A town called Anna

Readers my recall my review of the film Green Book (2018) about a black classical pianist and his white driver going on a road trip during the Jim Crow era as part of a concert tour. The title of the film came from a travel guide called The Negro Motorist Green Book that was written by a US postal worker Victor Hugo Green to advise black travellers about what towns to avoid and what places they could stay at and eat. One of the most important pieces of information was to avoid so-called ‘sundown’ towns.

Logan Jaffe of ProPublica Illinois writes about one such small town called Anna in rural Illinois that had such a history and how it is slowly, very slowly, trying to put it behind them, though with only partial success.
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Bloomberg running for president? Sure, why not?

If there is one thing that shows how corrupt and ridiculous politics in the US has become, it is that the mere report that former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg is considering entering the race for the Democratic nomination for president has gained so much media attention. The reason for this is, of course, that he is a billionaire and nothing gives you more ‘credibility’ in the media on anything at all than being very rich, and the fact that he says he is willing to spend a lot of money on his candidacy just adds to that perception.

To me what his moves signifies is that the oligarchs are really concerned that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are drawing so much attention and doing so well in the polls and that Joe Biden just does not have what it takes to win and his understudies Pete Buttigieg and Kamala Harris are not likely to succeed if he fails.

As Sanders says about this new development:

It is easy to believe this is true

A new book by an anonymous author described only as “a senior official in the Trump administration” describes Donald Trump as being even worse than we supposed. There was always a question as to whether Trump was actually what he seemed to be, petulant, narcissistic, vindictive, irrational, ignorant, misogynistic, racist, xenophobic, and corrupt, or whether at least part of that was a deliberate persona adopted by him because it plays well to his base. This book says that he really is as bad as he seems, so much so that there were plans for a large number of cabinet members to resign en masse in order to show to the world how bad things were.
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Ted Rall urges progressives to seize the moment

The cartoonist and columnist says that Trump’s presidency is what has galvanized the progressive movement and that they must seize this moment and avoid the siren call of nominating a Hillary Clinton clone such as Joe Biden. Instead they must take this opportunity to drag the Democratic party away from the Obama-Clinton-Biden Republican-lite mentality that has sucked the party into a neoliberal quagmire.

He says that Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump has actually worked out well for progressives who tend to be marginalized whenever Democrats win the presidency with their usual neoliberal candidates.
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The lesser-known ugly history of sugar plantation slavery in the US

When I think of the history of slave labor in the US, I tend to think of cotton fields where slaves were brutalized. But an article by Khalil Gibran Muhammad in The 1619 Project (pages 70-77) brought to my attention the vast scale of slavery in sugar plantations, centered in Louisiana, where the working conditions were arguably even worse. Muhammad says that Christopher Columbus brought sugar cane stalks on his second voyage and that it was the presence of slave labor that shifted sugar from a luxury commodity to what it is now.

In Europe at that time, refined sugar was a luxury product, the backbreaking toil and dangerous labor required in its manufacture an insuperable barrier to production in anything approaching bulk. It seems reasonable to imagine that it might have remained so if it weren’t for the establishment of an enormous market in enslaved laborers who had no way to opt out of the treacherous work.
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One final indignity for Trump

As if the other results were not bad enough for Donald Trump, we have the case of Juli Bricksman, a cyclist in Virginia, who in 2017 was being passed by the Trump motorcade and took the opportunity to flip him off.

She later explained why she did it.

“It was just sort of like, here I am on my bike. I’ve got nothing, right?” Briskman told the Guardian in November 2017. “This is pretty much the only thing I had to express my opinion. He wasn’t going to hear me through bullet-proof glass … So that was pretty much how I could say what I wanted to say, right?”

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Implications of yesterday’s election results

The US seems to be in perpetual election cycle mode. There were some state and local elections yesterday and the results were interesting. Much attention has been paid to the governor’s race in Kentucky where the incumbent Republican Matt Bevin narrowly lost 49.2-48.8% to Democrat Andy Beshear who has claimed victory even though Bevin has yet to concede. Kentucky is a solidly Republican state though Democrats have won the governorships before and indeed Beshear’s father was governor before Bevin. There may be a recount, though the Republican senate president has ominously threatened to use an obscure state law that has not been used for 120 years that says that the state legislature can decide the result of a ‘contested’ election. Since the legislature is Republican, we know how that will turn out. But if he does carry out that threat, expect to see furious legal challenges.
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Elizabeth Warren’s single payer health care plan

She has released her plan to provide universal health care coverage through a single payer system that will save ordinary people money by producing savings and charging rich people and corporations to pay for it. Naturally, this has aroused opposition from all those who benefit from the current system (hospitals, doctors, health insurance and drug companies). But it is also being criticized by other Democratic candidates such as Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar, and Pete Buttigieg, all of whom represent the corporate-friendly Democratic party establishment.
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Grifters gotta grift: Marianne Williamson edition

Many of us assumed that vanity candidates for the presidency did so as a means to gain publicity for their other ventures. Tessa Stuart writes how erstwhile presidential candidate Marianne Williamson, who thinks that it was collective prayer that caused Hurricane Dorian to veer away from the mainland, started hawking various seminars and other products offered by an entity she created called The Williamson Institute. (In case you were wondering, Williamson is still technically in the Democratic primary race though she did not qualify for the third and fourth debates and is unlikely to do so for the fifth.)
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