A horrifying video has emerged of a black man George Floyd who died in Minneapolis after a police officer pinned him to the ground with his knee on the man’s neck for five minutes, even though the man was saying that he could not breathe and bystanders who recorded the incident said that the man had started bleeding from his nose.
That excellent radio program This American Life just recently won the first-ever Pulitzer prize for excellence in journalism awarded to a radio program. It is well deserved because it is a truly outstanding program. The show they won the prize for dealt with the terrible plight of the migrants who have been turned away at the US-Mexico border because of the cruelty of Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy. They rebroadcast that program last week after winning the prize and you can listen to it here. Back in 2005, I wrote to the program offering to nominate them for a prize for their coverage of the terrible treatment meted out to poor people in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina hit. You can listen to that program here.
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Regular readers of this blog will know that I have never been a fan of former senator, vice-president, and now presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. I strongly favored Bernie Sanders and Biden was way down the list of the many people who sought the nomination. Biden has always seemed to me to be shallow, lacking a central core of convictions, and thus easily swayed by pressure groups, lobbyists, and those whom he considers more powerful than him. He has been, like the Democratic party establishment, a loyal servant of the business class, especially those in the financial sector. His home state of Delaware is the choice of tax-evading and money-laundering companies because of its very loose regulatory structure.
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My ignoring of the Trump campaign emails has resulted in them steadily increasing the inducements offered to me and my recent prediction that this would occur again did in fact happen. It was not the offer of a private lunch with Trump that I had anticipated but even better, as you can see from the text of the email I received.
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What the covid-19 pandemic has revealed, at least as far as the US is concerned, is how delicately balanced the supply and distribution systems are. As long as things are normal, everything appears to run smoothly. But given a large enough disruption, the system can not only not cope, it cannot reconfigure itself quickly enough to meet the challenge. In this case, we have discovered that the supply of goods and services is highly dependent on a just-in-time supply chains for each item that are finely tuned for maximum efficiency and eliminate the need for costly stockpiling of supplies. But the sudden change in the way people live and work has resulted in shortages in some areas along with gluts in others, with no means for quickly redistributing the resources to reach a new equilibrium.
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Trump has fired another government watchdog, this time the inspector general who was investigating transportation secretary Elaine Chao for taking actions that benefit her husband Republican senate majority leader Mitch McConnell who has been fiercely shielding Trump from facing any consequences of his corruption and venality. It is a circle of corruption and cover up. The replacement is, of course, a loyalist.
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Trump’s policies on dealing with the pandemic have been disastrous from the start. After not recognizing the need to take action for about a month early on, a delay that is estimated to have resulted in about 36,000 additional deaths. He has also not provided funding for widespread testing, apparently fearing that would increase the numbers and make him look bad, touted bizarre and even dangerous treatments for covid-19, promised unrealistically quick discoveries of a vaccine, and urged the reopening the country earlier than health experts recommend.
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In the killing of the black jogger by two white men Gregory McMichael and his son Travis that was captured on video, the role of he videographer William Bryan, Jr. was always suspicious. Clearly he was not a mere passerby who happened to have filmed it with a dashcam. He seemed to be following Arbery. He then said he had given the video to the police and local prosecutors who, despite the damning nature of the killing shown on it, did not charge the two men with the murder and indeed did nothing for two months, until the video was leaked to a local media outlet, apparently by Bryan. Bryan was reported to live in the same area and the McMichaels and they knew each other. It was all very murky but highly suspicious
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In an article titled The Pessimistic Style in American Politics appearing in the May 2020 issue of Harper’s Magazine (subscription required), Thomas Frank looks at the origins of the word ‘populism’ and how it went from being used to describe a movement that embraced progressive and egalitarian goals to being deliberately distorted by the elites to make it represent the views of anarchic and reactionary views, and how that revised meaning of the term was used to stop the Bernie Sanders campaign and other reform movements, by arguing that populism unleashes the basest impulses of the mass of people. (The article is excerpted from a new book by Frank titled The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism.)
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The car company is once again in trouble after the release of an ad widely condemned as racist.
Volkswagen has withdrawn a Golf car advertisement posted on its official Instagram page that the company admitted was racist and insulting, saying it would investigate how it came about.
…The advertisement features a woman’s large, pale-skinned hands seeming to push and then flick a black man away from a shiny new, yellow Golf parked on a street. The man is flicked into a cafe called “Petit Colon”, a name with colonial overtones. In the background, jaunty music plays, along with sound effects resembling a computer game.
German television noted that the hand could be interpreted as making a “white power” gesture, while letters that appear on the screen afterwards briefly spell out a racist slur in German.
Juergen Stackmann, the VW brand’s board member for sales and marketing, and Elke Heitmueller, head of diversity management, apologised. “We understand the public outrage at this. Because we’re horrified, too. This video is an insult to all achievements of the civil rights movement. It is an insult to every decent person,” they wrote.
Here’s the ad.
Even apart from the racial overtones, I am baffled by the ad. What exactly is the point that is trying to be made? And how do such things slip through the cracks in a huge company where presumably there are many layers of bureaucracy that must sign off on it before it is released?