What is Donald Trump hiding?

When any of Hillary Clinton’s staff and supporters talk about Trump’s tax returns, that’s the question that they ask. They pretend that Trump’s tax returns have any real meaning. They don’t.

The don’t for two reasons: first, we’re not tax lawyers able to decipher the Byzantine code we’ll find there; and second, we all secretly wish we were smart enough, or wealthy enough, to pay zero taxes.

How do I know the second? I know that everyone wants to pay no taxes because everyone works as hard as they can to pay as little tax as they can and you can’t pay less than zero. (Well you can, some people can actually get tax refunds greater than what they pay in, but that’s not what we’re talking about here.)

As for the first: consider The Pritzker family.

The Pritzker family is one of the wealthiest in the United States. Their assets, which amount to $15bn, are held in 60 companies and 2,500 trusts, using structures and strategies that Forbes magazine—normally a cheerleader for wealthy elites—describes with an unusual hint of moral distaste as “shadowy … constructed to discourage outside inquiry—and brilliantly exploitative of loopholes in the tax code.”

This complex asset-holding structure was created not by the Pritzker family itself but by its lawyers, accountants, tax specialists and investment advisers. In this respect, the Pritzkers are no different to tens of thousands of super-rich families and individuals worldwide, who use the services of wealth managers. These professionals not only shelter wealth from taxation but, in the words of one academic paper, serve to “obscure concentrations of economic power”, using vehicles that make it difficult, if not impossible, to identify the true owners of wealth.

If the Pritzkers, and the rest of the 0.1 percent, can obfuscate their wealth in ways that confound the best tax people our federal government have, what makes any of us think that we can even begin to understand what their, or Trump’s, tax return mean?

Writing in How to hide it: inside the secret world of wealth managers for The Guardian, Brooke Harrington tells us why we can’t beat the MEGOs:

The work of wealth managers has been described by some leading practitioners as a defence against the depredations of “confiscatory states.” Much of these professionals’ day-to-day practice occurs in an ethical grey area—a realm of activity that is formally legal but socially illegitimate. This includes the use of trusts, offshore corporations and similar tools to help clients avoid paying tax, debts to creditors or alimony to ex-spouses. Following the financial crisis and news stories such as the Panama Papers, these tactics—many of which are also used by corporations to avoid taxation and regulation—are attracting increasing public attention and condemnation.

The profession—whose main representative body is the London-based Society for Trust and Estate Practitioners—has been singled out for blame in several countries by government agencies concerned with tax evasion, money laundering, and growing worldwide wealth inequality. In its 2006 Seoul declaration, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development made special mention of the roles played by ‘‘law and accounting firms, other tax advisers and financial institutions” in helping companies and individuals find ways round international laws. In 2003, the now-retired Democrat senator Carl Levin complained to a US Senate subcommittee about the asset-holding structures created by wealth managers to obscure their clients’ assets: “Most are so complex that they are MEGOs—‘My Eyes Glaze Over’ type of schemes. Those who cook up these concoctions count on their complexity to escape scrutiny and public ire.”

Like increasingly complex camouflage patterns designed to confuse the enemy.

Harrington continues at length—this is one of The Guardian‘s excellent long reads—but the core message here is that the 0.1 percent are different from the rest of us, as starkly illustrated by one of Harrington’s encounters with power:

In August 2013, I conducted a prearranged interview in the British Virgin Islands with a white British man in his 60s, who was a banker by training. He greeted me by saying that he had read my two recently published papers and found my work to be “left-leaning” and “disapproving of what the [wealth management] industry and wealthy people are doing”. He added that the islands’ wealth management community were all wondering what I was doing here. Although he graciously answered my interview questions, he was not done with the subject of my “agenda”. At the end of the interview, he crossed his arms, leaned back in his chair, and expressed his resentment that wealth managers and their clients had been “vilified” as being “immoral for not paying as much tax as some people think they should”. He added that one local wealth manager had suggested that I “should be thrown off the island”.

I was so taken aback by this statement that I simply thanked the man for his time, shook his hand, and walked back to the bar at my hotel to have a drink. I was unaware then of a precedent: just two years previously, the Channel Islands tax haven of Jersey had detained, deported, and ultimately banned a reporter from Newsweek magazine for investigating claims of illegal activity there. Even though the story had no connection to financial services, it was expected to bring negative publicity to the island, threatening its reputation as a quiet, off-the-radar place for elites to park their fortunes. Remarkably, the local financial authorities were so well connected that they managed to bar the reporter not only from re-entering Jersey but also from entering the United Kingdom, period.

Fighting that kind of power requires herculean effort.

Sometimes the past could predict the future. Or at least raises warning signs. This warning is about DEBT.

From time to time, when it seems appropriate, I will revive something I wrote years ago if it has a relevance to the present. The following was written in Point of Viǝw newsletter in April of 1976.

If Dennis Kucinich had paid attention after he became mayor there might never have been a default, especially since it was a phony bank contrivance. (Perk indebted the city despite sale or transfer of many assets, including the stadium, the port, the city sewer system, its public transit to RTA with a Muny Light sale planned. He squandered the receipts).

The following piece shows what happened. It is also a warning to Cuyahoga County as it appears to have indebted itself recklessly too. A CSU report on Cleveland’s debt in the 1970s suggests a similar need for a study of Cuyahoga County’s debt now. The warning signs are there.

The 1976 piece follows:

The impending sale of the Municipal Light Plant to the gouging Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co. may have less to do with Muny’s incompetence than with the fiscal irresponsibility of the Perk Administration.

The rapid sale of city assets that have been accumulated over decades feeds the apparently inexhaustible thirst of Mayor Ralph Perk and his cronies for more funds.

While the thirst remains unquenchable, Perk confuses the public Continue Reading »

Charlotte Mendelson, sharing in I live for the moments when something comes into verbal focus for The Guardian’s My Writing Day, writes:

It’s ridiculous. Obstetricians don’t pause, mid-breech, to check their Twitter notifications; bricklayers can’t demolish their wall-in-progress and start again. For 20 years I had a real job I was good at: fixing other people’s novels. Now, however, that I work alone, making up stories, I am locked in a battle between self-doubt and self-discipline, and the former usually wins. I have the concentration of… oh, I like your shoes. It is so much easier to plummet down the sinkhole of Twitter, or clean the front door with baby wipes, or update one’s log of Terrible Comments Made At Readings, or potter in the garden during the busy season (Feb-Oct), than to sit at one’s desk in front of Draft 18/b, trying to scale the wall of self-loathing, certain that this novel is doomed.

Mendelson’s solution (one that has very often worked for me) is to get out.

Some writers like cafes: the loving waiters included in their acknowledgements; the flapjacks. But I always sit by the loud idiot. Besides, my back is, even by writer standards, bad, and unsuited to distressed metal furniture. Where else is there? My criteria are modest: excellent people-watching; good seating; quiet without privacy. The answer, thank the sweet Lord, is the British Library.

The BL is an idyll for chatty introverts: enough familiar faces to keep one from utter loneliness, yet absolute solitude for as long as one can stay at one’s desk. And I can stay there, because they let me use an office chair, and I stretch regularly, left, right, left. There are always coughers and sniffers, odd regulars—Stompy Woman, Man Who Coughs Like a Sea Lion—but the prevailing atmosphere is of industrious near-quiet, and one is too visible to sleep or weep or pick one’s split ends for long.

For me the quiet study rooms—except when a gaggle of giggling girls occupy the adjacent room—at the newer Cuyahoga County libraries are a magical haven. I have plenty of places to write at home: my office, a wonderful back deck when the weather cooperates, my writing desk looking out over our wee meadow when the temperature drops or rain is falling; but all of those come with inherent distractions. At the library I can put my back to the door and with absolutely nothing in front of me except three blank walls and the project at hand, I can disappear into the work.

Writing is deep work. We need to treat our vocation as such and do all we can to remove ourselves from the other world when we enter our own.

On a very important Friday night in Brunswick, Ohio, Blue Devil Quarterback Rodney Axson made a fateful decision and became the first high school student to follow the example of San Francisco 49ers Quarterback Colin Kaepernick in protest of xenophobic bigotry and police violence against young African American men (and women) like himself.

Axson’s principal and others responsible for his education, came to his support. Others have not been so fortunate. The numbers of other high school athletes following the example of Kaepernick and Axson is growing and we should all be very happy about that. What we must deplore is the violent reaction of xenophobic bigots of those tasked with shepherding student’s education unable to fathom how to properly exercise our Constitutional rights.

Zaid Jilani and Naomi LaChance, reporting in Students Are Pulling a Kaepernick All Over America—and Being Threatened for It for The Intercept, write:

Students are being threatened with punishment for not participating in rituals surrounding the national anthem or Pledge of Allegiance—and they are fighting back.

Since NFL 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick sat during the national anthem in August to protest oppression of people of color, many Americans, particularly professional athletes and students, have followed suit. But their constitutional right to engage in such gestures of dissent is not always being respected.

Threats from school administrators and teachers have put free speech advocates like the ACLU on high alert. At Lely High School, a public school in Naples, Florida, the principal told students that they would be removed from athletic events if they refused to stand during the national anthem — though he said the quote was misunderstood when the ACLU of Florida reached out.

“You will stand, and you will stay quiet. If you don’t, you are going to be sent home, and you’re not going to have a refund of your ticket price,” Lely High School Principal Ryan Nemeth told students.

Nemeth was flat out wrong.

“The Supreme Court ruled in 1943 that public schools may not constitutionally force students to salute the flag,” Lee Rowland, a First Amendment attorney who works with the ACLU, told The Intercept. “That ruling is crystal clear about a student’s right not to be compelled into patriotism by their government, and it is over 70 years old.”

The ruling that Rowland references came after many Jehovah’s Witnesses in the United States began to refuse to salute the flag in solidarity with their brethren in Nazi Germany who were being arrested for refusing to salute that country’s fascist flag.

The action by the American Jehovah’s Witnesses provoked a backlash, and a number of followers of the faith were persecuted for refusing to salute. In West Virginia, a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses brought suit after their children were sanctioned for doing so.

The court ruled in favor of the family. In his opinion, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson wrote, “Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.”

Nemeth is just one example of how adults in schools are behaving like petulant children.

In Worcester, Massachusetts, a high school football player was told that he would be forced to sit out a game for kneeling during the national anthem — since then, his suspension was terminated.

“I’m standing up for the injustice that happens to black people every day, not just cops killing black people. We are disrespected and mistreated everywhere we go on a daily basis because of our skin color and I’m sick of it,” Mike Oppong, a junior at Doherty Memorial High School, told a reporter.

A student at Lower Lake High School in Lower Lake, California, Leilani Thomas, was punished for the first time since she first began sitting out the Pledge of Allegiance in second grade.

Thomas, a member of the Native American Pomo Tribe, is protesting the United States’ systematic abuse of native peoples. After a teacher lowered her grade for sitting, the school moved Thomas to a class with a different teacher.

“[The teacher] told me I was being disrespectful and I was pretty mad,” Leilani told ABC 10. “She was being disrespectful to me also, saying I was making bad choices, and I don’t have the choice to sit during the pledge.”

Too many people feel that the primary function of our education system is to impose a respect for authority and blind obedience to power. In a free society, neither must be true.

(This is the scene that sets up the insight above. Truly. Perfectly. Genius.)

Any writer who believes they don’t need an editor is a fool. I’ve seen the difference. I’ve shaken my head reading well established authors, too good and too arrogant to suffer the critique of an editor, write trash. Colin Firth’s Max Perkins relationship with Jude Law’s Thomas Wolfe in Genius should be a Heminwayesgue epigraph to any writer.

As Perkins was to Wolfe (and Hemingway and many others), so too was Robert Gottlieb to Joseph Heller, Toni Morrison, Mordecai Richler, Edna O’Brien, Ray Bradbury, Cynthia Ozick, Doris Lessing, John Le Carré, Michael Crichton, Robert Caro, Katharine Hepburn and Bill Clinton. (I’ll forgive him the last.) Gottlieb has written an autobiography about his life as an editor.

Michelle Dean, in Robert Gottlieb: the editor who changed American literature for The Guardian, writes:

Avid Reader is, in some way, a book for book nerds. To the average book reader, after all, the world in which Gottlieb has made his career is mostly invisible. Most people do not pay attention to the publisher’s imprint on a given book. Most writers are more egotistical than Heller and do not talk about their editor’s contributions to the finished product in interviews. And most editors share Gottlieb’s view that what’s done in publishing is best kept in publishing. “This is a boring point, but it’s a service job,” Gottlieb told me. “You’re there to serve.”

Many years ago, when I was a magazine editor, my ex-father-in-law asked me to show him something I’d written in the magazine of which I was the editor. I tried to explain to him that my hand was on every word, but he wanted to read my voice. Perhaps that’s the way reading ought to be.

Dean continues:

The essential quality of an editor, he told me, is sympathy. “You don’t take on books with which you do not have a sympathy,” he says early in our conversation. “Only trouble can arise if instead of wanting to make a book that you like even better than it is, you want to change it into something that it isn’t.” The most disastrous thing that can happen in an editing process is for an editor to insist on making the book their own. “For writers, everything is at stake in this relationship,” Gottlieb said. “And they’ve very sensitive to what’s going on even if they’re not conscious of it.”

Writers have to be willing to kill their darlings, and editors have to do their best to save what ought to be saved.

Julia Carrie Wong, reporting in Serena Williams speaks out against police killings: ‘I won’t be silent’ for The Guardian, writes:

Serena Williams spoke out against police killings of African Americans in a heartfelt Facebook post, writing: “As Dr Martin Luther King said ‘There comes a time when silence is betrayal’. I won’t be silent.”

The tennis champion, who is arguably the greatest sportsperson ever, wrote that she was in a car being driven by her nephew, who is black, when she saw a police car on the side of the road on Tuesday.

“I remembered that horrible video of the woman in the car when a cop shot her boyfriend,” she wrote, referencing Philando Castile, whose girlfriend broadcast the aftermath of his killing by police on Facebook Live. “I even regretted not driving myself. I would never forgive myself if something happened to my nephew. He’s so innocent. So were all ‘the others’”.

“Why did I have to think about this in 2016?” she wrote. “Have we not gone through enough, opened so many doors, impacted billions of lives? But I realized we must stride on—for it’s not how far we have come but how much further still we have to go.”

Williams is the latest—and perhaps the most high-profile—star to join a growing movement of black American athletes who are speaking candidly about how racism and police brutality affect their lives.

Can basketball be far behind?

We shouldn’t have to feel like this. —Zianna Oliphant.

When I was seven or eight, one of my aunts gave me a globe of the world for Christmas. I immediately sat down and started running my finger over the surface, reading the strange country names. When I got to West Africa I found Nigeria and Niger. I proclaimed to the room, Look! There’s a country called nigger.

OK, at that young age my spelling wasn’t that great, but I knew the word.

My aunt quickly told me that we didn’t say that word. I don’t know where I knew the word from, but clearly someone, an adult thinking that little ears weren’t around or a playmate showing off, had used the word and even then I knew that the word had some hidden power.

I’ve never used that word since, except when I was calling out a xenophobic bigot. The word has leapt onto the media stage in recent weeks with the verbal attacks on Colin Kaepernick, Rodney Axson and the other athletes taking a knee or expressing themselves in other ways during the singing of the Star Spangled Banner to open sporting events.

When I read these stories, I almost always see a mention similar to this:

But just five days ago, @j0es_ tweeted that “Colin Kaepernick need to go back to africa dumb f–king n—-r”. And no, he didn’t censor his words, we did. [Emphasis mine, JH] And weeks earlier, when Eric Reid joined Kaepernick’s protest, @barry0hBama retweeted a Yahoo! story about that with a creative headline: “Colin Kaepernick protests national anthem again, is joined by #n—-r teammate”. Note the hashtag, too, the deliberate push to draw attention to a word with so much racial hatred.

Now, is there anyone reading this, feck, is there anyone on the planet who reads n—-r that doesn’t hear nigger in their head? Once we hear a word, like that little boy at Christmas, we can’t unhear the word. I don’t use the word in public for the same reason I don’t use lots of offensive words I know, they’re offensive. That should not, however, allow us to self censor the offensive words of others when we’re reporting on the offensive use.

I’ll allow that you might argue using n-word or n—-r accomplishes the goal without being offensive, but I just don’t buy that. If we hear the word in our heads, and we do, resorting to code words just makes us look silly and allows, as Lenny Bruce argued, the word to retain power.

We shouldn’t use the word ourselves unless we’re calling out the xenophobic bigots (or the group I call XBATs), but we must not shy away from being responsible adults. Now there will be some who will say that if the niggers can use nigger then I can use nigger. No you can’t. You can’t because your xenophobic bigoted brain doesn’t understand what Wilmore said.

You might be scratching your head at this point, wondering why I used the convoluted phrase xenophobic bigot when most people just use racist. I do so for much the same reason I avoid using terrorism. The other day I found a photocopy left on the machine at school with the headline: Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Race. The document makes a rock-solid case for why race is an artificial concept:

1. Race is a modern idea. Ancient societies, like the Greeks, did not divide people according to physical differences, but according to religion, status, class or even language. The English word “race” turns up for the first time in a 1508 poem by William Dunbar referring to a line of kings.

2. Race has no genetic basis—Not one characteristic, trait or even gene distinguishes all the members of one so-called race from all the members of another so-called race.

3. Human subspecies don’t exist—Unlike many animals, modern humans simply haven’t been around long enough, nor have populations been isolated enough, to evolve into separate subspecies or races. On average, only one of every thousand of the nucleotides that make up our DNA differ one human from another. We are one of the most genetically similar of all species.

I applaud all but one of the points: number nine:

Race isn’t biological, but racism is still real. Race is a powerful social idea that gives people different access to opportunities and resources.

All of that is absolutely true. Because all of that is absolutely true, we shouldn’t be talking about an artificial concept that gives people different access to opportunities and resources. The quick response from some will be: What about affirmative action? How, they will argue, can we address, as Ta-Nehisi Coates so well sets the table: Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. without using race?

I don’t know. If I did I’d probably be sitting on the Supreme Court. Maybe we can’t. From where I sit, however, this is a linguistic fence—and as a writer I am firmly committed to the truth that words matter— we must hurdle.

Suggestions?

I don’t think so, but when you look a the above poll results (click on the image and then vote select “view results” to see the current tally) from this week’s North Royalton Post, four out of five respondents do not support professional athletes protesting the National Anthem, you get that the southwest corner of Cuyahoga County is not a liberal bastion.

(I was one of only 19 people who said: Yes. In fact, I would do the same thing.)

Full disclosure: when I talk to my eastside friends about my move to North Royalton a few years ago, I jokingly tell them that I moved to the anti-Cleveland Heights. I do see Trump signs (no Hillary signs yet) as I drive through North Royalton on my way to work in Orange. I do see Gadsen flags in front yards and pick-up trucks flying the Confederate Battle Flag, I buy my groceries in Strongsville where Tim Russo shot the McCain-Palin Mob video.

But did I move to Klan Kountry?

Mansfield B. Frazier writes:

In my sometimes-scathing style I questioned the wisdom of blacks moving into hostile territory instead of strengthen [sic. Fair is fair, Mansfield. JH] their own communities. I received this email in response:

I recently stumbled across your article pertaining to my family. I would first like to say, you made quite a few assumption that you obviously know absolutely nothing about. If you would like factual information about why I “consciously” made the decision to move my family to Brunswick I [sic] open to speak to you. For the record, I do not have ” low self esteem” nor am I trying to “outrun my blackness”. I am very proud of who I am and where I came from. What you didn’t bother to mention in your article is I’m obviously an intelligent, educated Black Woman who made a choice for her children that would not only help to mold them into well rounded individuals but would also provide them with the tools and education that they’ll need to be successful in life. I look forward to hearing from you.

Thank you, Danielle Axson

I responded:

Ms. Axson,

I do have to question your intelligence (at least to some extent) since you obviously didn’t factor in the racism your son could (and did) face in Brunswick. There were many other places that your family could have moved to that would have provided all of the positive things you want for your son, without the potential negatives of racial hatred.

I just can’t understand how moving into what essentially is Klan country is a good thing. The proof of that comment is this: Where are all of the supposedly “good” upstanding white citizens of Brunswick? [Well, I’m in North Royalton, but I still think that qualifies me. JH] Why are they not speaking out and saying what was done to your son should not and will not be tolerated in Brunswick? The reason is, these kids on the football team were just giving voice to what their parents feel [sic.].

You set your son up for this incident by not thinking through your decision to move into a racist environment. If you don’t understand that, I have nothing more to say to you on the matter.

Stay well and all the best to you and your family.

She responded:

And it is closed minded, individuals like yourself that help contribute to the underlying issues. I gave you an opportunity to get the whole story but I guess it makes you feel better about yourself, to form your own 1 sided opinion and question my intelligence.

You have a nice life.

I responded in turn:

I’m completely open to you explaining to me why you decided to move into Brunswick. Write it down and I’ll read it.

I’m also a radio host. You can call into my show on Sunday evening at 8:05 pm if you want to debate the issue.

In the interim I got a call from Michael Nelson, the new head of the NAACP (who has gotten involved in the case), who stated that Cleveland schools were so bad the Axson family had little choice but to move their family to a city where their child could get a better education. He then proceeded to place the blame on Frank Jackson.

I explained that I could understand their feeling—but moving to Brunswick? There are many places in between Cleveland and Klan country where a black family could have moved to.

But the larger issue is this: The reason Cleveland schools are struggling is because middle-class blacks abandoned the city for suburbs both near and far; and that began long before Frank Jackson became mayor.

I live in Hough, and am proud to say my wife and I built our home here back in 2000, when we could have built it anywhere in the county. We actually like being around our kith and kin.

No one should blame Frank Jackson (who still lives on East 39th Street, by the way) for the sad state of affairs of inner-city Cleveland neighborhoods and schools. If you want to blame anyone, blame the black folks that abandoned the city starting over 50 years ago, all in the name of integration, which has proven to be a failed notion. Some blacks, like the Axsons, are families without a community. They don’t want to live among their own, and whites really don’t want them either.

Mansfield’s explanation of why Cleveland Schools are so bad is simplistic. In 1988 I considered buying a home in Ohio City or Lakewood to be closer to my job in Middleburg Heights. I decided instead to buy a home on the north side of Monticello in Cleveland Heights. While I was not thinking of having children at the time, I have over the years talked to young couples of a variety of backgrounds who did buy homes in Cleveland who told me that they would sell those homes if they had children simply because the schools weren’t acceptable.

Eastside suburban school districts have a problem with school-age children moving in with relatives elsewhere as a way of escaping Cleveland’s school system. Black flight did not cause this problem. I would suggest a deep dive into back issues of Point Of View or Roldo Bartimole’s writings here, particularly the decades of tax diversion away from Cleveland schools, for a better understanding.

I’ve written before that Rodney Axson Sr. has much to be proud of in his son. I can now say that about Danielle Axson as well.

Then there’s this from Wiley Miller:

The 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution, widely assumed to simply end slavery, doesn’t. The amendment reads:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, [emphasis mine, JH] shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Two books—WEB DuBois’ Black Reconstruction in America and Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877—make up the backbone of the research for Absent Son, my current novel-in-progress. Both works detail how even before the ratification of the 13th Amendment at the end of 1865, local political forces in the South passed and enforced laws governing vagrancy to feed a prison-to-plantation system to keep the cotton flowing to the North. Ava DuVernay’s film documents how that system continues to the present day.

Nigel M Smith, in The 13th: inside Ava DuVernay’s Netflix prison documentary on racial inequality writes:

[DuVernay’s The 13th] examines why the US has produced the highest rate of incarceration in the world, with the majority of those imprisoned being African American. The title of the film refers to the 13th amendment to the constitution: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.”

Beginning with DW Griffith’s technically groundbreaking but profoundly racist 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, The 13th is reported to take in the civil rights movement, the 1994 Crime Bill, which extended the death penalty and encouraged states to lengthen prison sentences, and the surge of the Black Lives Matter movement. It makes its debut on Friday at the New York film festival, the first non-fiction film to ever do so. The festival director and selection committee chair, Kent Jones, has said in a statement that The 13th is a “great film” and “an act of true patriotism”.

The trailer sets up DuVernay’s documentary as a provocative a mix of archival footage and testimonies from activists, politicians and historians, including Michelle Alexander, Bryan Stevenson, Van Jones, Newt Gingrich, Angela Davis, Senator Cory Booker, Grover Norquist, Khalil Muhammad, Craig DeRoche, Shaka Senghor, Malkia Cyril and Henry Louis Gates Jr. Hillary Clinton’s controversial “super-predators” remark from a 1996 speech also makes an appearance.

The 13th debuts on Netflix and in select theaters on 7 October, DuVernay, best known for directing 2014’s Oscar-nominated Selma, had kept the project a secret from the public during its production

This one film may justify my Netflix subscription.

Note, in the group above, the number of people standing but not placing their hand over their heart and the number of people who do place their hand over their heart but do not remove their caps, and then there are the people standing but not paying attention to the song.

A little more than a month ago, Colin Kaepernick remained seated during the singing of our national anthem as a protest against continuing murder by police of African Americans in the United States. The protest continues to spread beyond professional football and now people in the stands are joining in.

From The Associated Press in College players join in raising fists for anthem as Kaepernick’s protest speads we learn:

Football players for Michigan and Michigan State along with a group of students at North Carolina raised their fists during the national anthem Saturday.

The gestures at the games come following a week punctuated by riots in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the killing of an unarmed black man in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Three Michigan State players—Delton Williams, Kenney Lyke and Gabe Sherrod—held their right fists in the air while standing on the sideline before the No8 Spartans hosted No11 Wisconsin.

“Whether somebody salutes, puts the hand over their heart or does something else, everybody has a choice to make,” Michigan State coach Mark Dantonio added after the Spartans’ 30-6 loss. “Our young people are in college, and I can promise you one thing, that when the flag is presented in some respect, I guess it becomes much more important now. It’s not just, oh by the way, we’ll just stand for ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’.

Coach Dantonio is right. We daily must decide if we are to be an upstander or a bystander.

Dan Labbe, in Andrew Hawkins on national anthem protests: ‘It’s not so much about the kneeling as much as it is about the message’ for The Plain Dealer, writes:

If Miami Dolphins players continue their protest during Sunday’s national anthem before their game against the Browns, wide receiver Andrew Hawkins—as outspoken as any NFL player in regards to police violence against African-Americans—supports the message those players and others in the NFL and other sports are sending.

“I support it,” Hawkins said of the protests, started by 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick during the preseason and other players since. “It’s not so much about the kneeling as much as it is about the message. And it’s a message that you guys all know I’m passionate about and we’ve kind of been through this before.”

Two seasons ago, Hawkins wore a shirt during warm-ups prior to the Browns’ game against the Bengals that read “Justice for Tamir Rice and John Crawford.” It was referring, of course, to the police shootings of 12-year-old Rice in Cleveland and Crawford, who was shot in a Wal-Mart in Beavercreek, Ohio after waving an air rifle.

This story will not go away, and that is a very good reality.

An XBAT is a Xenophobic Bigoted Anonymous Troll. Since I began following Rodney Axson’s story on The Plain Dealer‘s website I’ve identified several of these particularly odious creatures and now follow them with the intent of injecting a bit of sanity into their ravings.

I am a rabid defender of free speech as guaranteed under the First Amendment of our Constitution. All of these individuals have a perfect constitutional right to express their vile and offensive views, but, free speech cuts all ways. I, and I hope others, understand that the proper way to respond to offensive speech is never with censorship, but rather with more speech.

Just as the Klan was humiliated in Northeast Ohio a couple of decades ago by counter demonstrators who lined the path of their sad march, so too can we convince the XBATs infesting the Plain Dealer site that they are just as sad and shameful as hooded Klan members.

So, if you feel like doing a good deed and striking a blow for light and decency like one of my heroes—Stetson Kennedy—then adopt an XBAT like Col Kurtz, Razorback (originally Xafcop), Deplorable (originally Whitestorm), 66 or Todd.

Follow them and every time they drop one of their turds, write a response and let them know that you expect them to clean up their mess.

In Season 4, Episode 17 of Glee, with Mr. Schuester out sick, Sam and Blaine assign their gleemates to sing guilty pleasures: songs they’re too embarrassed to admit they love. When I watched the show I couldn’t think of any song or band that I would feel that way about, but watching the above video, I realize that my guilty pleasure is the whole show.

I’ll accept that MsMojo knows more about the topic than I, but, as is the case with all such lists, there were songs that I had hoped would be there that got no mention. Having watched the show only through Season 5, Episode 18, I can say that didn’t make her list. These are my two favorite covers: Safety Dance by Men Without Hats and Raise Your Glass by Pink.

So, here’s a core fail of all the people who subscribe to the whole America, Love It Or Leave It philosophy: if the founders had followed that advice we all would still be bowing and curtsying to Queen Elizabeth as our rightful sovereign. The United States of America, as so perfectly demonstrated by The Son’s Of Liberty at the Boston Tea Party, is a nation founded on protest. (The irony here of the TEA party is not lost on me.)

In that world, Mike Dikta would be wearing a redcoat and singing God Save The Queen. Bryan Armen Graham, in Mike Ditka to Colin Kaepernick: ‘Get the hell out’ if you don’t like America, writes for The Guardian:

Hall of Fame coach Mike Ditka has leveled blistering criticism at Colin Kaepernick’s decision to kneel during the national anthem, saying he has “no respect” for the San Francisco 49ers quarterback whose protest has sparked a national discussion over racial injustice, inspired dozens of NFL players to follow suit and landed him on the cover of Time magazine.

I think it’s a problem, anybody who disrespects this country and the flag,” the longtime NFL coach said in a radio interview on KRLD-FM in Dallas. “If they don’t like the country, if they don’t like our flag, get the hell out. That’s what I think.

“I have no respect for Colin Kaepernick. He probably has no respect for me, that’s his choice. My choice is that I like this country, I respect our flag, and I don’t see all the atrocities going on in this country that people say are going on.

“I see opportunities if people want to look for opportunity. Now if they don’t want to look for them, then you can find problems with anything, but this is the land of opportunity because you can be anything you want to be if you work. Now if you don’t work, that’s a different problem.

Thankfully, we do not live in Dikta’s dream world. I don’t think that, as anthem’s go, The Star Spangled Banner is such a great example, but I do believe that God Save The Queen would be far worse for us.

I’ll have to wait until I can buy a newsstand copy next week to read the story, but Colin Kaepernick taking-a-knee cover is already big news as evidenced by the headlines this morning: Colin Kaepernick Protest So Big, It Deserved Cover… Says Time Mag; Ray Lewis Hates on Colin Kaepernick Getting Time Magazine Cover; Colin Kaepernick set to appear on the cover of Time magazine; and much, much more.

John McWhorter, writing in Colin Kaepernick Had No Choice but to Kneel for Time, had this to say this week:

The idea that Colin Kaepernick’s refusal to stand during the national anthem is unpatriotic fails doubly: first, in a mistaken notion of what real patriotism is, and second in missing a larger point.

For one, the idea that to not stand while the anthem is played signals a lack of allegiance to one’s nation is simplistic to the point of stretching plausibility, seemingly designed more as a way to hate on someone than to grapple with the complexities of the real world. Is patriotism a matter of either/or? Perhaps in terms of military service, although we find gray lines even there.

Elsewhere, however, critique and even scolding are fundamental facets of loving. What would be unpatriotic of Kaepernick, given his views, would be to refrain from sitting out the national anthem out of an unreflective sense of patriotism as an on/off switch. Kaepernick thinks his country is capable of changing and wants to help it do so.

How else was he supposed to say so in a way that would get attention, which is rather basic to contributing to an ideological moment? Was he supposed to tweet?

I haven’t bought, or read, a copy of Time for a very long time. I will be doing so next week.

Ralph Nader, in BreakingThroughPower.org–Ready for Democracy!, writes:

Are the people ready for democracy? This question was leveled by monarchs, despots and authoritarian rulers post-World War II when stirrings for freedom in less developed countries blossomed. We often heard apologists for the western colonial powers—the British, French, Portuguese, etc.—say that the Indians, the Arabs and the Africans were not “ready for democracy.” By that they meant people didn’t have the experience, wherewithal, or desire to do what was necessary to govern themselves.

In our own country, are we ready to revive, repair and reclaim our deteriorating democratic institutions from the 24/7 drumming of corporatism and its corporate state? Not so far!
Congress and state legislatures score very low in approval polls by detached, inactive citizens. Our courts are operating on squeezed budgets and doctrines that obstruct and severely ration justice. Even using the courts is a major burden for most people except for the rich and powerful.

No western country places more obstacles on voters and for third-party challengers. Limited access for third-parties restricts voices and choices at election time. Deep inequalities in income, wealth and power are not improving. We have the second lowest voting turnout among almost three dozen western nations.

It has been said that democracy is not a spectator sport. By definition it must be a participatory duty that we impose on ourselves. Apart from jury Continue Reading »