The American Caste System

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Caste is not a term often applied to the US. It is considered the language of India.



 Martin Luther King Jr and his wife, Coretta, journeyed to the city of Trivandrum in the state of Kerala, and visited with high-school students whose families were untouchables. The principal made the introduction.

“Young people,” he said, “I would like to present to you a fellow untouchable from the United States of America.”
“For a moment,” he wrote, “I was a bit shocked and peeved that I would be referred to as an untouchable.”
Then he began to think about the reality of the lives of the people he was fighting for – 20 million people, consigned to the lowest rank in the US for centuries, “still smothering in an airtight cage of poverty,” quarantined in isolated ghettoes, exiled in their own country.
And he said to himself: “Yes, I am an untouchable, and every negro in the United States of America is an untouchable.” 
In that moment, he realised that the land of the free had imposed a caste system not unlike the caste system of India, and that he had lived under that system all of his life. It was what lay beneath the forces he was fighting in the US.  A human hierarchy had evolved in the United States, reinforced by their self-interested interpretation of the Bible, a hierarchy of who could do what, who could own what, who was on top and who was on the bottom and who was in between. 
In 1913, Bhimrao Ambedkar, a man born to the bottom of India’s caste system, born an untouchable in the central provinces, arrived in New York City. He came to the US to study economics as a graduate student at Columbia, focused on the differences between race, caste and class. Living just blocks from Harlem, he would see first-hand the condition of his counterparts in the US. He completed his thesis just as the film The Birth of a Nation – the incendiary homage to the Confederate south – premiered in New York in 1915. He would study further in London and return to India to become the foremost leader of the untouchables, and a pre-eminent intellectual who would help draft a new Indian constitution. He would work to dispense with the demeaning term “untouchable”. He rejected the term Harijans, which had been applied to them by Gandhi, to their minds patronisingly. He renamed his people Dalits, meaning “broken people” – which, due to the caste system, they were. It is hard to know what effect his exposure to the American social order had on him personally. But over the years, he paid close attention, as did many Dalits, to the subordinate caste in the US. Indians had long been aware of the plight of enslaved Africans, and of their descendants in the US. In 946, acting on news that black Americans were petitioning the United Nations for protection as minorities, Ambedkar reached out to the best-known African American intellectual of the day, WEB Du Bois. He told Du Bois that he had been a “student of the Negro problem” from across the oceans, and recognised their common fates.
“There is so much similarity between the position of the Untouchables in India and of the position of the Negroes in America,” Ambedkar wrote to Du Bois, “that the study of the latter is not only natural but necessary.”
Du Bois wrote back to Ambedkar to say that he was, indeed, familiar with him, and that he had “every sympathy with the Untouchables of India”. It had been Du Bois who seemed to have spoken for the marginalised in both countries as he identified the double consciousness of their existence. And it was Du Bois who, decades before, had invoked an Indian concept in channelling the “bitter cry” of his people in the US: “Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house?”
There emerged a ladder of humanity, global in nature, as the upper-rung people would descend from Europe, with rungs inside that designation – the English Protestants at the very top, as their guns and resources would ultimately prevail in the bloody fight for North America. Everyone else would rank in descending order, on the basis of their proximity to those deemed most superior. The ranking would continue downward until one arrived at the very bottom: African captives transported in order to build the New World and to serve the victors for all their days, one generation after the next, for 12 generations. There developed a caste system, based upon what people looked like – an internalised ranking, unspoken, unnamed and unacknowledged by everyday citizens even as they go about their lives adhering to it and acting upon it subconsciously, to this day. 
The American caste system began in the years after the arrival of the first Africans to the Colony of Virginia in the summer of 1619, as the colony sought to refine the distinctions of who could be enslaved for life and who could not. Over time, colonial laws granted English and Irish indentured servants greater privileges than the Africans who worked alongside them, and the Europeans were fused into a new identity – that of being categorised as white, the polar opposite of black. The historian Kenneth M Stampp called this assigning of race a “caste system, which divided those whose appearance enabled them to claim pure Caucasian ancestry from those whose appearance indicated that some or all of their forebears were Negroes”. Members of the Caucasian caste, as he called it, “believed in ‘white supremacy’, and maintained a high degree of caste solidarity to secure it”.
Caste is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of others, on the basis of ancestry and often of immutable traits – traits that would be neutral in the abstract, but are ascribed life-and-death meaning in a hierarchy favouring the dominant caste whose forebears designed it. A caste system uses rigid, often arbitrary boundaries to keep the ranked groupings apart, distinct from one another and in their assigned places.  The lingering, millennia-long caste system of India and the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the US relied on stigmatising those deemed inferior in order to justify the dehumanisation necessary to keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom, and to rationalise the protocols of enforcement. A caste system endures because it is often justified as divine will, originating from a sacred text or the presumed laws of nature, reinforced throughout the culture and passed down through the generations.
The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power: which groups have it and which do not. It is about resources: which caste is seen as worthy of them, and which are not; who gets to acquire and control them, and who does not. It is about respect, authority and assumptions of competence: who is accorded these, and who is not. In the American caste system, the signal of rank is what we call race, the division of humans on the basis of their appearance. In the US, race is the primary tool and the visible decoy – the frontman – for caste.
Caste and race are neither synonymous nor mutually exclusive. They can and do coexist in the same culture, and serve to reinforce each other. Caste is the bones, race the skin. Race is what we can see, the physical traits that have been given arbitrary meaning and become shorthand for who a person is. Caste is the powerful infrastructure that holds each group in its place. Caste is fixed and rigid. Race is fluid and superficial, subject to periodic redefinition to meet the needs of the dominant caste in what is now the US. While the requirements to qualify as white have changed over the centuries, the fact of a dominant caste has remained constant from its inception – whoever fit the definition of white, at whatever point in history, was granted the legal rights and privileges of the dominant caste. Perhaps more critically and tragically, at the other end of the ladder, the subordinated caste, too, has been fixed from the beginning as the psychological floor beneath which all other castes cannot fall.
One of the earliest Americans to take up the idea of caste was the antebellum abolitionist and US senator Charles Sumner, as he fought against segregation in the north. “The separation of children in the Public Schools of Boston, on account of color or race,” he wrote, “is in the nature of Caste, and on this account is a violation of Equality.” He quoted a fellow humanitarian: “Caste makes distinctions among creatures where God has made none.”
 “A record of the desperate efforts of the conquering upper classes in India to preserve the purity of their blood persists to until this very day in their carefully regulated system of castes,” wrote Madison Grant, a popular eugenicist, in his 1916 bestseller, The Passing of the Great Race. “In our Southern States, Jim Crow cars and social discriminations have exactly the same purpose.”
In 1944, the Swedish social economist Gunnar Myrdal and a team of the most talented researchers in the country produced a 2,800-page, two-volume work that is still considered perhaps the most comprehensive study of race in the US. It was titled An American Dilemma. Myrdal’s investigation into race led him to the realisation that the most accurate term to describe the workings of US society was not race, but caste.
The anthropologist Ashley Montagu was among the first to argue that race is a human invention – a social construct, not a biological one – and that in seeking to understand the divisions and disparities in the US, we have typically fallen into the quicksand and mythology of race. “When we speak of ‘the race problem in America’,” he wrote in 1942, “what we really mean is the caste system and the problems which that caste system creates in America.”

River Fish Migrations Disappearing

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Populations of migratory river fish around the world have plunged by a “catastrophic” 76% since 1970, an analysis has found.
The decline in migratory fish populations is higher than that for land and ocean animals, whose populations have fallen by an average of 60% in the last 50 years. “Freshwaters are disproportionately at risk to human pressures, since they are affected by everything happening in the surrounding catchment,” said Michelle Jackson, at the University of Oxford.
The fall was even greater in Europe at 93%, and for some groups of fish, with sturgeon and eel populations both down by more than 90%. Populations of sturgeon in the Great Lakes of North America, for example, have dropped by 95% from historic levels.
The average fall in populations was 84% in Latin America, while there has been a 59% decrease in Asia-Oceania, although there is limited data there and not enough from Africa to determine any reliable trend. In North America, the fall was less dramatic, at 28%. This is probably because large declines occurred before 1970, but also as a result of a growing number of dams being removed. “For migratory fish, there’s nothing worse than a dam,” said Zeb Hogan, at the University of Nevada and an author of the new report. Studies have shown only a third of world’s great rivers remain free-flowing, while in Britain, for example, 97% of the river network has been interrupted by human-built structures.
“Catastrophic losses in migratory fish populations show we cannot continue destroying our rivers,” said Arjan Berkhuysen, at the World Fish Migration Foundation. “This has immense consequences for people and nature across the globe. We can and need to act now before these keystone species are lost for good.”

Jewish Zionism and Palestinian Nationalism

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“…Religion and race, national independence and patriotism, are now, from the worker’s point of view, just so many ruling-class devices useful for the purpose, among others, of stirring up hatred when and where they may want it…



 …Socialism alone is worth struggling for. That is the message of the Socialist to all the working-class dupes of the closely-allied superstitions of religious, racial and patriotic rivalries. Jewish workers and Arab workers both suffer, but not because they are Jew or Arab, or because they happen both to be in Palestine, but because they are workers and therefore exploited by those who own and control their means of life. The Jewish workers cannot solve their problems by transferring their misery from New York or Berlin to Jerusalem. The world will be fit for Jewish workers and Arab workers to live in when, and only when, the working-class, as a whole, have gained political control for the establishment of Socialism…”



 Socialist Standard, October 1929.

Hunger Grows

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All around the world, the coronavirus and its restrictions are pushing already hungry communities over the edge, cutting off meager farms from markets and isolating villages from food and medical aid. Virus-linked hunger is leading to the deaths of 10,000 more children a month over the first year of the pandemic, according to an urgent call to action from the United Nations. From Latin America to South Asia to sub-Saharan Africa, more families than ever are staring down a future without enough food. The analysis published Monday found about 128,000 more young children will die over the first 12 months of the virus.



  Further, more than 550,000 additional children each month are being struck by what is called wasting, according to the U.N. — malnutrition that manifests in spindly limbs and distended bellies. Over a year, that’s up 6.7 million from last year’s total of 47 million. Wasting and stunting can permanently damage children physically and mentally, transforming individual tragedies into a generational catastrophe. The rise in child deaths worldwide would reverse global progress for the first time in decades. Deaths of children younger than 5 had declined steadily since 1980, to 5.3 million around the world in 2018, according to a UNICEF report. About 45 percent of the deaths were due to undernutrition.



 “The food security effects of the COVID crisis are going to reflect many years from now,” said Dr. Francesco Branca, the World Health Organization head of nutrition. “There is going to be a societal effect.” 



 Most stunted children never catch up, dampening the productivity of poor countries, according to a report released this month by the Chatham House think tank.



  In Burkina Faso, for example, one in five young children is chronically malnourished. Food prices have spiked, and 12 million of the country’s 20 million residents don’t get enough to eat. Lanizou’s husband, Yakouaran Boue, used to sell onions to buy seeds and fertilizer, but then the markets closed. Even now, a 50-kilogram bag of onions sells for a dollar less, which means less seed to plant for next year.



 “I’m worried that this year we won’t have enough food to feed her,” he said, staring down at his daughter over his wife’s shoulder. “I’m afraid she’s going to die.”



 “Before the disease we didn’t have anything,” said Aminata Mande. “Now with the disease we don’t have anything also.”



 Burkina Faso was already facing a growing food crisis, with rising violence linked to militants cutting families off from their farms. With the advent of the coronavirus, the government closed markets, restricted movement and shut down public transport, making it much harder for traders to buy and sell food. While malnutrition deaths routinely rise during the four-month wait for the next harvest in October, this year is worse than anyone can remember, according to physicians and aid workers. On the World Food Program’s hunger map, nearly all of Burkina Faso is a red zone of need. Even though the Tuy province produces the most corn in the country, food there is not reaching those who need it most. In Tuy between March and April, the number of underweight newborns increased by 40%, signifying that the mothers were most likely malnourished during pregnancy. Child deaths due to malnutrition are also escalating.



 In April, World Food Program head David Beasley warned that the coronavirus economy would cause global famines “of biblical proportions” this year. There are different stages of what is known as food insecurity; famine is officially declared when, along with other measures, 30% of the population suffers from wasting. The agency estimated in February that one in every three people in Venezuela was already going hungry, as inflation rendered many salaries nearly worthless and forced millions to flee abroad. Then the virus arrived.



 “The parents of the children are without work,” said Annelise Mirabal, who works with a foundation that helps malnourished children in Maracaibo, the city in Venezuela thus far hardest hit by the pandemic. “How are they going to feed their kids?”



 These days, many new patients are the children of migrants who are making long journeys back to Venezuela from Peru, Ecuador or Colombia, where their families became jobless and unable to buy food during the pandemic. Others are the children of migrants who are still abroad and have not been able to send back money for more food.



 “Every day we receive a malnourished child,” said Dr. Francisco Nieto, who works in a hospital in the border state of Tachira. He added that they look “like children we haven’t seen in a long time in Venezuela,” alluding to those in famines in parts of Africa. In May, Nieto recalled, after two months of quarantine in Venezuela, 18-month-old twins arrived at his hospital with bodies bloated from malnutrition. The children’s mother was jobless and living with her own mother. She told the doctor she had only been able to feed them a simple drink made with boiled bananas. Nieto said aid groups have provided some relief, but their work has been limited by COVID-19 quarantines. A home set up in Tachira to receive malnourished children after they are released from the hospital is no longer in operation. So now children are sent directly back to their families, many of whom are still unable to feed them properly.



 “It’s very frustrating,” Nieto said. “The children get lost.” 



 In Afghanistan, restrictions on movement prevent many families from bringing their malnourished children to hospitals for food and aid just when they need it most. 



 “Transportation between Kabul and the provinces was not allowed regularly and also people were afraid of coronavirus,” Amiri explained. Last year, 10 times as many malnourished children filled the ward. 



 Afghanistan is now in a red zone of hunger, with severe childhood malnutrition spiking from 690,000 in January to 780,000 — a 13% increase, according to UNICEF. Food prices have risen by more than 15%, and a recent study by Johns Hopkins University indicated an additional 13,000 Afghans younger than 5 could die. Four in 10 Afghan children are already stunted. Stunting happens when families live on a cheap diet of grains or potatoes, with supply chains in disarray and money scarce. 



 The same is true of hospital beds in multiple countries, according to Médecins Sans Frontières.



 In Yemen, restrictions on movement have also blocked the distribution of aid, along with the stalling of salaries and price hikes. The Arab world’s poorest country is suffering further from a fall in remittances and a huge drop in funding from humanitarian agencies.



 Yemen is now on the brink of famine, according to the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, which uses surveys, satellite data and weather mapping to pinpoint the places most in need. A UNICEF report predicted that the number of malnourished children could reach 2.4 million by the end of the year, a 20% increase. 



 Some of the worst hunger still occurs in sub-Saharan Africa. In Sudan, 9.6 million people are living from one meal to the next in acute food insecurity — a 65% increase from the same time last year.



 Lockdowns across Sudanese provinces, as around the world, have dried up work and incomes for millions. The global economic downturn has brought supply chains to a standstill, and restrictions on public transport have disrupted agricultural production. With inflation hitting 136%, prices for basic goods have more than tripled.



 “It has never been easy but now we are starving, eating grass, weeds, just plants from the earth,” said Ibrahim Youssef, director of the Kalma camp for internally displaced people in war-ravaged south Darfur. 



 Long before the pandemic hit, Sudan’s economy had plummeted, especially after the oil-rich south seceded in 2011. Decades of economic mismanagement under Omar al-Bashir led to a surge in food prices, and the transitional government now in power has struggled to stop the tailspin. Natural disasters are making the situation even worse. The country’s production of grain has dropped by 57% compared to last year, largely due to pests and seasonal floods. And swarms of desert locusts have already infested three Sudanese provinces, threatening more losses to farmers. Internally displaced people in the restive provinces of Darfur, Kassala and Kordofan have been hit hardest, and the poorest say they can barely afford one meal a day.



 “The hunger here is not any normal hunger,” said Adam Gomaa, a local activist in Kabkabiya, North Darfur, who helps run displacement camps in the area.



 https://apnews.com/5cbee9693c52728a3808f4e7b4965cbd



Heatwaves and the Racial Divide

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 Extreme heat is among the deadliest weather hazards humanity faces due to the climate crisis, which contributes to thousands of deaths in the US every year.
Heatwaves have been occurring more frequently since the mid-20th century, and there’s mounting consensus among climate scientists that dangerous bouts of high temperatures and humidity will become substantially more common, more severe, and longer-lasting 
The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), reveals dangerous heatwaves are exacerbating systemic racial inequalities, with soaring temperatures expected to further disadvantage communities of colour if greenhouse gas emissions keep rising
Killer heat is already affecting communities unequally: between 1971 and 2000, US counties with more than 25% black residents endured an average of 18 days with temperatures above 100F (38C) compared to seven days per year for counties with fewer than 25% African Americans.
By mid-century if Paris climate accord targets are not met, US counties with larger black populations will face a staggering 72 very hot days a year on average – compared with 36 days in counties with smaller African American populations, according to the UCS.
Latin communities also suffer disproportionately: historically, counties with more than a 25% Hispanic/Latinx residents experienced 13 days very hot days a year, rising to 49 by mid-century if greenhouse gas emissions are not curtailed.
“The significantly higher exposure to extreme heat is an artefact of where black people tend to live in the US which is a legacy of slavery,” said senior climate scientist Kristina Dahl. He added that “Even if rapid action is taken to limit the future temperature rise to 2C, the US can expect a significant increase in the frequency of extreme heat which will affect people of colour most severely as a result of systemic racism. If we blow past that target, the increase and the disparities will be enormous. Extreme heat is a climate justice issue.”
By mid-century, a third of America’s 481 largest cities will endure temperatures above 105F (40.5C) on at least 30 days a year – a rise from just three cities historically (El Centro and Indio, California, and Yuma, Arizona), according to a UCS report from 2019. By the end of this century, this would rise to 60% of cities, which is the equivalent of 180 million Americans at risk of potentially fatal complications caused by heatstroke and heat exhaustion. In this scenario, children wouldn’t be able to play outside and farmers would struggle to get crops to market. Agriculture, an industry which depends on cheap migrant labour, many workers, especially undocumented migrants, already often lack access to crucial mitigation measures such as regular breaks, shade, medical services, adequate clean water and health insurance. Underlying health and environmental hazards which more commonly affect people of colour such as air pollution, diabetes, obesity and high blood pressure, also increase the risk of heat-related illnesses. 
In US cities nationwide, heatwaves disproportionately affect underserved neighbourhoods thanks to the legacy of discriminatory housing policies denying home ownership and basic public services to people of colour, according to research published in Climate earlier this year. This is the result of streets where people of colour lived being graded as “hazardous” starting in the 1930s – otherwise known as redlining – which were then denied a whole range of public and private services including banking, healthcare and parks, while being earmarked for environmentally toxic projects such as landfills and chemical plants. Urban heat islands – characterised by abundant heat-trapping structures such as housing projects and asphalt car parks, and inadequate vegetation – are up to 12.6F hotter than non-redlined neighborhoods in the same city. The heat disparity exists in 94% of the 108 cities analysed. For instance in Birmingham, Alabama, the average temperature in redlined neighbourhoods, which account for 64% of the city, is currently 8F higher than historically white neighbourhoods.
A nationwide study, using data from over 12,000 schools and 10 million middle- and high-school students, researchers found that a 1F hotter-than-average academic year reduces learning by about 1%. But the effects of heat on learning are more pronounced for black and brown students and those living in poorer neighborhoods, because air conditioning – like other essential school infrastructure – is locally funded and unequally distributed.

Women’s Reproduction Rights and the Pandemic

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More research that indicates that the COVID-19 pandemic will undermine the progress women have made in recent years. 

Rates of unplanned pregnancies have fallen around the world, according to new data published by health research organisation the Guttmacher Institute and the UN Human Reproduction Programme (HRP) on Wednesday. Global rates of unintended pregnancies have fallen from 79 per 1,000 women aged 15 to 49 in 1990 to 64 in 2019, thanks in part to a concerted effort to increase access to contraceptives, but there are concerns that decades of progress in reducing the numbers risk being undone by Covid-19, as lockdown restrictions hamper health services.
Zara Ahmed, a senior policy manager at Guttmacher, warned : “Covid-19 could reverse those declines due to challenges with the supply chain, diversion of providers to the response and lack of access to health facilities during lockdown.” Ahmed said the pandemic was illuminating existing gaps in – and strains on – healthcare services, adding that some governments had already shifted resources away from basic sexual and reproductive services to Covid-19 responses.
In April, Guttmacher predicted that just a 10% decline in services in poorer countries as a result of coronavirus restrictions could result in 15 million more unplanned pregnancies, 168,000 more newborn deaths, 28,000 more maternal deaths, and 3 million more unsafe abortions.
Guttmacher and HRP’s latest research, published in Lancet Global Health, found that women in the poorest countries were nearly three times as likely to have an unplanned pregnancy as women in the wealthiest countries – 93 per 1,000 women in low-income countries compared with 34 in wealthy states.
Europe and North America had the lowest number of unplanned pregnancies (35 per 1,000 women), while sub-Saharan Africa had the highest (91). Women in sub-Saharan Africa are among the least likely to have access to family planning.
The research also revealed that 61% of unplanned pregnancies globally in 2015–19 resulted in an abortion, up from 51% in 1990. Despite a slight fall in abortion rates in the early 2000s, rates had increased over the past 15 years. Researchers said the trend could reflect increased access to abortion or “a stronger motivation to avoid unintended births”.


The majority of terminations occurred in countries where abortion is banned or restricted, researchers found, which meant they were more likely to be conducted unsafely. At least 22,800 women are estimated to die from an unsafe abortion each year.
Ahmed said even where it was legal some countries had deemed abortion not to be an essential service during the pandemic and had restricted services. “These service gaps could result in some individuals not being able to access abortion care at all, while others are forced to seek unsafe abortions,” she said.
The World Health Organization estimates that 270 million women who want modern contraceptives have no access to them. Universal access to family planning is a target of the sustainable development goals.
A study published in the Lancet last week said increased access to contraception is crucial if new global population forecasts are to be realised. Researchers forecast the global population will be 2 billion below current UN predictions by 2100 if women’s lives are improved.

Trump’s Stormtroopers

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In January 2011, James Tomsheck, then a top internal affairs investigator inside US Customs and Border Protection, attended a meeting of about 100 senior CBP leaders in a hotel in Irvington, Virginia. He  recalls hearing the nation’s then highest-ranking border patrol agent, David Aguilar, laying out his vision for the future. Border patrol, the former CBP deputy commissioner said, was to become the “marine corps of the US federal law enforcement community”.



Another leading CBP figure remarked that border agents were not required to adhere to the same constitutional restraints on the use of force as other law enforcers. “We are not cops,” he said.
Fast forward to Portland, Oregon and the Customs and Border Patrol has become a nationwide para-military force operating outside normal constitutional constraints.  They have no apparent training in crowd control or the policing of protests. 
 Daniel Martinez, a sociologist at the University of Arizona, in a study of the CBP found that there was “a culture of cruelty towards migrants and border crossers that dehumanizes and demeans border crossers. So to see border agents who have already been desensitized by the mistreatment of immigrants redirected to engaging with protesters in the interior is very concerning.”
Those deployed in Portland were spearheaded by an elite tactical unit known as Bortac, a quasi-militarised outfit equivalent to the Navy Seals. Todd Miller, the author of Empire of Borders, has dubbed Bortac as “the robocops of US border patrol”. They have been deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in many Latin American countries. Tod Miller said. “They consciously operate as though they were above the fourth amendment prohibitions on unreasonable search and seizures…”
Jenn Budd spent six years working as a senior border patrol agent.  In her years as an agent she got to know Bortac well. In Budd’s experience, Bortac agents are among “the most violent and racist in all law enforcement”. The quasi-military nature of the unit goes beyond their training, percolating into their state of mind. “They don’t exist within the realm of civilian law enforcement,” Budd said. “They view people they encounter in the military sense as enemy combatants, meaning they have virtually no rights.” She complained  of the racism, “There’s a prevailing view that all migrants are criminals, and that if you stop someone in their vehicle who looks Latino and speaks Spanish, they are probably criminal too.”
In March 2016 the then Republican presidential candidate received a boost to his bid for his party’s nomination when the union representing border patrol agents endorsed him. Since then, the relationship has grown ever tighter. Border patrol has enthusiastically followed Trump’s executive orders, even when they mired the agency deep in controversy such as when its agents removed infants from their mothers’ arms under Trump’s 2018 policy of family separation. The National Border Patrol Council, the agents’ union, is in step with Trump. Of the top 20 posts on its Twitter feed, all but three are retweets of Trump’s personal or campaign messages.  The border patrol union lavishes praise on the president and supports his pitch for re-election.
The union’s president, Brandon Judd, declares that “President Trump is the right candidate for the safety and security of this great nation, not Joe Biden. Please join me in supporting President Trump.”

The Willie Lynch Speech

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Although determined a forgery and a hoax, the Willie Lynch speech remains a valid observation of how control can be maintained over the oppressed by divide and rule. It was purportedly given by William Lynch, a slave owner, back in 1712 in Virginia.



 Gentlemen, I greet you here on the bank of the James River in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and twelve. First, I shall thank you, the gentlemen of the Colony of Virginia, for bringing me here. I am here to help you solve some of your problems with slaves. Your invitation reached me on my modest plantation in the West Indies where I have experimented with some of the newest and still the oldest methods for control of slaves. Ancient Rome would envy us if my program is implemented. As our boat sailed south on the James River, named for our illustrious King, whose version of the Bible we cherish, I saw enough to know that your problem is not unique. While Rome used cords of wood as crosses for standing human bodies along its old highways in great numbers you are here using the tree and the rope on occassion. I caught a whiff of a dead slave hanging from a tree a couple of miles back. You are not only losing valuable stock by hangings, you are having uprisings, slaves are running away, your crops are sometimes left in the fields too long for maximum profit, you suffer occasional fires, your animals are killed. Gentlemen, you know what your problems are; I do not need to elaborate. I am not here to enumerate your problems, I am here to introduce you to a method of solving them. In my bag here, I have a fool proof method for controlling your Black slaves. I guarantee everyone of you that if installed correctly it will control the slaves for at least 300 years. My method is simple. Any member of your family or your overseer can use it. I have outlined a number of differences among the slaves; and I take these differences and make them bigger. I use fear, distrust, and envy for control purposes. These methods have worked on my modest plantation in the West Indies and it will work throughout the South. Take this simple little list of differences, and think about them. On top of my list is “Age”, the second is “Color” or shade, there is intelligence, size, sex, size of plantations, status on plantation, attitude of owners, whether the slaves live in the valley, on a hill, East, West, North, South, have fine hair or coarse hair, or is tall or short. Now that you have a list of differences, I shall give you an outline of action- but before that I shall assure you that distrust is stronger than adulation; respect or admiration. The Black slave after receiving this indoctrination shall carry on and will become self re-fueling and self-generating for hundreds of years, maybe thousands. Don’t forget you must pitch the old Black vs. the young Black male, and the young Black male against the old Black male. You must use the dark skin slave vs. the light skin slaves and the light skin slaves vs. the dark skin slaves. You must use the female vs. the male, and the male vs. the female. You must also have your White servants and overseers distrust all Blacks, but it is necessary that your slaves trust and depend on us. They must love, respect, and trust only us. Gentlemen, these Kits are your Keys to control. Use them. Have your wives and children use them, never miss opportunity. If used intensely for one year, the slaves themselves will remain perpetually distrustful. Thank you, gentlemen.

Cambodia’s Eco-system Destruction

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The destruction of critically-important Tompoun/Cheung Ek wetlands, by politically-connected developers in Cambodia threatens to flood more than one million Phnom Penh residents, ruin the city’s wastewater system, force hundreds of families from their homes, and trigger environmental devastation, a new report has warned.



 Just south of Phnom Penh, play a vital role in sustaining the Cambodian capital, acting as a natural store of 70% of its rain and wastewater and providing livelihoods for the more than 1,000 families who live, farm and fish in the area. Sophal Ear, an associate professor at Los Angeles’ Occidental College, said the wetlands were “nature’s way of protecting Phnom Penh”. He labelled their destruction “inane”, but said the government did not appear to care. “Phnom Penh’s floods grow worse year after year, and they see no correlation, no causation.”



 However, in 2004 developers, acting with government backing, began to gradually destroy the 1,500-hectare wetlands, filling them with sand dredged from the Mekong and Bassac rivers to prepare for the construction of a vast 2,500 hectare satellite city, dubbed “ING City”, the largest development in Cambodia, according to a report released on Monday by an alliance of local land rights and human rights groups – Sahmakum Teang Tnaut, Equitable Cambodia, Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights, and the Cambodia Youth Network. They warn the development associated with ING City and other projects will destroy 90% of the wetlands, causing untold environmental damage and the potential eviction of hundreds of families.



 The report, titled Smoke on the Water, warns the wetlands’ destruction will have “severe effects on the quality of life for an estimated one to two million people”, including placing one million Phnom Penh residents at increased risk of flooding. The wetlands’ aquatic crops also act as a natural wastewater treatment system, preventing Phnom Penh’s raw sewage polluting the Bassac River and connected waterways and contaminating the fish stocks that many depend on, the report says.



 The Cambodian government hopes that a $US26m wastewater plant funded with Japanese aid money will offset the wetlands’ loss. But the NGO report warns the facility would treat only 2% of the sewage flowing into the wetlands, making it a “wildly unfeasible” alternative.



 The report warns that the extraction of the huge quantity of sand needed to fill the wetlands – estimated at a staggering 100m tonnes – has also been linked with the collapse of riverbanks on the Mekong.



 “It will not just cause problems for the environment and flooding, but also the livelihood of the people who are living around the lake,” Eang Vuthy, executive director of Equitable Cambodia, told the Guardian. “We estimate for the city, if there’s no proper plan in place to mitigate that, it will affect more than one million people. That does not include the untreated water that could flow directly into the river.” 



 One of the wetlands’ last protected areas was Boeung Cheung Ek, a large lake that was demarcated as public state land until 2017. The retention of that lake had eased fears about the impact of the ING City project. But local authorities have recently signalled their intention to develop Boeung Cheung Ek. Between 2017 and 2019, a series of government sub-decrees converted roughly 70% of the lake to private land and leased plots to a series of companies and individuals, according to the report.



 The former Cambodian People’s Party secretary of state at the ministry of transport Ing Bun Hoaw, one of country’s most powerful tycoons and a Hun Sen ally, is involved in the project.He is one of the founders of ING Holdings, the entity behind ING City. A Guardian analysis of corporate records and government documents reveals that some land at Boeung Cheung Ek was leased to people connected to Hun Sen and his government. One sub-decree gave 37 hectares of land at Boeung Cheung Ek to a company named Orkide Villa Co Ltd, which lists Hun Mana, one of Hun Sen’s daughters, as a director and chair. The NGO’s report also lists the Hero King Company Co Ltd as a supplier of sand for the ING City Project. Its parent company LYP Group Co Ltd is owned by Okhna Ly Yong Phat, an economic advisor to Hun Sen’s government.



 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/27/one-million-cambodians-under-threat-from-development-of-vital-wetlands-report

Why Poverty Persists?

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 Poverty matters and it persists.  It reduces well-being today and limits life-chances tomorrow. 



 In the UK the incomes of the poorest families actually fell in the pre-crisis years, leaving them no higher in 2018-19 than in 2001-02. 



  More than 700 million people lived in extreme poverty in 2015. Why do people stay poor? 



  Research on poverty in Bangladesh debunks the idea that individual choice or failure is the explanation. Instead, it is a poverty trap. Using data from a programme that gave significant resources to poor families, the authors show there is a tipping point at around $500 (£391) under which people cannot sustainably break into higher-income opportunities. If the program pushes individuals above a threshold level of initial assets, then they escape poverty, but, if it does not, they slide back into poverty. 



 The authors write: “It is not their intrinsic characteristics that trap people in poverty but rather their circumstances.”



 There are two views as to why people stay poor. The equal opportunity view emphasizes that differences in individual traits like talent or motivation make the poor choose low productivity jobs. The poverty traps view emphasizes that access to opportunities depends on initial wealth and hence poor people have no choice but to work in low productivity jobs. W



  The lesson? If circumstances are the problem, then those circumstances can and should be changed.



 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/26/proof-that-poverty-is-not-failure-but-a-trap



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