Reflections on the working poor

(Every year at Case Western Reserve University where I used to work, the incoming class of students were assigned a book to read which formed a theme for some of the programs during the year. The first one was a welcoming program at Severance Hall, the performing center of the Cleveland Orchestra. The university president and other officials would give remarks and the program would end with me sharing my reflections on the book. I am posting today (slightly edited) the text of the talk I gave in 2007 about that year’s book, journalist David Shipler’s The Working Poor: Invisible in America. I stumbled across this while going through my computer archives.)
 
Welcome to Case Western Reserve University! The people you will encounter during your four years here , the staff, faculty, and fellow students, are very different from the people described in David Shipler’s book The Working Poor: Invisible in America and I would like to address the question: What has created that difference?
 
Two answers are usually given. One is that we live in a meritocracy, and that we got where we are because of our own virtues, that we are smarter or worked harder or had a better attitude and work ethic than those who didn’t make the cut. I am sure that everyone in this auditorium has been repeatedly told by their family and friends and teachers that they are good and clever, and it is tempting to believe it. What can be more gratifying than to be told that one’s success is due to one’s own ability and efforts? It makes it all seem so well deserved, that there is justice in the world.
 
Another answer is that luck plays an important role in educational success. I suspect that most of us were fortunate enough to be born into families that had most, if not all, of the following attributes: stable homes and families, good schools and teachers, safe environments, good health, and sufficient food and clothing. Others are not so fortunate and this negatively affects their performance in school and later in life.
 
But there is a third possibility that is not often discussed and that is that the educational system has been deliberately designed so that just a small number end up like you and a much larger number of people end up like the people in the book, people who not only have failed but more significantly have learned to think of themselves as failures.
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Preparing for confrontations with CBP and ICE

Two couples who are friends of mine are traveling separately to Europe over the summer. Each couple consists of one US-born person and the other a naturalized citizen. When describing their holiday plans, they spoke only of their itinerary and what they looked forward to seeing and doing, By contrast, if I were to be making a trip by air, even within the US, Trump’s America now requires me to think of what I should do if I am confronted by agents of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). This is no idle concern on my part, since my political views could well trigger interviews with them.

My post about the detention and questioning at Chicago airport of social media activist Hasan Piker by CBP on his return to the US from a trip to France made me think about what might be going on behind the scenes that trigger such detentions. In Piker’s case, there did not seem to be any obvious clues such as past violations of the law. What the CBP seemed to be focused on were his public criticisms of Trump and of Israel. But even if there had been some legal infraction, even a minor one, what is the process by which ‘violators’ are identified and pulled aside for questioning?
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Some sports fans are the worst

In a basketball game between two professional teams in the WNBA, the Indiana Fever and the Chicago Sky, Caitlin Clark of the former team was charged with a ‘flagrant foul’ against Angel Reese of the latter team. This resulted in some fans hurling abuse at Reese.

The WNBA says it is looking into allegations of “hateful fan comments” during Indiana Fever’s fiery win over the Chicago Sky on Saturday.
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Sources have told the Indianapolis Star the investigation is based around racist comments directed towards Reese from a member or members of the crowd, although they are not believed to have been directly related to the incident with Clark. On Sunday, the WNBA said it is looking into the matter without going into specifics.

“The WNBA strongly condemns racism, hate, and discrimination in all forms – they have no place in our league or in society. We are aware of the allegations and are looking into the matter,” the league said in its statement.

The Indiana Fever likewise issued a statement saying they are aware of the allegations and adding that the team are working “closely” with the WNBA in its investigation. “We stand firm in our commitment to providing a safe environment for all WNBA players,” the team said.

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What you should do in the police state that the US has become

In Trump’s America, no one is safe from government harassment and abuse. As we have seen, anyone can be picked up while walking along the street by masked people, bundled into unmarked vehicles, and ‘disappeared’, just like what happens in the worst kinds of despotic regimes. The abducted person may end up in a distant detention center and kept in awful conditions or even deported to countries like El Salvador that are notorious for their terrible prisons. You can see a list of recent such cases here.

So it is a good idea for everyone to know what rights they have and what they should do if ever they ever find themselves being taken in and questioned by the police or agents of the government for anything at all, however minor it may seem, like a traffic stop. This one-minute long video by longtime civil rights attorneys Bill Goodman and Denise Heberle, who look like a pair of genteel grandparents, succinctly tells you exactly what you should do in such situations.


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Supreme Court blocks Trump’s efforts to quickly deport Venezuelans

In the previous post, I wrote about the Trump gang’s efforts to quickly deport large numbers of Venezuelans using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 that has only been used three times in its history: the Civil War, World War I, and World War II, claiming that these people were members of the gang Tren de Aragua and formed the invading force of the Venezuelan government.

Today, in a 7-2 opinion (predictably with Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissenting), the Supreme Court ruled that the detainees must be given time to challenge their deportations

The court emphasized that the men — whom the Trump administration has labeled “alien enemies” — are entitled to more due process than the administration has so far provided. That means advance notice of their deportations and a meaningful opportunity to challenge the deportations in court, the justices wrote in an unsigned opinion.

In particular, the justices faulted the administration for its attempt last month to carry out swift deportations just one day after providing a bare-bones deportation notice to the detainees. The Supreme Court intervened at the time to stop those deportations, and in Friday’s decision, the court elaborated on its decision and extended its order blocking them.

“Notice roughly 24 hours before removal, devoid of information about how to exercise due process rights to contest that removal, surely does not pass muster,” the court’s opinion said, without deciding exactly how much notice is required.

A small victory for due process against a government that has no regard for the law or human rights.

Trump administration policy: “Only tell us what we want to hear”

The Trump gang, in its feverish determination to deport as many people as possible, has been running roughshod over constitutional protections such as due process. It has argued that this is allowed because the US is currently being invaded by foreign forces. This would come a surprise to pretty much anyone given the lack of fighting in the towns and rural areas of the country. Few would be even able to tell you who the invading forces are. To put you out of any suspense, the invading army is supposed to consist of members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua acting under the direction of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro. As a result Trump is invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to justify the arbitrary arrest, detention, and deportation on various trumped up charges that the people are members of this invading army.
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Film review Oppenheimer (2023), runaway fusion, and runaway AI

In the 2023 film Oppenheimer, during the Manhattan project to develop the nuclear bomb, one of the concerns was whether the nuclear explosion created during a test might create such high temperatures that it leads to the nuclei of nitrogen atoms in the atmosphere fusing together and triggering a chain reaction that essentially sets the atmosphere on fire, frying the entire planet. Oppenheimer tells general Leslie Groves, the director of the project, that the calculations of Arthur Compton showed that the chance of such a thing happening was less that three in a million, and thus acceptable. When Groves said that he was hoping that the answer would be zero, Oppenheimer replied that you could not expect such an answer from theory alone..

While the idea that theory can never give you absolute certainty about anything is correct, the actual story is more complicated. It turns out that the Oppenheimer-Compton story is based on an article written by Pearl S. Buck, based on an interview she had with Compton, and some of the details are apocryphal. Hans Bethe, head of the theoretical program at Los Alamos, who had shown how fusion reactions lay behind the energy production of stars, had concluded early on that the chance of a runaway fusion reaction igniting the air was so small as to not be worth worrying about.
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Tariff uncertainty not over

Chinese and US trade representatives agreed to suspend for 90 days 115% of the sky-high tariffs each had imposed on the other. This still leaves tariffs of 30% on Chinese goods to the US and 10% on US goods to China, plus a few other assorted tariffs that had been in existence earlier.

Trump had been bluffing that the US could withstand the pain that the high tariffs that were clearly causing, in his usual childish way.

Donald Trump on Wednesday acknowledged that his tariffs could result in fewer and costlier products in the United States, saying American kids might “have two dolls instead of 30 dolls”, but he insisted China will suffer more from his trade war.

The US president has tried to reassure a nervous country that his tariffs will not provoke a recession, after a new government report showed the US economy shrank during the first three months of the year.
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“You know, somebody said, ‘Oh, the shelves are going to be open,’” Trump said, offering a hypothetical. “Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls. So maybe the two dolls will cost a couple bucks more than they would normally.”

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A story that will make your blood boil

Price gouging of US consumers by drug companies so that they can make enormous profits off patients so that they can pay their executive massive salaries and inflate their stock prices is a well-known scandal. Yet another example involves a drug known as Revlimid, marketed by a company Celgene to treat the bone cancer known as multiple myeloma.

When David Armstrong was diagnosed in 2023 with this disease, he began a quest to find out why a drug capsule taken daily that costs just 25 cents to make is sold for nearly $1,000. What he found is a tale of disgusting greed and cynicism by the people who run these companies, who kept raising the price over and over again, 26 times in all over the years, just because they can, uncaring about what it did to people desperately trying to live.

That steep tab has put the drug’s lifesaving potential out of reach for some cancer patients, who have been forced into debt or simply stopped taking the drug. The price also helps fuel our ballooning insurance premiums.

They also bought off doctors.
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