived as outdated, wholly discredited horsecrap.

I couldn’t agree more.

Everyone and no one. Full stop. The constitutional, and only correct, response to offensive speech is, and must always be, more speech.

How we present that more, that counter speech, however, can be messy. Does more speech have to be respectful? Our constitution is, rightly, silent on that point. To merit respect you must first earn respect. If I think you’re bat-shit crazy, I don’t need to respectfully listen to your views and then attempt to rationally counter your arguments. (Someone, I can’t find the source this morning, wrote that logic cannot alter a view arrived at by means other than logic.) Common sense is simply a handy phrase to justify ignorance.

David French was upset by the reception that Christina Hoff Sommers received at the Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon. French, writing in Intersectionality, the Dangerous Faith for National Review, begins:

The demise of religion among American youth is greatly exaggerated. [Uh, no it isn’t, Dave. JH] It turns out that America isn’t raising a new generation of unbelievers. Instead, rising in the heart of deep-blue America are the zealots of a new religious faith. They’re the intersectionals, they’re fully woke, and the heretics don’t stand a chance.

Just ask Christina Hoff Sommers. Yesterday she walked into the First Intersectional Church of the Lewis and Clark Law School and promptly experienced the congregation’s wrath.

Of course, no such church exists and the protesters present would deny membership in French’s fantasy, but when religion—Christianity in French’s case—is central to your understanding of the world, then it is easier to see opposition through a religious lens. I searched for a full, unedited video of the events at Lewis and Clark, but came up empty.

As support for his thesis, French calls on a piece written by Andrew Sullivan’s a year ago.

Sullivan, writing in Is Intersectionality a Religion? for New York magazine, explains:

[W]hat grabbed me was the deeply disturbing 40-minute video of the event, posted on YouTube. It brings the incident to life in a way words cannot. At around the 19-minute mark, the students explained why they shut down the talk, and it helped clarify for me what exactly the meaning of “intersectionality” is.

“Intersectionality” is the latest academic craze sweeping the American academy. On the surface, it’s a recent neo-Marxist theory that argues that social oppression does not simply apply to single categories of identity—such as race, gender, sexual orientation, class, etc.—but to all of them in an interlocking system of hierarchy and power. At least, that’s my best attempt to define it briefly. But watching that video helps show how an otherwise challenging social theory can often operate in practice.

It is operating, in Orwell’s words, as a “smelly little orthodoxy,” and it manifests itself, it seems to me, almost as a religion. It posits a classic orthodoxy through which all of human experience is explained—and through which all speech must be filtered. Its version of original sin is the power of some identity groups over others. To overcome this sin, you need first to confess, i.e., “check your privilege,” and subsequently live your life and order your thoughts in a way that keeps this sin at bay. The sin goes so deep into your psyche, especially if you are white or male or straight, that a profound conversion is required.

Like the Puritanism once familiar in New England, intersectionality controls language and the very terms of discourse. It enforces manners.

Anyone has the right to stand in the commons and say anything they like and those who disagree have the right to respond. We have a constitutional right to speak. Not a constitutional right to be free from criticism and counter speech.

If you want to speak, without opposition, then rent a hall and sell tickets. (That didn’t workout so well for the fictional Rikki Carter, of course.)

Steve Eder, Danielle Ivory and Erica Green, writing in Education Dept. scales back unit investigating fraud at for-profit colleges for the New York Times, have the details.

The unwinding of the team has effectively killed investigations into possibly fraudulent activities at several large for-profit colleges where top hires of Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, had previously worked.

During the final months of the Obama administration, the team had expanded to include a dozen or so lawyers and investigators who were looking into advertising, recruitment practices and job placement claims at several institutions, including DeVry Education Group.

The investigation into DeVry ground to a halt early last year. Later, in the summer, DeVos named Julian Schmoke, a former dean at DeVry, as the team’s new supervisor.

Now only three employees work on the team, and their mission has been scaled back to focus on processing student loan forgiveness applications and looking at smaller compliance cases, said the current and former employees, including former members of the team, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation from the department.

In addition to DeVry, now known as Adtalem Global Education, investigations into Bridgepoint Education and Career Education Corp., which also operate large for-profit colleges, went dark.

Former employees of those institutions now work for DeVos as well, including Robert S. Eitel, her senior counselor, and Diane Auer Jones, a senior adviser on postsecondary education. Last month, Congress confirmed the appointment of a lawyer who provided consulting services to Career Education, Carlos G. Muñiz, as the department’s general counsel.

This is all done in our names, people. Our nation is being plundered by the gleeful machinations of a wannabe plutocrat and his minions.

When I was 14 I first read Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience, the essay that would, in part, inspire Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Palestine (Gaza and The West Bank) is not India and Israel is not Great Britain, but the roots of the way forward are in Gandhiji’s teachings. Until Palestinians find their Gandhi, there will be no solution.

The survivors of the slaughter at Marjory Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, are not going away.

At a time when most high school students are thinking about chilling for the summer, the MDS students have bigger plans.

Lois Beckett, writing in Parkland survivor aims to boost ‘unacceptable’ youth vote turnout for The Guardian, has the details:

Instead of going to college this fall, Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school senior Ryan Deitsch will focus on turning out the youth vote in November’s midterm elections in hopes of a fresh push for stricter gun control laws. His summer vacation will be spent traveling across the country enabling voter registration.

Deitsch and other student survivors of the 14 February school shooting in Parkland, Florida, brought hundreds of thousands of Americans to the streets this spring for the March for Our Lives, a protest for stricter gun control laws that sparked hundreds of rallies across the country.

But they know the success of their movement will be measured by whether they can show that gun control advocacy will bring voters to the polls this fall.

“The voter turnout for America’s youth is roughly about one in five, and that just isn’t acceptable,” Deitsch said on Tuesday, as part of a public platform conversation with Senator Chris Murphy, the Connecticut Democrat who became a passionate advocate for gun control after the 2012 school shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. “For the most part, youth in this country are ignored.”

The goal, Deitsch said, is to change those turnout numbers. “The moment that number goes from one out of five to three out of five, the youth in this country will control every election to come,” he told an audience at the Center for American Progress’s Ideas Conference in Washington. “Every lawmaker who doesn’t listen to us now will surely listen to us after November.”

“This is a turning point for members of our generation, “ Deitsch said.

I remember going to the polls for every election since I was five or so. My grandfather would typically take me into the voting booth—Washington County, Ohio, had voting machines where you actually pulled a lever—to show me how important voting was. My Grandmother, who had been a suffragette, was rabid when it came to voting. She would not tolerate any woman telling her that voting wasn’t important, a message that she learned from her own mother who was also active in local and state politics.

When I have students who will be old enough to vote in an election year, I help them to fill out the registration card and put the stamp on the form myself. I don’t care how they vote. I just care that they vote.

Via Mano Singham…

Yesterday, in POOR PEOPLE RECLAIMING THE RIGHTEOUS STAFF…, I wrote:

The world shifted for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 and that shift scared the fuck out of America’s white power structure.

We may be witness to a similar shift this summer.

The 0.1 percent were frightened because Dr. King’s change in perspective signaled a pivot away from race to class. Black people were an easily identifiable demographic that made up only a little bit more than 10 percent of the American population. Poor people, however, were members of every identifiable group and could not easily be parsed. Exploited, yes. Segregated, no.

Fifty years later William Barber and Liz Theoharis have picked up the staff left on the ground by King.

This morning, I read Edward Helmore’s piece for The Guardian, ‘CEOs don’t want this released’: US study lays bare extreme pay-ratio problem, which is as good an argument for tumbrels and Phrygian caps that you’re ever likely to see. Helmore writes:

The first comprehensive study of the massive pay gap between the US executive suite and average workers has found that the average CEO-to-worker pay ratio has now reached 339 to 1, with the highest gap approaching 5,000 to 1.

The study, titled Rewarding Or Hoarding?, was published on Wednesday by Minnesota’s Democratic US congressman Keith Ellison, and includes data on almost 14 million workers at 225 US companies with total annual revenues of $6.3tn.

Just the summary makes for sober reading.

In 188 of the 225 companies in the report’s database, a single chief executive’s pay could be used to pay more than 100 workers; the average worker at 219 of the 225 companies studied would need to work at least 45 years to earn what their CEO makes in one.

The No. 1 company—at 4,987-to-one—is Mattel. Fucking Babie and Hot Wheels Mattel

Quoting the sponsor of the study, Congressman Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), Helmore continues:

“Now we know why CEOs didn’t want this data released,” says Ellison, who championed the implementation of the pay ratio disclosure rule as it was written into the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill of 2010. “I knew inequality was a great problem in our society but I didn’t understand quite how extreme it was.”

The requirements, long resisted by some of the largest US companies, simply tells companies to identify a median worker, and then calculate how much the CEO makes in comparison to that person.

But the requirement triggered years of prevarication as companies claimed the method of calculating CEO compensation and median employee compensation had not been well defined. Some claimed that including workers employed abroad, especially in developing countries, would make pay ratio data even more extreme than it would be if calculated only within the US.

“If wealth is being concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, then obviously wealth is being dissipated from more and more people,” Ellison said.

“We have people who are paying more than half their income in rent, and we have whole school districts where poverty is erasing any opportunity for Americans to climb that ladder.”

Now do you understand why President Donald John Trump doubled the membership fee at Mar-A-Lago?

Sharon Lerner has been covering an aspect of this story in her now 16-part The Teflon Toxin series forThe Intercept since 2015. That Scott Pruitt, the literal walking definition of the fox guarding the hen house, would block this kind of study should come as a surprise to no one. There is a bigger story here and Lerner’s entire series is a must read.

Annie Snider, reporting in White House, EPA headed off chemical pollution study for Politico, writes:

Scott Pruitt’s EPA and the White House sought to block publication of a federal health study on a nationwide water-contamination crisis, after one Trump administration aide warned it would cause a “public relations nightmare,” newly disclosed emails reveal.

The intervention early this year — not previously disclosed — came as HHS’ Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry was preparing to publish its assessment of a class of toxic chemicals that has contaminated water supplies near military bases, chemical plants and other sites from New York to Michigan to West Virginia.

The study would show that the chemicals endanger human health at a far lower level than EPA has previously called safe, according to the emails.

“The public, media, and Congressional reaction to these numbers is going to be huge,” one unidentified White House aide said in an email forwarded on Jan. 30 by James Herz, a political appointee who oversees environmental issues at the OMB. The email added: “The impact to EPA and [the Defense Department] is going to be extremely painful. We (DoD and EPA) cannot seem to get ATSDR to realize the potential public relations nightmare this is going to be.”

More than three months later, the draft study remains unpublished, and the HHS unit says it has no scheduled date to release it for public comment. Critics say the delay shows the Trump administration is placing politics ahead of an urgent public health concern — something they had feared would happen after agency leaders like Pruitt started placing industry advocates in charge of issues like chemical safety.

The Teflon/PFOA/PHOS connection comes in the 16th paragraph where Snider writes:

The chemicals at issue in the HHS study have long been used in products like Teflon and firefighting foam, and are contaminating water systems around the country. Known as PFOA and PFOS, they have been linked with thyroid defects, problems in pregnancy and certain cancers, even at low levels of exposure.

The problem has already proven to be enormously costly for chemicals manufacturers. The 3M Co., which used them to make Scotchguard, paid more than $1.5 billion to settle lawsuits related to water contamination and personal injury claims.

But some of the biggest liabilities reside with the Defense Department, which used foam containing the chemicals in exercises at bases across the country. In a March report to Congress, the Defense Department listed 126 facilities where tests of nearby water supplies showed the substances exceeded the current safety guidelines.

A government study concluding that the chemicals are more dangerous than previously thought could dramatically increase the cost of cleanups at sites like military bases and chemical manufacturing plants, and force neighboring communities to pour money into treating their drinking water supplies.

Back February, Lerner, reporting in PFOA and PFOS Are Only the Best-Known Members of a Very Dangerous Class of Chemicals, wrote:

While the dangers of PFOA and PFOS are widely known, very little is known about the other chemicals in their class, PFAS. Here is some of the emerging science on how other per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances affect people.

The revelation that PFOS accumulated in people’s blood led 3M to stop making the chemical in 2001. Disturbingly, 3M, the Minnesota-based company that made both PFOS and the related chemical PFOA, had found that virtually every blood sample it tested contained both of these manmade molecules. By 2006, the Environmental Protection Agency coordinated an industry-wide phase-out of PFOA and PFOS, both of which had been used in firefighting foam and various stain-resistant and nonstick products.

Yet, PFOA and PFOS were not alone. In 2005, 3M tested blood samples from the general population for 16 other PFAS chemicals — and found 15 of them. The company submitted the results of this testing to the EPA in 2005, as the law requires chemical manufacturers to do when they have evidence that their products pose a substantial risk to human health or the environment. Most of the chemicals they had detected were present in every one of 36 samples tested, which were gathered from various parts of the U.S. and Canada.

But unlike the two best-known PFAS chemicals, which have been phased out in this country, many of the others aren’t going away. Several are still in commercial use and some have been offered up as safe alternatives to PFOS and PFOA. The EPA has received additional studies from manufacturers raising health concerns about each of these chemicals, but has yet to set safety limits for any of them.

I have a family connection to this story. Ground zero for Lerner’s initial reporting was the Mid-Ohio Valley where I grew up and my youngest brother and his family lived only a few miles down river from the DuPont plant dumping these chemicals in the water. As best as we can tell they’re all fine, but as Lerner reported early on, many others aren’t.

And then there was one. As a high school student my holy trinity of journalists was Hunter S. Thompson, Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe. Thompson took his life in 2005—though Derf had a superior take on the tale—and today we lost Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Jr..

When I delivered the eulogy for my father in 2016, I mentioned Wolfe because 50 years ago his The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was the first book I bought with my own money and shared with my dad. I took our copy with me to his funeral and that well-read copy sits on my desk in this moment. I’ll finish this post and begin again reading Wolfe’s prose.

Thompson, Talese and Wolfe created what would become known as New Journalism but Tom Wolfe was the front man for the genre. Truly a man in full.

The bottle of Cognac goes to Gay Talese: the last man standing.

So, I’ve been reading Walter Mosley’s Devil In A Blue Dress with one of my students and he’s really been enjoying it. Yesterday I loaded up 1995 movie with Denzel Washington and Don Cheadle and the student was so bored—until Cheadle, as Mouse, started killing people—that he actually nodded of a couple of times.

Cal Newport is right: focus, the ability to pay attention, is the superpower of the 21st century.

The world shifted for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 and that shift scared the fuck out of America’s white power structure.

We may be witness to a similar shift this summer.

The 0.1 percent were frightened because Dr. King’s change in perspective signaled a pivot away from race to class. Black people were an easily identifiable demographic that made up only a little bit more than 10 percent of the American population. Poor people, however, were members of every identifiable group and could not easily be parsed. Exploited, yes. Segregated, no.

Fifty years later William Barber and Liz Theoharis have picked up the staff left on the ground by King.

Lauren Gambino, writing in Hundreds arrested as activists pick up where Martin Luther King left off for The Guardian, explains:

Hundreds of low-wage workers, faith leaders, civil rights organizers and liberal activists were arrested in demonstrations in Washington and outside statehouses across the US on Monday [including in Ohio, JH] as they resumed the work Martin Luther King left unfinished.

Fifty years after King launched the Poor People’s Campaign against economic inequality, militarism and racial injustice, demonstrators revived that fight, kicking off 40 days of nonviolent action.

The new effort, The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, is being led by co-chairs William Barber, a pastor at Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro, North Carolina, and Liz Theoharis, an ordained minister and anti-poverty campaigner from New York City.

Their action on Monday, Barber continued, was not just a commemoration of King’s anti-poverty efforts, it was a new call-to-arms.

“We are here to have a reconsecration and a re-engagement because you do not commemorate the death of [a] prophet,” Barber said, his voice building as he spoke. “You go to where they were killed, reach down in the blood, pick up your baton and carry it the next round of the way. Now who’s ready?”

For generations—reaching back to the the antebellum south—plutocrats had maintained power, in part, by pitting exploited groups against each other. Dr. King threatened that dynamic and that may be one important reason why he was assassinated in Memphis on 4 April 1968.

A sanitation workers’ strike drew Dr. King to Memphis. He was there not fighting for civil rights. He was there fighting for human rights and his Poor People’s Campaign. While Ralph Abernathy picked up the reins of the fight, the campaigned fizzled and after a turbulent, often violent summer, Richard Milhous Nixon became president.

In 1968 approximately 12 million Americans lived in poverty. Millions more lived as what has come to be known as the working poor. In the 21st century that number pushed, albeit briefly, above 45 million. That is a number, if united, to give any patron of Mar-a-Lago nightmares.

Barber and Theoharis have a progressive agenda. Gambino continues:

The campaign’s list of demands are long and aspirational. It includes federal and state minimum wage laws “commensurate for the 21st century economy”, relief from student-loan debt, a repeal of the 2017 GOP tax cuts legislation, restoration of the Voting Rights Act, an end to mass incarceration, a fracking ban, protection of public lands, a cessation of US military involvement and universal healthcare.

In many ways this was the core message of Senator Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign. Hundreds showed up to join the nascent The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival on the first of 40 days of protest. Thousands, hundreds of thousands, should swell those ranks and rebuild Resurrection City.