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The number of self-identified Black farmers in the United States has dwindled over the last century, in part because of overt discrimination by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The agency is the economic backbone for most American farmers through its financing, insurance, research and education programs. Fred de Sam Lazaro reports on a push to help Black and other underserved farmers survive.

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Amna Nawaz:

The number of self-identified Black farmers in the United States has dwindled over the last century, in part because of discrimination by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The agency is the economic backbone for most American farmers through its financing, insurance and research and education programs.

Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro reports from Oklahoma, where, despite roadblocks to federal aid, there's a concerted push to help Black and other underserved farmers survive.

Leroy Brinkley, Rancher:

I knew I was going to do this since I was 7 years old. First time I pretty much got on a tractor with my uncle, and I knew I love agriculture. Wouldn't give it for nothing in the world.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

Did you know how tough it was going to be?

Leroy Brinkley:

No. I do now.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

For 50 year old Leroy Brinkley, self-described hermit, this 80-acre farm with nearly three dozen beef cows is his comfort zone, a labor-intensive full-time job, but it is one he has to finance by working at least as long off the farm as a heavy equipment mechanic and truck driver.

Why isn't farming by itself a full-time occupation? Because the work certainly is full-time, right?

Leroy Brinkley:

Yes, the work is there, but the money is not. Economically, I don't see this working just by itself.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

When he began farming three decades ago, Leroy Brinkley tried to get a loan from the USDA. But at the local office, he says he was turned down and turned off by the experience.

Leroy Brinkley:

I brought the papers, and it was just no support. I could tell from the get-go I wasn't going to get help. I tried it anyway, trying to be nice, polite. I still didn't get the support that I needed from it. So, I couldn't bother with it anymore.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

An experience all too familiar to Black and minority farmers.

John Boyd Jr., President, National Black Farmers Association:

We have clearly been dumped on worse than any other race in this country by our own federal government.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

John Boyd Jr. is president of the National Black Farmers Association and a fourth-generation Virginia farmer. He says African Americans have been systematically excluded from programs that enable farmers to acquire land and build wealth, and unfairly targeted for foreclosure.

John Boyd Jr.:

The government has to start living up to its commitment, and they have to start treating Black farmers with dignity and respect.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

The government has settled two class action lawsuits in the past 25 years.

Tom Vilsack, U.S. Agriculture Secretary:

Socially disadvantaged producers were discriminated against by the United States Department of Agriculture. We know this.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

And, in 2021, the Biden administration included billions in debt relief for minority farmers in its American Rescue Plan. But lawsuits from white farmers, claiming reverse discrimination, held up the program.

In response, Congress repealed it last August, instead setting aside money in the administration's Inflation Reduction Act now for so-called distressed borrowers.

Willard Tillman, Executive Director, Oklahoma Black Historical Research Project:

There a lot of opportunities there under this administration that a lot of people are not taking advantage of.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

Willard Tillman;s organization is a resource that connects minority farmers to complex government farm programs. He says there's a rare opportunity to bring these farmers into the system from which they felt alienated.

Willard Tillman:

If they don't understand it, they're ain't going to mess with it. So that is where we come in.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

They don't trust the government.

Willard Tillman:

They trust me. I don't take dirty water to them. If it is good for them, I tell them yes. If it's not good for them, I tell them no.

Leroy Brinkley:

Survive with these cows.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

With the help of Tillman's group, Leroy Brinkley enrolled in a program last year called CARE, Conservation and Agriculture Reach Everyone.

Leroy Brinkley:

Those blackbirds, you see how they started?

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

It paid him $70 an acre for 40 acres, which he used to partner with a local elementary student to bring goats to graze on the invasive species.

Leroy Brinkley:

Want to try to get this covered with a cover crop.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

This year he has participating again, getting support to plant more grass for his herd to graze on.

Leroy Brinkley:

Fifteen hundred dollars in seed ought to get it.

Sarah Blaney, Oklahoma Association of Conservation Districts: Yes, well, time, yes, for your time.

Leroy Brinkley:

Yes.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

Sarah Blaney runs the Oklahoma Association of Conservation Districts, which administers the admittedly modest CARE program.

Sarah Blaney:

Our specific program is smaller, but our hope is that this is maybe the first introduction to that process and makes them a little bit more comfortable with the idea of working with government, so that, when they're ready to go apply for those bigger contracts, they know the right questions to ask. They know what their rights are.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

A more immediate challenge for Brinkley is the months-long drought across Oklahoma, which has almost tripled hay prices this year.

So it costs you about 700 bucks per week to feed this group?

Leroy Brinkley:

Yes. This is very expensive this year.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

Some of his expenses have been offset by a $50,000 loan he received through the Native Creek Nation, where he is an enrolled member, money that was guaranteed by the USDA.

Leroy Brinkley:

It did not grow me any. It just kind of took the curves off some things. Maybe the next time, the next go-around, when this operation is up fully and running, it may make a difference.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

The Black Farmers Association's Boyd applauds efforts like those in Oklahoma, but he says the money now available is a fraction of what would have come to minority farmers under the debt relief program that was repealed.

John Boyd Jr.:

We were promised 120 percent debt relief, and we didn't get it. It looks like to me, every time Black farmers are promised something in this country, we don't get it.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

The USDA declined an interview request, but, in a statement to "PBS NewsHour," said, given court injunctions that tied its hands, the goal was to get relief to farmers quickly, adding that: "The Inflation Reduction Act provided $3.1 billion that will allow USDA to work with distressed borrowers, and for those farmers that have suffered discrimination by the USDA farm loan programs, Congress allocated to $2.2 billion."

But Boyd says the government broke a promise and a contract with minority farmers, and he is suing the USDA.

John Boyd Jr.:

When they changed the language to distressed, it opened it up, and white farmers were able to get their loans and stuff current. There are far more white farmers than there are Black farmers in this country. We are less than 1 percent. We are facing extinction.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

Back in the early 1900s, Black Americans owned some 16 million acres of farmland, a number that was down by 90 percent by the turn of the 21st century.

Here in Oklahoma, there once were more than 50 all-Black towns built around agriculture. Clearview is one of just 13 that survive today.

Shirley Nero, Resident of Clearview, Oklahoma: My family moved here in 1902, when the town was established. My dad had a 40-acre farm. This is where I will stay until I pass away.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

Shirley Nero and her husband, Donnie, both had careers as educators, Donnie eventually becoming president of Connors State College. But they were both pulled to return to this tiny town 80 miles east of Oklahoma City, population about 50.

Shirley Nero:

Most of those people that settled here were freed men. When Oklahoma became a state in 1907, the first bill they passed was the Jim Crow law. And this was a place of freedom. They could express themselves. They could actually support themselves.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

As the years went on, the population and Black-owned land eventually began to dwindle.

Shirley Nero:

Our school got down to 32 in the high school, and then that is when they closed it, in '64.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

The Neros built their house and now breed cattle here, a rare reverse migration, they admit.

Donnie Nero, Rancher:

We see so many of the young people today, their parents or grandparents have had land for so many years, but that almighty dollar speaks. And, when it does, they are going to move, and the farms are going to be lost.

And when you lose the land that you have, and you now find yourself in a condominium somewhere, the value does not — doesn't equate.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

For his part, Leroy Brinkley is open to participating in more farm programs, but, based on experience, says he is not counting on anyone but himself.

Leroy Brinkley:

I have got a little piece of a home. I'm satisfied. Had to move some hurdles out of the way, but I am making a go of it.

For the "PBS NewsHour," I'm Fred de Sam Lazaro in Haskell, Oklahoma.

Amna Nawaz:

And Fred's reporting is a partnership with the Under-Told Stories Project at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

And there is more online, including a look at the lives of Black farmers through a photographer's lens. You can see those images at PBS.org/NewsHour.

U.R.L.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/black-farmers-struggle-in-face-of-structural-racism-and-economic-headwinds
 

Michelle Yeoh and opportunity

Silicon Valley Bank and risk in fiscal capitalism

Tiktok and the war over who owns the internet

Maternity Deaths in the usa

Londonium, the roman name for london

The live streaming former elected official in japan

Michelle Yeoh with her historic trophy. She has roles lined up but no starring ones.Credit...Sinna Nasseri for The New York Times

After Her Oscar Win, Will Michelle Yeoh Get to Lead Again?
The historic victory should mean opportunities to star again, but too often after such milestones, Hollywood doesn’t find central roles for women of color.

By Kyle Buchanan
Published March 15, 2023
Updated March 17, 2023

We’re conditioned to think of an Oscar win as the endpoint to a journey. For some actors, holding that trophy is the realization of a dream held since childhood. For others, it’s the culmination of a well-deserved comeback.

But what happens after that win? In our eagerness to treat Oscar victories as career capstones, do we pay too little attention to the opportunities that are supposed to come afterward, yet often don’t?

I’ve been mulling that over since Sunday night, when Michelle Yeoh took the best actress Oscar for “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” It happened at the 95th edition of the Academy Awards, the kind of big, tantalizing milestone that prods you to contemplate what has come before, and Yeoh’s win proved especially historic: The first Asian star to win best actress, she was greeted onstage by Halle Berry, the first Black woman to have pulled off that feat.

Asking Berry to announce the winner with Jessica Chastain (the previous year’s winner) was a gamble twice over. If Yeoh had lost to one of her four competitors — all of whom were white women — the ensuing photo op would have served as a stark example of a best-actress category that has been hostile to women of color for 95 years. And though Berry has returned to the Oscars several times since her 2002 win for “Monster’s Ball,” it has always been as a presenter and never as a nominee. To see her there is to be reminded that an Oscar win carries no guarantees when an actress is already liable to receive fewer scripts and career opportunities than her white counterparts.

So though Yeoh’s triumph was a long time coming, and I teared up as she addressed “all the little boys and girls who look like me watching tonight,” I also found myself worrying that it won’t be enough. The people in the Dolby Theater looked awfully proud of themselves after Yeoh’s win, but if they really want to do right by her, they have to keep writing lead roles for 60-year-old Asian actresses; otherwise, it’s just empty back-patting.

That, after all, was the real breakthrough of “Everything Everywhere,” Yeoh told me in October. We were at an awards event where, flanked by the “Everything Everywhere” directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, she reminisced about a Hollywood career that had mostly been filled with supporting parts.

“Look, I’ve been very blessed — I’ve continuously worked, and I’ve worked with great directors,” she said. “But for the first time, I’m No. 1 on the call sheet, thanks to these guys. I do meaningful roles, like in ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ and ‘Shang-Chi,’ but it was not my movie.”

Yeoh said she hoped that “Everything Everywhere” would not be a one-off, but more than a year after the film’s release, it’s unclear when, or if, she will have another lead film role. Coming projects — including the big-screen musical “Wicked,” the third “Avatar” movie, and the ensemble mystery “A Haunting in Venice” — all consign her to supporting parts. Though she is a headline-making superstar who led the hip studio A24 to its biggest ever worldwide hit, Yeoh is still too often treated as additional casting rather than the main event.

“Even you, Michelle Yeoh — on the top of the world — has struggled to find the right roles,” Kwan told her when we met in October. “I think that has taken a lot of people by surprise.”

Yeoh laughed ruefully. “I read scripts and it’s the guy who goes off on some big adventure — and he’s going off with my daughter!” she said. “I’m like, no, no.”

Few Hollywood movies are conceived with a woman over 50 as the central character, and the ones that are greenlit tend to offer those leads to a triumvirate of white women: Meryl if she’s older, Cate if she’s younger and Tilda if she’s weirder. To ensure that Yeoh can be first on the call sheet again, filmmakers must think more creatively, as Kwan and Scheinert did when they revamped “Everything Everywhere” for Yeoh after conceiving the film as a Jackie Chan vehicle. (And while they’re at it, can they find something juicy for last year’s best supporting actor, Troy Kotsur, similarly a boundary breaker — with “CODA,” he became the first deaf man to win an acting Oscar — who has been seen in little since?)

As momentum in the best-actress race swung from the “Tár” star Cate Blanchett to Yeoh over the last few weeks of awards season, I kept hearing a common refrain from voters: While Blanchett already had two Oscars and would surely be nominated again — she has eight nominations overall — this could be Yeoh’s only chance at gold. Though I understand the practicality of that argument, I hope those voters understand that their job isn’t done simply because of how they marked their ballot. Yeoh’s Sunday-night win is a big one, but the real victory will come when the lead roles that had long eluded her grasp start to become commonplace. If Hollywood can make that so, then instead of an endpoint, Yeoh’s historic Oscar will serve as a long-needed new beginning.

Kyle Buchanan is a pop culture reporter and serves as The Projectionist, the awards season columnist for The Times. He is the author of “Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road.” @kylebuchanan

ARTICLE
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/15/movies/michelle-yeoh-oscars-next.html

A bank official trying to reassure worried depositors in 1933. Credit...Associated Press

The Silicon Valley Bank Rescue Just Changed Capitalism
March 15, 2023

By Roger Lowenstein

Mr. Lowenstein is a financial journalist and author of “When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management.”

After a career of writing about bank failures, I wound up in the middle of one when my bank, Silicon Valley Bank, was seized by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. On Saturday, when I tried to pay a bill online, I was greeted by this not very reassuring missive:

“This page will be unavailable throughout the weekend, but will resume next week in accordance with the guidance provided by the F.D.I.C.” I wasn’t truly worried; small depositors like me had long ago internalized the rule that it made no sense to worry about your bank’s condition, since the risks of failure were borne by the F.D.I.C.

Federal deposit insurance was introduced 90 years ago during the heart of the Great Depression. Ever since then, small depositors within the F.D.I.C. limit of coverage have slept soundly. Now, in light of the bank failures of the last few days and the F.D.I.C.’s extension of coverage, why will any depositor worry about risk? Having bailed out depositors of two banks in full, how will the government refuse others?

Established as part of the landmark Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation initially provided deposit insurance up to $2,500, supported by premiums from member banks. The act was written by two Democrats, Senator Carter Glass of Virginia and Representative Henry Steagall of Alabama. Steagall wanted to protect rural banks, which had many small depositors, from contagious panics.

In that era, banking “progressives” were centered in the heartland. During the 1920s, low farm prices led to waves of bank failures. Various states adopted insurance, but the statewide systems failed. Scores of bills for federal insurance were also introduced.

The idea was controversial. The president of the American Bankers Association protested that insuring deposits was “unsound, unscientific and dangerous.” It was opposed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and by his Treasury secretary, William H. Woodin. Roosevelt opposed insurance because he thought it would be costly and also encourage bad behavior. If there was no need to mollify depositors, then banks would be free to take all sorts of risks. Today we call this “moral hazard.”

In 1933, an estimated 4,000 banks failed. Roosevelt took office in March, and declared a national bank holiday to prevent more failures. After a pointed debate, in June Roosevelt signed the Glass-Steagall Act.

The F.D.I.C. definitely prevented panics. From its creation until America’s entry into World War II, banks failed at a rate of close to 50 per year, not bad considering the economic depression in most of that period. And most of the banks that failed were small.

By the postwar period, deposit insurance seemed to have been created for an era that no longer existed. Bankers schooled in the 1930s tended toward prudence, and the industry was risk averse. The failure rate was exceptionally low. That all changed in the 1970s and ’80s. A combination of financial deregulation, revived animal spirits on Wall Street, and rising inflation led to financial instability and swings in interest rates. Voilà — bank failures returned.

In recent days, many have been reminded of 2008 and ’09 (165 banks failed in those two years alone). But for the most part, that crisis was not the result of depositors pulling funds. Bear Stearns, Lehman and others failed or sought bailouts because overnight funding from professional investors disappeared. It dried up for two good reasons: Banks like Lehman had too much leverage, and they were overexposed to a very weak and widely held asset, mortgage securities.

That was not the case with S.V.B.

This panic was a classic bank run, and it bears an echo to a different historical episode. In the 1980s, lenders known as savings and loans had invested their funds in long-term mortgages paying a fixed rate of interest. When the Federal Reserve, under pressure of rising inflation, began to jack up rates, S.&L.s had to pay higher rates to attract deposits.

The mismatch between the cost of their money and the (lower) rate that their mortgages earned sank the industry. Many switched to riskier assets to juice their returns, but as these investments soured, their problems worsened. Roughly a third, or about 1,000, S.&L.s failed. The F.D.I.C. was not (luckily for it) involved, because the S.&L.s were covered by a separate federal insurer. This agency, known as F.S.L.I.C., became insolvent, and the subsequent bailout was estimated to have cost taxpayers more than $100 billion.

Silicon Valley Bank’s failure looks a bit like an S.&L. crisis in miniature. Like its 1980s counterparts, S.V.B. grew extremely rapidly, had many assets parked in fixed, long-term bonds, and was done in when inflation caused the Fed to raise interest rates, raising the cost of keeping deposits.

Like the S.&L.s, Silicon Valley Bank was heavily concentrated. It catered to start-ups for whom an S.V.B. account was a matter of status. One tech savant who had recently changed jobs (aren’t they always switching jobs?) told me that in his experience, roughly two thirds of start-ups banked with S.V.B. (the bank claimed that nearly half the country’s venture capital-backed technology and life science companies were customers).

These crises provoked a widening of the federal safety net. Until the 1970s, the F.D.I.C. limit on deposit coverage increased only slowly. But in 1980, as banks came under pressure from soaring inflation, Congress raised the cap to $100,000, over the objections of the F.D.I.C. itself. In the 2008 crisis, the limit was raised to $250,000. And after the failure of IndyMac in 2008, the F.D.I.C., when possible, quietly protected uninsured depositors.

In the rescue of S.V.B. on Friday and of Signature Bank in New York two days later, the F.D.I.C. overtly ignored the cap and rescued all depositors, irrespective of size. This is a breathtaking leap.

Rescued seven-figure depositors were primarily venture companies steeped in the ideology of investing. The first plank of capitalism is that it entails risk. You cannot sensibly invest without assessing the chance for loss. If venture firms relied on groupthink rather than financial due diligence, that was their doing. In the case of Signature, which was exposed to the crypto industry, the rescue probably bailed out gamblers on speculative assets.

Federal officials have seized on a technicality to claim that it is not a bailout: Any required rescue payments will come from a special assessment on (private) banks, not the public. Prudent banks, which hedged their exposure to interest rates and suffered a competitive cost for doing so, will be hit with the added expense. Most likely, banks will pass along the rescue costs in the form of higher fees to consumers.

Strictly speaking, President Biden’s assurance that taxpayers are not on the line was accurate. However, in the sense that banking customers are a pretty big group, the “public” will be affected.

Moreover, the hazardous effect on behavior will be the same.

The regulators clearly failed to monitor S.V.B.’s unhealthy mismatch of assets and liabilities. Their job will be more difficult in the future, as risk taking on deposits has effectively become socialized. What if a bank opts to attract more funds by raising its interest rate on deposits? Can the regulators permit it? Wait a second, this is what all banks do.

Once you take risk out of a part of a bank’s operations, it is hard to let market principles govern the rest. We should expect, at a minimum, tougher standards on bank capital (as now exists at the biggest banks), more regulation and higher costs. As this newspaper’s DealBook newsletter has predicted, more loans will move away from F.D.I.C.-member institutions to so-called shadow banks such as hedge funds, outside the purview of regulators.

In past bank failures, uninsured depositors did not lose all — 10 to 15 percent was typical. And in this episode, there wasn’t any systemically bad asset à la mortgages in 2008. Given that the risk was contained, and that the Federal Reserve provides liquidity to banks facing runs (and provided emergency liquidity this week), allowing uninsured depositors of banks that fail to suffer a haircut might have been healthier for the system in the long run.

And the bailout does nothing to address the condition that fostered financial instability: inflation. It may even exacerbate it. This is not what Henry Steagall had in mind.

Roger Lowenstein is a financial journalist and the author of “Buffett” and, most recently, “Ways and Means:Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

ARTICLE
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/15/opinion/silicon-valley-bank-rescue-glass-steagall-act.html

TikTok’s chief executive, Shou Zi Chew, in the ByteDance offices in Singapore. The White House is hardening its stance toward the Chinese-owned video app.Credit...Ore Huiying for The New York Times

U.S. Pushes for TikTok Sale to Resolve National Security Concerns
The demand hardens the White House’s stance toward the popular video app, which is owned by the Chinese internet company ByteDance.

By David McCabe and Cecilia Kang
March 15, 2023
阅读简体中文版閱讀繁體中文版
WASHINGTON — The Biden administration wants TikTok’s Chinese ownership to sell the app or face a possible ban, TikTok said on Wednesday, as the White House hardens its stance toward resolving national security concerns about the popular video service.

The new demand to sell the app was delivered to TikTok in recent weeks, two people with knowledge of the matter said. TikTok is owned by the Chinese internet company ByteDance.

The move is a significant shift in the Biden administration’s position toward TikTok, which has been under scrutiny over fears that Beijing could request Americans’ data from the app. The White House had been trying to negotiate an agreement with TikTok that would apply new safeguards to its data and eliminate a need for ByteDance to sell its shares in the app.

But the demand for a sale — coupled with the White House’s support for legislation that would allow it to ban TikTok in the United States — hardens the administration’s approach. It harks back to the position of former President Donald J. Trump, who threatened to ban TikTok unless it was sold to an American company.

TikTok said it was weighing its options and was disappointed by the decision. The company said its security proposal, which involves storing Americans’ data in the United States, offered the best protection for users.

“If protecting national security is the objective, divestment doesn’t solve the problem: A change in ownership would not impose any new restrictions on data flows or access,” Maureen Shanahan, a spokeswoman for TikTok, said in a statement.

TikTok’s chief executive, Shou Zi Chew, is scheduled to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee next week. He is expected to face questions about the app’s ties to China, as well as concerns that it delivers harmful content to young people.

A White House spokeswoman declined to comment, as did a spokeswoman for the Treasury Department, which has led the negotiations with TikTok. The Justice Department also declined to comment. The demand for a sale was reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal.

TikTok, with 100 million U.S. users, is at the center of a battle between the Biden administration and the Chinese government over tech and economic leadership, as well as national security. President Biden has waged a broad campaign against China with enormous funding programs to increase domestic production of semiconductors, electric vehicles and lithium batteries. The administration has also banned Chinese telecommunications equipment and restricted U.S. exports of chip-manufacturing equipment to China.

The fight over TikTok began in 2020 when Mr. Trump said he would ban the app unless ByteDance sold its stake to an American company, a move recommended by a group of federal agencies known as the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS.

The Trump administration eventually appeared to reach a deal for ByteDance to sell part of TikTok to Oracle, the U.S. cloud computing company, and Walmart. But the potential transaction never came to fruition.

CFIUS staff and TikTok continued to negotiate a deal that would allow the app to operate in America. TikTok submitted a major draft of an agreement — which TikTok has called Project Texas — in August. Under the proposal, the company said it would store data belonging to U.S. users on server computers run by Oracle inside the United States.

TikTok officials have not heard back from CFIUS officials since they submitted their proposal, the company said.

In that vacuum, concerns about the app have intensified. States, schools and Congress have enacted bans on TikTok. Last year, a company investigation found that Chinese-based employees of ByteDance had access to the data of U.S. TikTok users, including reporters.

Brendan Carr, a Republican on the Federal Communications Commission, said the administration’s new demand was a “good sign” that the White House was taking a harder line.

“There is bipartisan consensus that we can’t compromise on U.S. national security when it comes to TikTok, and so I hope the CFIUS review now quickly concludes in a manner that safeguards U.S. interests,” Mr. Carr said.

The White House last week backed a bipartisan Senate bill that would give it more power to deal with TikTok, including by banning the app. If it passed, the legislation would give the administration more leverage in its negotiations with the app and potentially allow it to force a sale.

Any effort to ban the app or force its sale could face a legal challenge. Federal courts ultimately ruled against Mr. Trump’s attempt to block the app from appearing in Apple’s and Google’s app stores. And the American Civil Liberties Union recently condemned legislation to ban the app, saying it raises concerns under the First Amendment.

David McCabe covers tech policy. He joined The Times from Axios in 2019. 

Cecilia Kang covers technology and regulation and joined The Times in 2015. She is a co-author, along with Sheera Frenkel of The Times, of “An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination.” @ceciliakang

ARTICLE
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/15/technology/tiktok-biden-pushes-sale.html

Tammy Cunningham with her son, Calum. She gave birth while hospitalized with severe Covid-19.Credit...Kaiti Sullivan for The New York Times

Covid Worsened a Health Crisis Among Pregnant Women
In 2021, deaths of pregnant women soared by 40 percent in the United States, according to new government figures. Here’s how one family coped after the virus threatened a pregnant mother.

By Roni Caryn Rabin
March 16, 2023
KOKOMO, Ind. — Tammy Cunningham doesn’t remember the birth of her son. She was not quite seven months pregnant when she became acutely ill with Covid-19 in May 2021. By the time she was taken by helicopter to an Indianapolis hospital, she was coughing and gasping for breath.

The baby was not due for another 11 weeks, but Ms. Cunningham’s lungs were failing. The medical team, worried that neither she nor the fetus would survive so long as she was pregnant, asked her fiancé to authorize an emergency C-section.

“I asked, ‘Are they both going to make it?’” recalled Matt Cunningham. “And they said they couldn’t answer that.”

New government data suggest that scenes like this played out with shocking frequency in 2021, the second year of the pandemic.

The National Center for Health Statistics reported on Thursday that 1,205 pregnant women died in 2021, representing a 40 percent increase in maternal deaths compared with 2020, when there were 861 deaths, and a 60 percent increase compared with 2019, when there were 754.

The count includes deaths of women who were pregnant or had been pregnant within the last 42 days, from any cause related to or aggravated by the pregnancy. A separate report by the Government Accountability Office has cited Covid as a contributing factor in at least 400 maternal deaths in 2021, accounting for much of the increase.

Even before the pandemic, the United States had the highest maternal mortality rate of any industrialized nation. The coronavirus worsened an already dire situation, pushing the rate to 32.9 per 100,000 births in 2021 from 20.1 per 100,000 live births in 2019.

The racial disparities have been particularly acute. The maternal mortality rate among Black women rose to 69.9 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2021, 2.6 times the rate among white women. From 2020 to 2021, mortality rates doubled among Native American and Alaska Native women who were pregnant or had given birth within the previous year, according to a study published on Thursday in Obstetrics & Gynecology.

The deaths tell only part of the story. For each woman who died of a pregnancy-related complication, there were many others, like Ms. Cunningham, who experienced the kind of severe illness that leads to premature birth and can compromise the long-term health of both mother and child. Lost wages, medical bills and psychological trauma add to the strain.

Pregnancy leaves women uniquely vulnerable to infectious diseases like Covid. The heart, lungs and kidneys are all working harder during pregnancy. The immune system, while not exactly depressed, is retuned to accommodate the fetus.

Abdominal pressure reduces excess lung capacity. Blood clots more easily, a tendency amplified by Covid, raising the risk of dangerous blockages. The infection also appears to damage the placenta, which delivers oxygen and nutrients to the fetus, and may increase the risk of a dangerous complication of pregnancy called pre-eclampsia.

Pregnant women with Covid face a sevenfold risk of dying compared with uninfected pregnant women, according to one large meta-analysis tracking unvaccinated people. The infection also makes it more likely that a woman will give birth prematurely and that the baby will require neonatal intensive care.

Fortunately, the current Omicron variant appears to be less virulent than the Delta variant, which surfaced in the summer of 2021, and more people have acquired immunity to the coronavirus by now. Preliminary figures suggest maternal deaths dropped to roughly prepandemic levels in 2022.

But pregnancy continues to be a factor that makes even young women uniquely vulnerable to severe illness. Ms. Cunningham, now 39, who was slightly overweight when she became pregnant, had just been diagnosed with gestational diabetes when she got sick.

“It’s something I talk to all my patients about,” said Dr. Torri Metz, a maternal fetal medicine specialist at the University of Utah. “If they have some of these underlying medical conditions and they’re pregnant, both of which are high-risk categories, they have to be especially careful about putting themselves at risk of exposure to any kind of respiratory virus, because we know that pregnant people get sicker from those viruses.”

Lagging Vaccination
In the summer of 2021, scientists were somewhat unsure of the safety of mRNA vaccines during pregnancy; pregnant women had been excluded from the clinical trials, as they often are. It was not until August 2021 that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention came out with unambiguous guidance supporting vaccination for pregnant women.

Most of the pregnant women who died of Covid had not been vaccinated. These days, more than 70 percent of pregnant women have gotten Covid vaccines, but only about 20 percent have received the bivalent boosters.

“We know definitively that vaccination prevents severe disease and hospitalization and prevents poor maternal and infant outcomes,” said Dr. Dana Meaney-Delman, chief of the C.D.C.’s infant outcomes monitoring, research and prevention branch. “We have to keep emphasizing that point.”

Ms. Cunningham’s obstetrician had encouraged her to get the shots, but she vacillated. She was “almost there” when she suddenly started having unusually heavy nosebleeds that produced blood clots “the size of golf balls,” she said.

Ms. Cunningham was also feeling short of breath, but she ascribed that to the advancing pregnancy. (Many Covid symptoms can be missed because they resemble those normally occurring in pregnancy.)

A Covid test came back negative, and Ms. Cunningham was happy to return to her job. She had already lost wages after earlier pandemic furloughs at the auto parts plant where she worked. On May 3, 2021, shortly after clocking in, she turned to a friend at the plant and said, “I can’t breathe.”

By the time she arrived at IU Health Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis, she was in acute respiratory distress. Doctors diagnosed pneumonia and found patchy shadows in her lungs.

Her oxygen levels continued falling even after she was put on undiluted oxygen, and even after the baby was delivered.

“It was clear her lungs were extremely damaged and unable to work on their own,” said Dr. Omar Rahman, a critical care physician who treated Ms. Cunningham. Already on a ventilator, Ms. Cunningham was connected to a specialized heart-lung bypass machine.

Jennifer McGregor, a friend who visited Ms. Cunningham in the hospital, was shocked at how quickly her condition had deteriorated. “I can’t tell you how many bags were hanging there, and how many tubes were going into her body,” she said.

But over the next 10 days, Ms. Cunningham started to recover. Once she was weaned off the heart-lung machine, she discovered she had missed a major life event while under sedation: She had a son.

He was born 29 weeks and two days into the pregnancy, weighing three pounds.

Premature births declined slightly during the first year of the pandemic. But they rose sharply in 2021, the year of the Delta surge, reaching the highest rate since 2007.

Some 10.5 percent of all births were preterm that year, up from 10.1 percent in 2020, and from 10.2 percent in 2019, the year before the pandemic.

Though the Cunninghams’ baby, Calum, never tested positive for Covid, he was hospitalized in the neonatal intensive care unit at Riley Hospital for Children in Indianapolis. He was on a breathing tube, and occasionally stopped breathing for seconds at a time.

Doctors worried that he was not gaining weight quickly enough — “failure to thrive,” they wrote in his chart. They worried about possible vision and hearing loss.

But after 66 days in the NICU, the Cunninghams were able to take Calum home. They learned how to use his feeding tube by practicing on a mannequin, and they prepared for the worst.

“From everything they told us, he was going to have developmental delays and be really behind,” Mr. Cunningham said.

After her discharge from the hospital, Ms. Cunningham was under strict orders to have a caretaker with her at all times and to rest. She didn’t return to work for seven months, after she finally secured her doctors’ approval.

Ms. Cunningham has three teenage daughters, and Mr. Cunningham has another daughter from a previous relationship. Money was tight. Friends dropped off groceries, and the landlord accepted late payments. But the Cunninghams received no government aid: They were even turned down for food stamps.

“We had never asked for assistance in our lives,” Ms. Cunningham said. “We were workers. We used to work seven days a week, eight-hour days, sometimes 12. But when the whole world shut down in 2020, we used up a lot of our savings, and then I got sick. We never got caught up.”

Though she is back to work at the plant, Ms. Cunningham has lingering symptoms, including migraines and short-term memory problems. She forgets doctor’s appointments and what she went to the store for. Recently she left her card in an A.T.M.

Many patients are so traumatized by their stays in intensive care units that they develop so-called post-intensive care syndrome. Ms. Cunningham has flashbacks and nightmares about being back in the hospital.

“I wake up feeling like I’m being smothered at the hospital, or that they’re killing my whole family,” she said. Recently she was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Calum, however, has surprised everyone. Within months of coming home from the hospital, he was reaching developmental milestones on time. He started walking soon after his first birthday, and likes to chime in with “What’s up?” and “Uh-oh!”

He has been back to the hospital for viral infections, but his vocabulary and comprehension are superb, his father said. “If you ask if he wants a bath, he’ll take off all his clothes and meet you at the bath,” he said.

Louann Gross, who owns the day care that Calum attends, said he has a hearty appetite — often asking for “thirds” — and more than keeps up with his peers. She added, “I nicknamed him our ‘Superbaby.’”

ARTICLE
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/16/health/covid-pregnancy-death.html

Two skeletons that were found last year as part of an archaeological dig in northern England.Credit...West Yorkshire Joint Services

A 1,600-Year-Old Coffin May Shed Light on Roman Britain
A lead-lined coffin that was discovered in northern England could offer clues about the area’s transition from the Roman Empire to its Anglo-Saxon period.

By Jenny Gross
Published March 15, 2023
Updated March 16, 2023
LONDON — British archaeologists have uncovered an ancient coffin in a 1,600-year-old cemetery in northern England, a discovery, they said, that could shed light on the end of Roman Britain and the establishment of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.

Discovered during an archaeological dig in Leeds, the lead-lined coffin contained the remains of an aristocratic woman who most likely lived in the fourth century.

Archaeologists also found the remains of more than 60 people who lived in the area more than a thousand years ago. Some bodies were buried on their backs with their legs straight out, in accordance with late-Roman customs. Others adhered to the Anglo-Saxon tradition, within which burials often included items such as clothes fasteners and knives.

The archaeological dig was part of a consultation process for a company applying for permission to build on the site. Archaeologists had previously uncovered late-Roman stone buildings and a number of structures in the Anglo-Saxon architectural style in the area.

“Very quickly, we started finding burials,” said David Hunter, the principal archaeologist of the West Yorkshire Archaeology Advisory Service, which works with the West Yorkshire planning authorities. “The potential is there to give us much better information on how this transition from the Roman population to Anglo-Saxon England happened.”

Mr. Hunter said that the presence of both late-Roman and early-Anglo Saxon people on the same burial site was unusual. Whether the use of the graveyard had overlapped between the two eras would determine the significance of the find, he added.

The Roman occupation of Britain, from 43 A.D. to around 410, transformed the culture, as settlers from Europe, the Middle East and Africa arrived. Around the third century, market towns and villages were established, and Roman objects became more common even in poor, rural areas, according to English Heritage, which manages prehistoric sites, medieval castles and Roman forts in England.

After the Romans retreated from Britain, society became much more insular and parochial, Mr. Hunter said. A lot is unknown about the period, including how the area transitioned from being part of the Roman Empire in the early fifth century to part of the English nation in the 10th.

“Different people have different theories as to how this could have happened: It could’ve happened by cooperation, it could’ve happened by aggression,” he said.

These findings may add to knowledge about an era that is largely undocumented, Mr. Hunter said. Radiocarbon dating could help determine exactly when the remains were buried. Chemical tests could reveal the diets and ancestry of the people.

Researchers would also like to understand why there were a number of instances in which two or three people were buried in the same grave, as well as why there were multiple burial styles in the same cemetery.

Mr. Hunter said that the two different burial styles could be for reasons of practicality; Since the area was already recognized as a burial place by Roman Britons, it would have been easier for subsequent groups of people to have used the same site.

While the discovery was made in February 2022, the findings were only announced on Monday, in order to keep the site safe and conduct tests on some of the findings, the Leeds City Council said in a statement. The discovery of a lead-lined coffin is rare, with only a few hundred having been discovered in Britain, said Kylie Buxton, on-site supervisor for the excavations.

The council has not released the exact location of the dig. After the analysis is completed, the lead coffin may be displayed at the Leeds City Museum, in an exhibition on death and burial customs, officials said.

A correction was made on March 16, 2023: An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to English Heritage. The organization manages prehistoric sites, medieval castles and Roman forts in England, not in the rest of Britain. (Other groups manage such sites in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.)
When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at nytnews@nytimes.com.Learn more

Jenny Gross is a general assignment reporter. Before joining The Times, she covered British politics for The Wall Street Journal. @jggross

ARTICLE
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/15/world/europe/uk-roman-burial-leeds.html#:~:text=By Jenny Gross March 15%2C 2023 LONDON —,Roman Britain and the establishment of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.

Mr. Higashitani, seen on a computer monitor, celebrating after winning his election to a seat in the House of Councillors in July 2022.Credit...Kyodo News, via Getty Images

How to Get Kicked Out of Parliament: Livestream Instead of Legislating
The upper house of Japan’s Parliament almost unanimously voted to expel an eccentric YouTuber who won a seat last year. The reason: He never showed up for work.

By Tiffany May and Hisako Ueno
March 15, 2023
Since he was elected to Japan’s Parliament in July, Yoshikazu Higashitani has spread celebrity gossip on his YouTube channel, explored the sights of Dubai and handed out snacks to children displaced by an earthquake in Turkey.

One thing he has not done is show up for work.

On Wednesday, he was expelled from Japan’s upper house of Parliament, the House of Councillors, making him the first elected lawmaker in the country to be removed from office in more than seven decades.

Before his short-lived career as a lawmaker, Mr. Higashitani, 51, was well-known for his lengthy livestreams during which he dished out salacious celebrity gossip under the alias “GaaSyy.” He ran for Parliament from Dubai, claiming that he could not return to Japan because the police were investigating him for fraud. While in self-imposed exile, he campaigned and promised to expose dozens of celebrity scandals.

To the surprise of many, he won — running as the candidate of the single-issue NHK Party, which is dedicated to making changes to how Japan’s national broadcaster is funded. But he has missed every session in the House of Councillors since then.

In the meantime, he has maintained diverse interests, balancing his lengthy rants about celebrities with breezy posts about touring La Sagrada Familia in Spain and playing water sports in Thailand, using the hashtag “#endlesssummer.”  Last week, he said he traveled to Turkey, and in videos posted online was seen distributing snacks to children in areas devastated by a February earthquake, in front of a camera crew.

The founder of the NHK Party, Takashi Tachibana, told reporters in January that the police had asked Mr. Higashitani, a fellow party member, to cooperate with investigations related to accusations of defamatory comments and threats he had made in his videos, and that the YouTuber would return to the country in March. (The police declined to comment.)

In February, the House of Councillors demanded that Mr. Higashitani apologize in an open session, a disciplinary act second only to expulsion. He had agreed to do so, only to backtrack on that decision last week, saying that he did not feel safe enough to return, despite having immunity from arrest as a lawmaker.

Mr. Tachibana said last Wednesday that he would step down as head of the party. “As party leader, I will take responsibility for GaaSyy’s failure to keep his promise that he would come back to the upper house to make an apology,” Mr. Tachibana said at a news conference.

He added that the party would be renamed “Seijika Joshi 48 To,” which translates to Politician Girls 48 Party, and that the actress Ayaka Otsu would replace him. Mr. Tachibana said that the party would broaden its goals and would also recruit only female candidates to run for upcoming local elections.

Koichi Nakano, a professor of comparative politics at Sophia University in Tokyo, said that the party’s rebranding was a response to a movement to increase the number of female candidates in elections.

“NHK Party must have thought that they can poke fun at that in a right-wing, misogynist way, by treating female candidates as if they were teen pop idols like AKB48,” Professor Nakano wrote in an email, referring to a popular female pop group.

He added that Mr. Higashitani’s notoriety and what he characterized as the populist appeal of his party got him elected. “It’s unusual, to a degree, but Japan has had its own share of media-celebrities who are complete amateurs of politics, including comedians, actors and pop singers, though none was as unserious as GaaSyy,” Professor Nakano added.

Jeff Kingston, a professor of Asian studies at Temple University’s Japan campus, wrote in an email: “The NHK party, despite rebranding, has achieved little except to register discontent with the establishment and unhappiness with the mandatory fees every household has to pay, even if they don’t watch NHK.”

Muneo Suzuki, who heads a key disciplinary committee in Parliament, told reporters on Tuesday that Mr. Higashitani had already been given ample time to correct his behavior, but that he had ultimately undermined the electoral process. “GaaSyy doesn’t understand what democracy means in principle,” he said.

Dozens of protesters, mostly members of the Seijika Joshi 48 Party, rallied in front of the legislature before lawmakers cast votes over whether to expel Mr. Higashitani. Among the 236 lawmakers who attended the session, all but one voted in favor of his ouster.

Mr. Higashitani could not be immediately reached for comment, but in a statement read on the House floor by Satoshi Hamada, a fellow lawmaker, Mr. Higashitani said that his removal was unjust.

“There will continue to be people like me running for office. If you do not want the world you have made to be destroyed, please exclude those people from candidacy from the very beginning,” he wrote in the statement. “I wish the same punishment upon lawmakers who leave their seats immediately after propping up their nameplates and ones who are asleep and don’t show up like myself.”

Tiffany May covers news from Asia. She joined The Times in 2017. @nytmay

Hisako Ueno has been reporting on Japanese politics, business, gender, labor and culture for The Times since 2012. She previously worked for the Tokyo bureau of The Los Angeles Times from 1999 to 2009. @hudidi1

Article
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/15/world/asia/japan-parliament-youtuber-expelled.html
 

How does a bank collapse in 48 hours? A timeline of the SVB fall
By Ramishah Maruf and Allison Morrow, CNN

This week, the go-to bank for US tech startups came rapidly unglued, leaving its high-powered customers and investors in limbo.

Silicon Valley Bank, facing a sudden bank run and capital crisis, collapsed Friday morning and was taken over by federal regulators.

It was the largest failure of a US bank since Washington Mutual in 2008.

Here’s what we know about the bank’s downfall, and what might come next.

What is SVB?
Founded in 1983, SVB specialized in banking for tech startups. It provided financing for almost half of US venture-backed technology and health care companies.

While relatively unknown outside of Silicon Valley, SVB was among the top 20 American commercial banks, with $209 billion in total assets at the end of last year, according to the FDIC.

Why did it fail?
In short, SVB encountered a classic run on the bank.

The longer version is a bit more complicated.

Several forces collided to take down the banker.

First, there was the Federal Reserve, which began raising interest rates a year ago to tame inflation. The Fed moved aggressively, and higher borrowing costs sapped the momentum of tech stocks that had benefited SVB.

Higher interest rates also eroded the value of long-term bonds that SVB and other banks gobbled up during the era of ultra-low, near-zero interest rates. SVB’s $21 billion bond portfolio was yielding an average of 1.79% — the current 10-year Treasury yield is about 3.9%.

At the same time, venture capital began drying up, forcing startups to draw down funds held by SVB. So the bank was sitting on a mountain of unrealized losses in bonds just as the pace of customer withdrawals was escalating.

The panic takes root…
On Wednesday, SVB announced it had sold a bunch of securities at a loss, and that it would also sell $2.25 billion in new shares to shore up its balance sheet. That triggered a panic among key venture capital firms, who reportedly advised companies to withdraw their money from the bank.

The bank’s stock began plummeting Thursday morning and by the afternoon it was dragging other bank shares down with it as investors began to fear a repeat of the 2007-2008 financial crisis.

By Friday morning, trading in SVB shares was halted and it had abandoned efforts to quickly raise capital or find a buyer. California regulators intervened, shutting the bank down and placing it in receivership under the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

Contagion fears subside
Despite initial panic on Wall Street, analysts said SVB’s collapse is unlikely to set off the kind of domino effect that gripped the banking industry during the financial crisis.

“The system is as well-capitalized and liquid as it has ever been,” Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi said. “The banks that are now in trouble are much too small to be a meaningful threat to the broader system.”

No later than Monday morning, all insured depositors will have full access to their insured deposits, according to the FDIC. It will pay uninsured depositors an “advance dividend within the next week.”

What’s next?
So, while a broader contagion is unlikely, smaller banks that are disproportionately tied to cash-strapped industries like tech and crypto may be in for a rough ride, according to Ed Moya, senior market analyst at Oanda.

“Everyone on Wall Street knew that the Fed’s rate-hiking campaign would eventually break something, and right now that is taking down small banks,” Moya said on Friday.

The FDIC typically sells a failed bank’s assets to other banks, using the proceeds to repay depositors whose funds weren’t insured.

A buyer could still emerge for SVB, though it’s far from guaranteed.

ARTICLE
https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/11/business/svb-bank-collapse-explainer-timeline/

U.S. regulators try to reduce bank-run risk, discuss fund to backstop deposits if more banks fail in wake of SVB collapse
BYTONY CZUCZKA, VICTORIA CAVALIERE AND BLOOMBERG

US regulators are racing against the clock to find solutions for failed Silicon Valley Bank while Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said officials are focusing on protecting depositors, as officials seek to avoid a wider bank run.

After SVB collapsed into receivership on Friday in the biggest bank failure in over a decade, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. kicked off an auction process for its assets late Saturday, as it aims to make a portion of clients’ uninsured deposits available as soon as Monday, according to people with knowledge of the situation. The agency and the Federal Reserve have also discussed a fund to backstop deposits if more banks fail as part of wider contingency planning, people said. 

Those efforts are aimed at protecting depositors, rather than bailing out investors, Yellen said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday. 

“During the financial crisis there were investors and owners of systemic large banks that were bailed out,” the Treasury Secretary said. “And we’re certainly not looking — and the reforms that have been put in place means that we’re not going to do that again. But we are concerned about depositors and we’re focused on trying to meet their needs.”

Democratic Representative Ro Khanna, whose California district is home to SVB, said the FDIC is working to find a buyer and urged the US government to guarantee all of the bank’s deposits. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a Republican from California, told Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures” he’s “hopeful that something can be announced today to move forward.”  

Concern about the health of other smaller banks focused on the venture capital and startup communities is prompting regulators to consider extraordinary measures. Officials have discussed the new fund to backstop deposits in conversations with banking executives, in the hope that setting up such a vehicle would reassure depositors and help contain any panic, said the people. They asked not to be identified because the talks weren’t public. 

Final bids for SVB’s assets are due Sunday afternoon but a winner may not be known until late in the day, other people with knowledge said. 

In her CBS interview, Yellen renewed assurances that the US banking system is safe, well-capitalized and resilient.

“I simply want to say that we’re very aware of the problems that depositors will have,” she said. “Many of them are small businesses that employ people across the country and of course this is a significant concern and working with regulators to try to address these concerns.”

US regulators are under time pressure to sell assets of SVB Financial Group, the bank’s parent, prompting offers by some investment firms to provide financing to companies with cash trapped at Silicon Valley Bank.

Asked whether the FDIC might be open to a “foreign bank” coming in as a buyer, Yellen said, “I’m sure they’re considering a wide range of available options that include acquisitions.”

While the FDIC insures deposits of up to $250,000, the vast majority of funds held in at SVB far exceeded that. The agency has said it will make 100% of protected deposits available on Monday.

Asked on “Face the Nation” about the option of a private-sector bank buying SVB’s assets, Khanna said: “That would be the ideal situation and our delegation that talked to the FDIC last night made that clear. That’s what we urged them to work on, they said they’re working on it.”

Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley said Saturday that US taxpayers shouldn’t bail out Silicon Valley Bank. “Private investors can purchase the bank and its assets,” Haley, a former South Carolina governor and US ambassador to the United Nations, said in a statement.

The White House repeated its assurances on the US banking system, with Office of Management and Budget Shalanda Young citing regulatory changes put in place after the financial crisis more than a decade ago.

“What I’ll say about the banking system overall is it’s more resilient, and has a better foundation than before the financial crisis,” Young said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“Americans can have confidence in the safety and soundness of our banking system” and the US economy is “extremely strong,” Yellen said on CBS. 

ARTICLE
https://fortune.com/2023/03/12/us-regulators-bank-run-risk-fund-backstop-deposits-if-more-banks-fail-after-svb-collapse/

List of bank failures in the usa
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bank_failures_in_the_United_States_(2008–present)

Wiki of collapse of silicon valley bank
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_Silicon_Valley_Bank
 

photo source
Image via Linkedin/Miishe Addy

GHANAIAN CEO SECURES $13M FROM INVESTORS FOR STARTUP SHIPPING AND LOGISTICS FIRM

Stacy Jackson

This Ghanaian entrepreneur is helping businesses in Africa expand globally.

Jetstream Africa’s co-founder and CEO, Miishe Addy <  https://twitter.com/MiisheAddy , secured $13 million dollars in pre-Series-A equity and debt funding for her shipping and logistics firm.

According to Ghana Web, the funding round included investors, such as development finance institution PROPARCO, through the Digital Africa Bridge Fund, and ASC VC, a venture fund founded by executives of the end-to-end visibility platform, Project44. < https://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/business/Meet-the-Ghanaian-entrepreneur-who-led-her-startup-to-raise-13-million-from-investors-1714037> 

Nigerian venture capital fund, Octerra, also participated in the funding round, along with Senegal’s Wuri Ventures, Seed9, an association founded by Google alumni, the MBA Fund, the W Fun, and investments from family offices. Alitheia, IDF, and Golden Palm were additional investors in the equity round. < https://jetstreamafrica.com/ >

Fintech lender, Cauris, participated in the debt round as the sole investor.

“All of our major investors have investment or operational experience with the problem we’re solving. They are specialists in supply chain technology like ASCVC, which was founded by Project44 executives, or African value chain and logistics portfolio companies like Alitheia, Golden Palm, Octerra, Wuri, and Proparco,” Addy said.

Jetstream provides services to shippers who need to import or export goods from Ghana and Nigeria. The company’s digital platform allows shippers to pay for and track their cargo.

“Most businesses in Africa make and sell physical things, and you can’t sell what you can’t move. So logistics is really a centerpiece of the entire commerce equation,” Addy said during the virtual Africa Tech Summit Connects. “There are so many e-commerce websites that are coming up to allow SMEs and everyone else to sell products, but it is the people who are running the cargo on the ground who are solving one of the trickiest bottlenecks.”

During a 2021 interview with CNN, Addy discussed her journey as a woman who pursued a male-dominated industry by launching her technology-enabled logistics company. She shared that she takes pride in making an impact through technology and her contributions in an industry creating things that are of value to people across geographical boundaries.

“I would generally say it’s easier to be an entrepreneur as a woman in Ghana than in other countries. Technology specifically is a little harder in Ghana because there are so few women with engineering backgrounds or who have the capabilities to build an engineering or technology-based business,” Addy said at the time.

Article source
https://www.blackenterprise.com/ghanaian-ceo-secures-13m-from-investors-for-startup/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Newsletter_02/16/2023
 

in facebook < https://www.facebook.com/groups/162792258578547/permalink/595312771993158/ > 
In the literature , carmen is not the villainous, as later in the play or movie. In the play and definitely movie versions carmen is the seductress who tempts a good man away. but in the literature carmen didn't have a part in his original sin so to speak, she simply proves he hasn't changed but is angry when she moves on from him, which all versions have oddly enough. The woman moving on from a fallen guy is the end hook in each:) ... to the white produced film, written by a white man with an all black cast:)  I have huge issues with Kleiner's interpretation, like Heyward's porgy and bess. Both stories do not have a proper comprehension of the financial levels or internal social strata's of the black community in the USA. What do I mean?  Kleiner suggest that a black woman who has "hoodoo voodoo" is equivalent to a romani woman. the romani are considered another race in spain. A black woman who does "hoodoo voodoo" is not deemed another race in the black community in the usa. From a storytelling perspective, the correct thing for carmen jones is similar to OScar Micheaux's symbol of the unconquered. No disrespect to harry belafonte's joe but in the black community in the usa since world war II is a small, usually high yellow, usually passing, financial black aristocracy who embraced the usa faster than other black people. Joe should be that, like in said michaeux film. So, the vision of the black community is totally false. The reason the movie made money was the same reason cameron's avatar  movies make money, the spectacle. A film of black people, with the sexy pearl bailey/dorothy dandrige the handsom well known white female sex symbol [I just quoted or paraphrased james baldwin] is the selling point. For all audiences the image of an all black cast and no mamies, forgive me hattie mcdaniel , during the time of premminger's carmen was the same as the totally digital blue people of cameron's avatar.
in youtube LINK < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBISrX84MpU > 
Before 10:15 One key you didn't mention is the role of women inability to own things based on male power.
After 10:15 great point, one of the biggest problems with many later carmen's that the original literature doesn't miss is the other racial category of carmen. Carmen is the tragedy. Dorothy dandrige was clearly very pretty but Carmen isn't the beautiful woman every man needs to fornicate with who when withers if they fornicate with her. Carmen is an outsider , deemed another of the dominant race, who meets a dishonorable/criminal man who still lives a very good life because of his racial status, and when her admiration to him makes him feel better all is good, but when she desires a change and a better man, at least in terms of criminal record, the disgraced man of "a better race" terminates her. That is the lesson of carmen. A person of a potent race can commit crimes and still live affluent or oppulent compared to one of an impotent race, and when the one of an impotent race decides to leave the one of an opulent race the true racial relationship is revealed in the murder. 

Flickr is celebrating Black photographers

It saddens me that only two black photographers I am connected on flickr knew or considered commenting. 

I am happy to have found so many more black photographers or their lovely work through this post.

This comments on this post have aided me alot in something I am constructing. 

The following is a photo I chose to represent  this time , can you see the magic?

Title: The Move
Photographer: Yeahbouyee < https://www.flickr.com/photos/yeahbouyee/ >

PHOTOURL: https://flic.kr/p/jTTQYU

The post

https://www.flickr.com/groups/2684497@N24/discuss/72157721918110682/

Black taxpayers are at least three times as likely to be audited by the Internal Revenue Service as other taxpayers.Credit...Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

Black Americans Are Much More Likely to Face Tax Audits, Study Finds
A new report documents systemic discrimination in how the I.R.S. selects taxpayers to be audited, with implications for a debate on the agency’s funding.

By Jim Tankersley
Jan. 31, 2023
WASHINGTON — Black taxpayers are at least three times as likely to be audited by the Internal Revenue Service as other taxpayers, even after accounting for the differences in the types of returns each group is most likely to file, a team of economists has concluded in one of the most detailed studies yet on race and the nation’s tax system.

The findings do not suggest bias from individual tax enforcement agents, who do not know the race of the people they are auditing. They also do not suggest any valid reason for the I.R.S. to target Black Americans at such high rates; there is no evidence that group engages in more tax evasion than others.

Instead, the findings document discrimination in the computer algorithms the agency uses to determine who is selected for an audit, according to the study by economists from Stanford University, the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago and the Treasury Department.

Some of that discrimination appears to be rooted in decisions that I.R.S. officials made over the past decade as they sought to maintain tax enforcement in the face of budget cuts, by relying on automated systems to select returns for audit.

Those decisions have produced an approach that disproportionately flags tax returns with potential errors in the claiming of certain tax credits, like the earned-income tax credit, which supplements low-income workers’ incomes in an effort to alleviate poverty. Those tax returns are more often selected for audits, regardless of how much in owed taxes the agency might recover.

The result is audit rates of Black Americans that are between three and five times the rate of other taxpayers, even when comparing that group to other taxpayers who also claim the E.I.T.C.

The I.R.S. does not detail how it selects returns for audit. But the researchers were able to isolate several apparent explanations for why Black taxpayers are targeted so much more frequently. One is complexity: It is much harder for the agency to audit returns that include business income, because that process requires expertise from individual auditors. Such returns appear to be audited less often than returns from otherwise similar taxpayers who do not report income from a business.

Black taxpayers are far less likely than others to report business income. And Black taxpayers appear to disproportionately file returns with the sort of potential errors that are easy for I.R.S. systems to identify, like underreporting certain income or claiming tax credits that the taxpayer does not qualify for, the authors find.

In effect, the researchers suggest that the I.R.S. has focused on audits that are easier to conduct and as a result, finds itself disproportionately auditing a historically disadvantaged group rather than other taxpayers, including high net-worth individuals.

“What the I.R.S. chooses to focus on when it conducts audits can either undercut or complement our progressive tax system,” said Daniel Ho, an author of the study who is the faculty director of Stanford’s Regulation, Evaluation and Governance Lab, known as RegLab, where the study originated.

The I.R.S. could instead program its algorithms to target audits toward more complicated returns with higher potential dollar value to the government if an audit found errors. In that case, the discrimination in the system would vanish, the authors concluded.

“Historically, there has been this idea that if federal agencies and other policymakers don’t have access to data on race and don’t explicitly take race into account when making policy decisions and allocating resources, the resulting outcome can’t be structurally biased,” said Evelyn Smith, an author of the paper who is a University of Michigan economics graduate student and visiting fellow at Stanford’s RegLab.

One lesson from the study, she said, “is that absolutely is not true.”

On his first day in office, President Biden signed a series of executive orders seeking to advance racial equity in the federal government and the nation. One of them included a directive to the White House budget office to “study methods for assessing whether agency policies and actions create or exacerbate barriers to full and equal participation by all eligible individuals.”

That order inspired researchers at the RegLab, which uses machine learning and other advanced techniques to help governments improve policies. It eventually yielded the study, which the authors will present publicly on Tuesday. It was conducted by Stanford researchers including Ms. Smith, Mr. Ho and Hadi Elzayn, along with Thomas Hertz and Robin Fisher of the Treasury Department’s Office of Tax Analysis; Arun Ramesh of the University of Chicago; and Jacob Goldin of Chicago and Treasury.

The group wanted to use machine learning to improve the federal auditing process, and they wanted to know if that process was infused with racial bias. But they couldn’t easily observe it, because the I.R.S. does not ask taxpayers to declare their race on tax forms, or otherwise track race in any way.

Instead, the researchers built a way to essentially fill in the blanks on taxpayer race, through a partnership with the Treasury that gave them access to 148 million tax returns and 780,000 audits, primarily from 2014, but ranging from 2010 to 2018.

They used taxpayer names — first and last — and the census demographics of their neighborhoods to effectively guess the race of any given filer. Then they examined those results in a small sample of returns from taxpayers who had reported their race elsewhere, on state election forms, in order to be confident that their estimates were correct.

The eventual findings were stark and surprising, the authors said. They saw an immediate correlation between the racial composition of neighborhoods and the audit rates in those areas — vivid signs of significantly higher audit rates for Black taxpayers.

Black Americans are disproportionately concentrated in low-wage jobs. They are more likely than whites to claim the E.I.T.C. The authors wondered if that prevalence in claiming the credit might explain why Black taxpayers face more audits, because I.R.S. data show the agency audits people who claim the E.I.T.C. at higher rates than other taxpayers.

But as the research progressed, the authors found the share of Black Americans claiming the E.I.T.C. only explained a small part of the audit differences. Instead, more than three-quarters of the disparity stems from how much more often Black taxpayers who claim the credit are audited, compared with E.I.T.C. claimants who are not Black.

Treasury officials are aware of the findings. The department started an advisory committee last fall to help it focus on disparities faced by Americans of color. This month, researchers from the department published an analysis of racial disparities in the tax code. It found a wide range of tax advantages that largely help higher-income Americans, like the mortgage interest deduction and preferential tax rates for investment income, disproportionately benefit white taxpayers.

Department officials are in the process of increasing tax enforcement on high earners and corporations that do not pay what they owe, using money from a sprawling climate, health and tax bill Mr. Biden signed into law last summer.

Asked about the study this week, a Treasury spokeswoman pointed to a letter that the deputy Treasury secretary, Wally Adeyemo, wrote last fall to the I.R.S. commissioner on those enforcement efforts, which in effect prioritized cracking down on groups of high-income taxpayers.

“Historic challenges and underfunding have led to audit rates for those at the top of the distribution decreasing more than the correspondence audits of those at the bottom in the last decade, which should change,” Mr. Adeyemo wrote.

Representative Richard E. Neal of Massachusetts, the top Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee, said in a statement on Wednesday that the audit rates documented in the study were “unacceptable, but a consequence of algorithmic tools that exacerbate racial biases in our institutions.”

Mr. Neal said he was looking forward to working with the Treasury on the new enforcement measures — and funding levels — that Mr. Biden set in motion last year. “It’s clear we must address the discrimination at the I.R.S.,” he said.

<the article misses the simple truth, every program, from the one people use to make speeches to the one people use to make paintings to the one people use to calculate taxes are made by humans sequentially, the biases negative or positive in the humans is in the functionality of the computer program, it is very simple  > 

Jim Tankersley is a White House correspondent with a focus on economic policy. He has written for more than a decade in Washington about the decline of opportunity for American workers, and is the author of "The Riches of This Land: The Untold, True Story of America's Middle Class." @jimtankersley

Article source
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/31/us/politics/black-americans-irs-tax-audits.html

Muhammad Aziz spent two decades in prison before he was cleared of killing Malcolm X.Credit...Todd Heisler/The New York Times
<What I love is no one is asking who actually killed Malcolm X? who? I bet somebody know and I bet whomever know is a real can of worms, unless everybody who know is dead and media rather not speak on this to rile up passions>

New York Pays $121 Million for Police Misconduct, the Most in 5 Years
The total was driven up by a small group of very expensive cases, including a settlement with a man wrongly accused of assassinating Malcolm X.

By Hurubie Meko
Feb. 2, 2023
Police misconduct settlements in New York City last year were driven to their highest level since 2018 by six payouts over $10 million, including one for Muhammad A. Aziz, whose conviction in the assassination of Malcolm X was thrown out after he spent two decades in prison.

Those cases, with a total value of about $73 million, accounted for about 60 percent of the settlements the Police Department paid last year, according to an analysis of city data released on Tuesday by the Legal Aid Society, New York’s largest provider of criminal and civil services for indigent clients.

The $121 million in payouts last year was up from about $85 million in 2021.

“In recent years, district attorneys have moved to vacate many more criminal cases going back dozens of years which have led to an increase in the number of reverse conviction suits and related payouts,” said Nick Paolucci, a spokesman for the city’s law department.

The city is “promptly reviewing” cases to keep litigation costs down and to provide a measure of justice to those who were wrongfully convicted, Mr. Paolucci added.

The increase in payouts can also partially be attributed to lawsuits filed following Black Lives Matter protests in the 2020, said Jennvine Wong, a Legal Aid staff attorney with the organization’s Cop Accountability Project.

Last year, the city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board, the oversight body that examines police misconduct, recommended that 145 city police officers should be disciplined for misconduct during the demonstrations after the killing of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man who died in Minneapolis after his neck was pinned to the ground by Derek Chauvin, a white police officer, in 2020.

During the weeks of protest, police officers and demonstrators clashed throughout the city, resulting in injuries and hundreds of arrests. The oversight body found evidence that supported 267 accusations of misconduct against the officers, recommending the highest level of discipline for about 60 percent of them.

Even outside the lawsuits that stemmed from the protests, the Police Department’s settlement amounts are “astronomically high,” Ms. Wong said.

“They make the payouts, they settled the lawsuits, but then they don’t pursue discipline,” she said.

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Police departments throughout the country have money set aside to settle civil lawsuits and often pay settlements to avoid lengthy litigation, said Maria Haberfeld, professor of police science at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Settling a lawsuit for police misconduct doesn’t mean that a department will punish officers, she said, adding that a payout “has no correlation to internal discipline.”

For the New York Police Department, a settlement “does not signify immediately, automatically that the officer needs to be brought on disciplinary charges,” she said.

When there are internal charges filed over a police officer’s conduct, administrative trials can take months to years to be decided.

“The systemic lack of police accountability for officers who kill and abuse people is a decades-old problem,” said Yul-san Liem, a representative of the Justice Committee, an organization that works with families in New York City whose relatives have been killed by police officers.

“All of those families have actively been campaigning and calling for the officers who killed their loved ones to be fired and that still hasn’t happened,” she said.

A spokesman for the Police Department said the “decision to settle a lawsuit and for how much remains with the Law Department and the Comptroller.”

The president of the Police Benevolent Association, Patrick J. Lynch, said that the annual totals of settlements are “not a fair or accurate measure” of how police officers have performed in a given year.

“The city routinely settles cases in which police officers have done nothing wrong, and some of the largest payouts arise from decades-old cases that don’t involve a single cop who is still on the job today,” he said.

The data on misconduct payouts released by the city’s Law Department this week doesn’t account for all police settlements in 2022. All told, the city paid nearly $184 million, primarily for personal injuries, but also property damage, according to the Comptroller’s office.

The average settlement totals for lawsuits have also gone up since 2018, according to Legal Aid’s analysis. In both 2020 and 2021, only one settlement topped $10 million, while there were no payments over that amount in the two prior years.

In the past three decades, New York State has also had the third-most people exonerated in the country at 319, behind Illinois at 556 and Texas at 437. The average payouts for those exonerated in New York are also among the highest in the country.

Although the city’s data included the settlement for Mr. Aziz, whose 1965 conviction was thrown out in 2021, the $13 million settlement for Khalil Islam, whose conviction for the assassination was exonerated posthumously, has yet to be reflected.

A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 3, 2023, Section A, Page 19 of the New York edition with the headline: N.Y.P.D. Misconduct Costs at 5-Year High. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Article source
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/02/nyregion/new-york-police-department-misconduct-settlements.html

Athenia Rodney at her new home in Snellville, Ga., with her husband Kendall and three children. They moved away from New York City last summer.Credit...Nicole Craine for The New York Times

Why Black Families Are Leaving New York, and What It Means for the City
Black children in particular are disappearing from the city, and many families point to one reason: Raising children here has become too expensive.

By Troy Closson and Nicole Hong
Published Jan. 31, 2023
Updated Feb. 3, 2023

Athenia Rodney is a product of the upward mobility New York City once promised Black Americans. She grew up in mostly Black neighborhoods in Brooklyn, graduated from public schools and attended a liberal arts college on a full scholarship. She went on to start her own event-planning business in the city.

But as Mrs. Rodney’s own family grew, she found herself living in a cramped one-bedroom rental, where her three children shared a bunk bed in the living room. It was hard to get them into programs that exposed them to green spaces or swim classes. As she scrolled through friends’ social media posts showing off trampolines in spacious backyards in Georgia, the solution became clearer: Leave.

Last summer, the family bought a five-bedroom home in Snellville, Ga.

“I felt like it became increasingly difficult to raise a family in New York,” Mrs. Rodney said.

The Rodneys are part of an exodus of Black residents from New York City. From 2010 to 2020, a decade during which the city’s population showed a surprising increase led by a surge in Asian and Hispanic residents, the number of Black residents decreased. The decline mirrored a national trend of younger Black professionals, middle-class families and retirees leaving cities in the Northeast and Midwest for the South.

<Yes, many blacks who are in or near the Black one percent have left New York City. This is true, but most black people of the millions of Black people in NYC have not left and have no reason to leave.>

The city’s Black population has declined by nearly 200,000 people in the past two decades, or about 9 percent. Now, about one in five residents are non-Hispanic Black, compared with one in four in 2000, according to the latest census data.
< Exactly, black people at the top of the Black financial scale>
The decline is starkest among the youngest New Yorkers: The number of Black children and teenagers living in the city fell more than 19 percent from 2010 to 2020. And the decline is continuing, school enrollment data suggests. Schools have lost children in all demographic groups, but the loss of Black children has been much steeper as families have left and as the birthrate among Black women has decreased.

The factors propelling families like the Rodneys out of the city are myriad, including concerns about school quality, a desire to be closer to relatives and tight urban living conditions. But many of those interviewed for this article pointed to one main cause: the ever-increasing cost of raising a family in New York.

<this article failed to mention this more simply, NYC had between guiliani and bloomberg  twenty years of White Elephant mayors. Guiliani started the attack on the black community by selling the buildings NYC owned, and starting the charter school movement. Both tactics served the purpose of splitting the black community and deleting the black majority in Harlem in particular. The buildings by the fact that in many buildings black people essentially did for themselves and hurt in one way or another other black people. I can personally tell you, in  many buildings Black people used Guiliani's program to kic other black people out of the building and scheme for their own profiteering passions in real estate. And then Charter schools is a simple strategy. Guiliani knew that in every community you always have those that are happy to have and don't give a damn about others. Anyone who knows about education in japan or france or in NYC historically knows what the charter school movements goal really is. The advertised goal is to give parents a choice but the functional goals are: hurt the teachers union which is a historic enemy of the party of abraham lincoln, hurt black laborers as most black people's upward mobility isn't in owning businesses but in working for municipal governments, in aiding whites entering the black communities by offering them jobs through the private managements of charter schools who get public school money, and finally by creating another educational tier in NYC. At the top is the styvesant/bronx science/brooklyn tech schools where many children from NYC's officials go to/ next is private jewish schools or other private white institutions that are not only free from the educational scrutiny of public schools but even upon learning that they have near complete failure at standardized test are not ridiculed in media as the following report which has gone quiet in nyc media [ https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2064&type=status ] / and now where there was public school is charter schools for parents of color, non white european descent, or whites themselves who are too poor for styvesant or a private school , but through vouchers which is a lottery, the most unfair of all things, get to go to a school with certain amenities that public school funding stop allowing when the 1970s hit and black children were making strides in the public schools of nyc.  I truly despise charter schools because I comprehend their purpose was never the betterment of all children but adding another layer to make public schools the dumping ground and how do I know this. What media never tells you is all the children who are taken from charter schools for failing in one way or another and guess where they have to go, the public schools. The algorithm is clear, the three layers above public schools will gain the kids with most affluence and public schools will have the majority. Public schools will never go away. And charter schools are known to not provide on average better grades or in NYC's case show an uptake in charter school enrollment. Public schools are losing kids across all demographics based on all peoples, not just black leaving nyc and why, cause the rent's too damn high... and that brings me to Bloomberg. Bloomberg continued the guiliani selling of nyc owned property + charter schools focused on the Black community, but he added the real estate boom. Which aided a Black Minority in the Black populace. Bloomberg made a ton of money. But he also led minorities in every community involved or aspiring to the real estate industry to make money in their own community, often against the betterment to the whole. But Bloomberg wanted to make a white city, and he succeeded in starting on the path. It was meant to be faster but it didn't work out that way.>

Black families drawn to opportunities in places where jobs and housing are more plentiful are finding new chances to spread out and build wealth. But the exodus could transform the fabric of New York, even as Black political power surges. It has alarmed Black leaders, as well as economists who point to labor shortages in industries like nursing where Black workers have traditionally been overrepresented.

< In all earnest, this is the best for the black community in NYC. One of the great fallicies of fiscal capitalism is the myth of majority wealth. The most successful communities in the USA or the European colonies that preceded it are minorities. The WHite jewish community, the white catholic, the Black Caribbean, being small is the best way for a community to be affluent in fiscal capitalism. German americans is where most of the poor white trash come from/ Descended of Enslaved Blacks in the USA is where most of the commonly called by other black people lazy ignorant blacks come from, it is the chinese americans where most of the slave/low wage workers trapped in chinese communities come from. It is always the largest communities in fiscal capitalism who produce most of the poor, fiscal capitalism is best for the most minor minorities as the usa proves. Black New York City population becoming less will cause it to benefit more financially, not governmentally, not in exposure,  but financially. It will force black wealth to interact more as the numbers are just smaller.>

The filmmaker Spike Lee, a longtime New York booster, said he worries about the city becoming more expensive and less accessible to people of color in particular, who have contributed so much to the city’s culture, from the birth of hip hop in the South Bronx to artists like Alvin Ailey and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

“It’s really sad because the reality is New York City is not affordable anymore,” Mr. Lee said. And if Black people can’t afford to live in the city, “you could seriously say New York City isn’t the greatest city in the world,” he said.
<a lie, greatness in NYC has nothing to do with the presence of Black people. Spike lee simply doesn't like the fact that the dream of stronger vibrant black communities in NYC is dead. The Black new york city community will become more a minority, and will become something it hasn't been since before the >

Eric Adams, New York’s second Black mayor, has vowed to create a more affordable city to stem the “hemorrhaging of Black and brown families.” Mr. Adams’s own bid for mayor was partially built on a biography that reflects the Black community’s roots in the city: His parents traveled north from Alabama during the Great Migration, climbed their way from poverty in Brooklyn to middle-class homeownership in Queens and relied on public schools and colleges to lift their children to greater success.
<He can't do that cause he nor any mayer in my lifetime in NYC has the courage and it will take hear tto take on the real estate industry of New York City, the project of BLoomberg will get its result>

Younger Black families say that trajectory has become more elusive. High inflation and a turbulent rental market as the pandemic has subsided have hurt New Yorkers across the board. But Black families lag far behind white families in homeownership and in building wealth. Black households have a median income of $53,000, compared with roughly $98,000 for white households, according to the most recent census data.
<NYC was never a pot of gold for black people, black people left the south not for jobs or betterment, they left the south because white people were burning our homes our people, the problem with the migration of DOSers in the USA is people, including black people, try to frame it as a financial affair, it was militaristic, whites burned black children alive as public entertainment and black people had to leave. This wasn't invite to work.  > 

Ruth Horry, a Black mother who bounced through cockroach- and rodent-infested Brooklyn apartments for years, has repeatedly been priced out by rising rents. Eventually, Ms. Horry, 36, and her three daughters, landed in the shelter system. At a shelter in Queens, the sink was so small Ms. Horry washed her children’s hair in the bathroom at a nearby McDonald’s.
< The article doesn't mention who owned those buildings, NYC white community never wanted the black community, it was a situation at the federal level, either the federal government protect black people from whites in the south or they don't, they chose not to, so either black people go to war against whites in the south or black people leave, black people chose to leave. but where could they go? North /West/Northwest was all 90% white and did not want black people and worked against black people from then to now. Black people make it seem like some sort of opportunities was waiting in the northern states > 

“The conditions for what you could afford were mind-blowing,” she said. “I was just so tired of that.”
<Again, your relatives were in the north for militaristic reasons not financial, nyc never tried to make a welcome mat for black people>

In late 2019, Ms. Horry moved to Jersey City through a New York City voucher program, known as the Special One-Time Assistance program, which relocates vulnerable families into permanent housing with a full year’s rent upfront. The drop in living costs has been life-changing, Ms. Horry said, and she is considering moving to the South to save even more.
<Again, that shows NYC's relationship. NYC is trying to help black people leave nyc and yet black people complain about nyc:)>

“I have no food stamps, no welfare, no rental assistance,” said Ms. Horry, who now lives in a two-bedroom apartment and pays the $1,650 monthly rent through her earnings at a nonprofit that helps families in Brooklyn’s Brownsville neighborhood. “I don’t qualify for those programs, and that is an amazing feeling.”
<This is the problem with black people in the usa , being poor isn't a symbol of yourself. but the individualist culture in the USA which is deeply entrenched among black people based on black forebears actions creates these illogical positions. If you are poor then having voucing or welfare is necessary. Black people living in nyc being assisted shouldn't be ashamed, you want the street or a place to live. you can chose live in the street and not have to deal with welfare/food stamps/rental assistance>

New York City’s loss of Black residents has been a gain for the South especially. The region’s economy has boomed as newcomers from the city and other urban areas in the North flock there.
<another lie, the south's economic growth is not related to blacks moving south , it is about the movement of industries to the south where wage cost are lower than north east or west coast. it is not about the movement of blacks.>

Still, Regine Jackson, a professor at Atlanta’s Morehouse College who studies migration patterns, said that as more Black Northerners make what is often a bittersweet decision to leave, it remains unclear whether the South will ultimately provide the greater opportunities they seek.
< the one bit of truth in the article. I know black people who went south, some like the highlighted people in the article come with money, but many are working poor folk who simply have a lower financial need in terms of cost of living but are not in a land of gold>

They may have become disillusioned with life in the North, said Ms. Jackson, but in the South, “there’s still problems.”
<truth>

“There’s been a lot of progress since the civil rights movement, yet there’s still a lot left to do,” Ms. Jackson said.
<truth, but i will say this, frederick douglass is getting his wish. The Black community, especially the Descended of enslaved, has basically lived side whites in majority since the end of the war between the states. First Black people were being burned alive in the south, then black people were put in caves in the north, and now 2023 the black community is split between the south and the not south and is more internally multiracial than ever and has only known living side whites in either situation. Is the black community better for it? Time will tell>

As New York’s housing shortage persists and rents stay high, Gov. Kathy Hochul recently pledged to build more than 800,000 new units of housing statewide over the next decade, double what went up in the past 10 years. In his own housing agenda, Mr. Adams has stressed expanding several programs to make homeownership more affordable for families of color.

While the Black homeownership rate — roughly 27 percent in New York — rose slightly during the pandemic, it has far to climb to catch up with other demographic groups. That is partly because of historical disparities, including racial biases that have held back Black homeownership. The national foreclosure crisis hit many middle-class Black families especially hard, and Black households still often face discrimination and the devaluation of their properties.

The departures have transformed neighborhoods across New York. In Southeast Queens enclaves like Jamaica and St. Albans, more Latino and South Asian residents are moving in. Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, two iconic Black neighborhoods, have grown in population even as they experienced steep declines in the number of Black residents.

Harlem, for example, lost more than 5,000 Black people over a decade, while nearly 9,000 white people moved in, according to census data analyzed by The New York Times. Bedford-Stuyvesant lost more than 22,000 Black residents while gaining 30,000 white residents.

Christie Peale, the executive director of the Center for New York City Neighborhoods, a nonprofit that promotes affordable homeownership, said more aggressive efforts are needed.
< I repeat this was bloomberg's plan set on guiliania's , it took time to settle but it was inevitable. When the City government led by those two opened their properties which were gained by the 1970s when the real estate industry in nyc collapsed to the real estate industry again, it was bound to harm the black community especially > 

“Our fear is that the city will become whiter and wealthier, and the only opportunities for realizing the upside of a strong market will be for investors, people with high-income jobs,” Ms. Peale said. “It really will be that tale of two cities.”
<NYC was already like this not to long ago, again, people assess place absent an honest historical view. during the gilded when the great gatsby was written whites themselves in NYC felt the rich whites were, and I quote fitzgerald, the wicked rich. What she means by fear is really silly. Cities, all cities are like living beings, they change over time, they never remain the same. >

Citywide, white residents now make up about 31 percent of the population, according to census data, Hispanic residents 28 percent and Asian residents nearly 16 percent. While the white population has stayed about the same, the Asian population grew by 34 percent and Hispanic population grew by 7 percent, according to the data.
<Again when people use the word white, they usually mean white european, but white people are also white latinos/white asians as black latinos or black asians exist. So NYC if you think of white as more than white european but including white muslim/white asian/white latino was always mostly white. IT was false assessment that suggested it wasn't>

The loss of Black families has already had major implications for the education system. Some schools have shrunk, and teachers have had to be moved around to account for drops in enrollment. Overall, the public schools have lost more than 100,000 students in the past five years, a crisis facing other urban districts like Boston and Chicago. In 2005, Black children comprised 35 percent of K-12 students in New York City; they now make up closer to 20 percent.

Just since 2017, about 50,000 Black students have left K-12 district schools, a decline of nearly 22 percent. The drop among white children in the same period was 14 percent, while the overall Latino and Asian student populations declined at lower rates. Some Black students enrolled at charter schools, but many more left the city altogether. About one in four Black children at district schools who left last year moved to the South, Education Department data shows.
<I quote: Some Black students enrolled at charter schools, but many more left the city altogether. About one in four Black children at district schools who left last year moved to the South, Education Department data shows. So when people say public schools are being influenced by charter schools you can say yes> 

School enrollment has also been affected by a steady drop in birthrates, another national trend. Black women accounted for more than 30 percent of citywide births in 2000; their share was below 20 percent in 2019, state data shows.
< again, when people say public schools are being encroached by charters you can say , again, no . Charter schools isn't public schools problem, big urban cities is public schools problem and charter schools have for many successfully created a false narrative about their option having potency> 

Some of the Black families that left the city were seeking better educational opportunities for their children.

Michelle Okeke moved from Bedford-Stuyvesant to Mansfield, Texas, in 2021 to be closer to relatives who could help raise her two children. But she also worried about obtaining a good education for them in what she called New York City’s “insane” and complex system. Selective academic programs and top middle and high schools accept few Black children each year. Stuyvesant High School, the city’s crown jewel, made offers to just 11 Black students for its freshman class of more than 750 this academic year.

“There was always a part of me that was like, ‘How are we going to deal with schools?’” Ms. Okeke, whose children are 2 and 4, said. “It was a looming consideration: Should we move to Jersey? Do we go to another area where there’s more opportunities?”

The administration has sought to increase access to selective pathways like the city’s gifted and talented program. But parents worry that schools serving primarily Black children in a deeply segregated system could face larger losses in future rounds of school budget cuts, and that shrinking resources and cuts to programs may prompt further departures.

The continuing loss of Black New Yorkers may also disrupt the city’s job market. Melva Miller, the chief executive of the nonprofit Association for a Better New York, pointed to labor shortages in industries that have long relied on a disproportionate share of Black employees, like the building trades and civil service.

Some families who have left say there are things they miss about the city, but that the opportunities they have found elsewhere have made the move worth it.

Alisha Brooks, 36, a Bronx native, had always envisioned raising her children in the city, clinging to her identity as a New Yorker. But as a young Black mother, she sometimes felt out of place in her Brooklyn Heights neighborhood, which is predominantly white and higher income.

Her oldest son’s Brooklyn Heights school was largely white. In his final year there, fewer than 5 percent of the students and only a small number of teachers were Black. She noticed him growing increasingly insecure about his natural hair; classmates would sometimes try to touch it.

“He was starting to feel different,” Ms. Brooks said. “He needed to be around more diversity and see more kids who looked like him.”

After a trip to North Carolina in the spring of 2020 revealed how much cheaper life could be elsewhere, the Brooks family chose to move to Charlotte, where a growing Black population makes up more than a third of residents. Most of her sons’ new teachers, and more of their classmates, are Black.

Mihir Zaveri contributed reporting. Susan C. Beachy contributed research. Robert Gebeloff contributed data analysis.
< these individual examples are just that individual and I think have no place in the article really, communal issues are not revealed by individuals> 

Audio produced by Parin Behrooz.

Troy Closson is a reporter on the Metro desk covering education in New York City. @troy_closson

Nicole Hong is a reporter covering China. She previously worked for The Wall Street Journal, where she was part of a team that won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting. 

SOURCE ARTICLE
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/31/nyregion/black-residents-nyc.html
 

MOVIES THAT MOVE WE : CROOKLYN

Have you seen the coming of age tale Crooklyn? Do you know its position in the timetable of spike lee joints or its developmental background?  All this and more on the Crooklyn episode of Movies That Move We with Nike Ma 
 

It's called war sweetie:) well said. People forget the USA was made from war. The native american was slaughtered by the colonial settlers who then made the usa's first thirteen states. But while the history books don't suggest war, that was war. I think the woman king handled slavery well. But I will explain, they showed that the institution of slavery was bigger than the Agoji warriors. Glory doesn't deal with the civil war any better than The Woman King dealt with the Slave Trade. 
hahaha chicken, can't crawl for your country:) 
Exactly, well, the question isn't will all humans regardless of phenotype go to see movies with all black people. Most films , including all white ones, lose money. Do the white producers, who produce most films connected to the usa, want to lost money on the all black films that do not become Black PAnther or The Woman King. 
Great mentioning the credits content.

The Woman King Search
https://aalbc.com/tc/search/?&q=the woman king&type=core_statuses_status&quick=1&author=richardmurray&search_and_or=and&sortby=relevancy
 

Speaker Kevin McCarthy said this week that Republicans would use their leverage, including the need to raise the U.S. debt limit later this year, to corral spending.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

U.S. Deficit Fell to $1.4 Trillion in 2022
The deficit was down from $2.6 trillion a year earlier, as pandemic emergency spending slowed, the economy reopened and tax revenue rose. The new figures come as spending fights loom in a divided Congress.

By Alan Rappeport and Jim Tankersley
Jan. 12, 2023
WASHINGTON — The federal budget deficit fell to $1.4 trillion for the 2022 calendar year, down from $2.6 trillion a year ago, as pandemic emergency spending slowed, the economy reopened and tax revenue rose, according to the Treasury Department.

While the annual gap between what the nation spends and what it takes in narrowed, the monthly deficit for December 2022 widened compared with a year ago, suggesting that the deficit will most likely grow again in the year to come. The federal government recorded an $85 billion shortfall last month, up from a $21 billion deficit in December 2021.

The figures released on Thursday come at a moment of heightened attention on the nation’s finances, with Republicans, who now control the House, pledging to push for deep spending cuts and slash the national debt. Despite the smaller annual shortfall, America’s long-term fiscal picture has darkened somewhat in the last year. The national debt topped $31 trillion for the first time in 2022 and interest rates are rising, increasing the amount of money the United States must pay to investors who buy its debt.

Net interest costs have risen by 41 percent over the past calendar year, the data showed. The Peterson Foundation, which advocates debt reduction, reported on Thursday that the jump was larger than the biggest increase in interest costs in any single fiscal year, dating back to 1962.

Republicans have said repeatedly that they will make balancing the federal budget over the course of a decade and reducing the national debt a central focus of their economic agenda this year. They say large deficits under President Biden have contributed to high inflation, which hit a 40-year peak last summer but has eased in recent months. The Labor Department reported on Thursday that prices receded slightly in December.

Speaker Kevin McCarthy said this week that Republicans would use their leverage, including the need to raise the country’s debt limit this year, to corral spending.

“One of the greatest threats we have to this nation is our debt,” Mr. McCarthy said on Fox News. “It makes us weak in every place that we can.”

But Republicans have also prioritized policies this month that would add to deficits. The House passed legislation this week that would rescind much of the $80 billion that was allocated to the Internal Revenue Service last year to beef up its enforcement capacity. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said that the Republican bill to cut the money would actually increase the deficit by $114 billion through 2032.

Mr. Biden said on Thursday that he would veto such legislation and assailed Republicans for backing a measure that would add to the deficit and make it easier for the wealthy to cheat on their taxes by cutting the I.R.S. enforcement budget. He has repeatedly said he will not negotiate with Republicans on the debt ceiling and will insist that lawmakers raise the limit with no strings attached.

“I was disappointed that the very first bill the Republicans in the House of Representatives passed would help wealthy people and big corporations cheat on their taxes at the expense of ordinary, middle-class taxpayers,” Mr. Biden told reporters at the end of remarks about inflation and the economy. “And it would add $114 billion to the deficit. Their very first bill.”

The president and his aides have said he is open to working with Republicans to reduce the deficit by raising taxes on high earners and corporations — proposals that Republican lawmakers have roundly rejected.

Budget watchdog groups that advocate fiscal restraint have called on lawmakers to enact policies that will stabilize the debt.

“We should not be borrowing $4 billion a day, an apparent debt addiction that is harmful to the economy and the budget,” said Maya MacGuineas, the president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “We hear a lot of talk about fiscal responsibility, but very little action.”

Ms. MacGuineas and other fiscal hawks have also attacked House Republicans over their debt limit threats, saying that they risk economic calamity — and that Republicans’ vow to balance the budget over 10 years without raising taxes is both politically unfeasible and economically inadvisable.

Mr. Biden has claimed credit for the decline in the budget deficit last year, but it was in large part the result of Congress forgoing another round of pandemic stimulus spending like the $1.9 trillion economic aid package Mr. Biden signed early in 2021. The president has contended that such spending, and other efforts by his administration to fuel economic growth in the recovery from pandemic recession, contributed to stronger-than-expected tax receipts in 2022, helping to lower the deficit.

But administration officials have also predicted that the deficit is set to rise again this year. In an August update to the president’s budget proposal for the 2023 fiscal year, White House economists predicted that the deficit would grow by about 30 percent from the 2022 to 2023 fiscal years. They forecast further increases in the deficit in each of the two years after that.

Alan Rappeport is an economic policy reporter, based in Washington. He covers the Treasury Department and writes about taxes, trade and fiscal matters. He previously worked for The Financial Times and The Economist. @arappeport

Jim Tankersley is a White House correspondent with a focus on economic policy. He has written for more than a decade in Washington about the decline of opportunity for American workers, and is the author of "The Riches of This Land: The Untold, True Story of America's Middle Class." @jimtankersley

Article URL
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/12/business/us-deficit-falls-2022.html

MY THOUGHTS
If I owed 31 trillion dollars ... anyway the two questions are simple
1) can the usa pay back the debt?
2) what will happen if a country that is owed wants to collect?

1) the answer is no. The reasons why are simple. The USA won the cold war by outspending russia in its soviet form. That is where the culture of selling debt comes from. The Japanese are owed over a trillion dollars. But what does the debt really come from?
The USA has a problem. China+ India+ Russia , together have a larger populace than the remainder in humanity and each country is militaristically an opponent to the USA, in one way or the other. Most of the other countries in humanity are satraps to the USA. A minority like North Korea/Cuba or similar are oppressed. 
But the cost of the USA's satraps are expensive, and since Russia China India will not become England Japan Taiwan outside of war, the usa has to finance until the war finally begins 
About Japan < https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2202&type=status > 

2) Nothing and thus the problem. The USA military is the reason why no one will get what they are owed from the usa and why the usa has an unlimited debt value. Seven warship fleets/hundreds of thousand of nuclear missiles/satellite arrays/submarine fleets/thousands to millions of agents in the cia/fbi/nsa/ or similar set of organizations. 
THe USA military in completion is simply an expensive beast that must be maintained to allow the USA to keep gaining debt.
About India < https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2203&type=status >

In conclusion, The USA has been poorly run since the second phase of world war two. Many say how can you say that? but the numbers are true.
Immigrants historically are a financial drain, this is historic fact anywhere in humanity. Why are immigrants drains? immigrants are human beings who need food, water, shelter, and more. All of those things come at a price. Thus if immigrants get it, some already in the country will not. I am not suggesting immigrants take everything away from people already in any country. They do not. But immigrants do present a drain on any country historically.
The financial firms in the USA have fled the labor market in the usa to keep low wage, but now their industries can't afford higher wage if they are to come to the usa. 
The USA can only add to its debt and it works in the trillions every year. 
Thirty one trillion and counting is how the USA has paid for itself and its allies. And it is the prepayment to a war that is inevitable in the future, i argue near future. And the next global war will use nuclear weapons which is honest since the last global  war ended with nuclear weapons. 

IN AMENDMENT
two prior articles

 
President Biden said on Friday that the federal budget deficit fell to $1.4 trillion.Credit...Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times

Federal Budget Deficit Fell to $1.4 Trillion as Pandemic Spending Eased
The gap between what the government borrows and what it spends narrowed amid less spending and higher tax receipts.

By Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Alan Rappeport
Oct. 21, 2022
WASHINGTON — The federal budget deficit fell to $1.4 trillion for the 2022 fiscal year, from $2.8 trillion a year ago, a reduction driven primarily by the winding down of pandemic emergency spending and a surge in tax receipts, according to the Treasury Department.

President Biden trumpeted the deficit reduction on Friday morning, saying the fact that it was cut roughly in half was evidence that his economic policies were working. With soaring inflation as one of the top concerns among voters ahead of tight congressional elections, Mr. Biden has often cited a shrinking budget deficit as a way to bring down rising costs.

“Today we have further proof that we’re rebuilding the economy in a responsible way,” Mr. Biden said during his remarks from the White House. “We’re going from historically strong economic recovery to a steady and stable growth while reducing the deficit.”

Mr. Biden seized on the moment to also portray the November congressional elections as not a referendum on his administration but a “choice” between his economic agenda and the policies that he said a Republican-controlled Congress would put in effect. He said Republicans would cut Social Security benefits, increase the deficit and undo his efforts to lower prescription drug prices.

“It’s mega-MAGA trickle down,” Mr. Biden said. He blamed Republicans for fueling the deficit during the Trump administration with large tax cuts. “The kind of policies that have failed the country before, and it’ll fail it again,” he said.

Deficit hawks were quick to attribute the deficit reduction under Mr. Biden to the phasing-out of pandemic relief spending, including the president’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan. And they warned that Mr. Biden’s plans to forgive certain amounts of student debt would weigh heavily on the nation’s finances going forward.

“In fact, the deficit would have been almost $400 billion lower had the Biden administration not decided to enact an inflationary, costly and regressive student debt cancellation plan in August,” Maya MacGuineas, the president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which argues for deficit relief, said in a statement. “It should be no surprise that the Federal Reserve is having a hard time getting inflation under control when fiscal policymakers keep making their job even harder with more borrowing.”

Republicans said Mr. Biden was misleading Americans about the deficit as he tried to embrace the mantle of fiscal responsibility and argued that the president’s policies had fanned inflation.

“President Biden is ignoring the facts about his own spending to fit his political narrative,” Representative Jason Smith, a Republican from Missouri, said on Twitter. “He says deficits are going down because of his policies, but in reality he’s spending more and fueling higher prices.”

Mr. Smith added that deficits were higher than projected because Democrats passed such an expensive stimulus package last year.

The national debt in the United States continues to be unsustainable in the long term. Treasury Department figures released this month revealed that America’s gross national debt exceeded $31 trillion for the first time, a milestone that the Biden administration did not observe with any fanfare.

While the deficit’s decline was primarily driven by reduced Covid spending, the economic rebound from the depths of the pandemic also gave the government’s coffers a boost, as corporate tax revenue came in faster than expected. A robust labor market and rising wages, which have struggled to keep up with inflation, also resulted in an increase in individual income tax receipts.

When measured against the total economic output of the United States, the federal budget deficit amounted to 5.5 percent of gross domestic product.

The federal government continued to spend more than it earned in the 2022 fiscal year and to borrow money at a fast clip. Total federal borrowing increased by $2 trillion to $24.3 trillion total, partly driven by additional borrowing to finance the federal budget deficit. The U.S. government pays interest to its bondholders, and as the Federal Reserve raises interest rates, those costs are rising.

Interest on the public debt increased 28 percent from last year and is expected to continue growing as the Fed raises rates. Higher rates could add an additional $1 trillion to what the federal government spends on interest payments this decade, according to estimates from the Peterson Foundation. That is on top of the record $8.1 trillion in debt costs that the Congressional Budget Office projected in May.

Still, the administration portrayed the 2022 deficit figures as a sign that the economy was strong and that the White House was focused on improving America’s “fiscal health.”

“Today’s joint budget statement provides further evidence of our historic economic recovery, driven by our vaccination effort and the American Rescue Plan,” said Janet L. Yellen, the Treasury secretary. “It also demonstrates President Biden’s commitment to strengthening our nation’s fiscal health.”

Even as some Democrats, as well as Ms. Yellen, have called for the statutory debt limit to be abolished to carry out congressionally authorized government spending, Mr. Biden said such a move would be “irresponsible.”

But the president, citing the reduced deficit and last month’s streak of gas price declines, said he believed the recent economic outlook of the United States would give Democrats an edge in the midterm elections. A New York Times/Siena College poll this month found Republicans had a slight edge with the share of likely voters who said economic concerns were the most important issues facing America, leaping since July to 44 percent from 36 percent.

“I think that we’re going to see one more shift back to our side,” Mr. Biden said. “Let me tell you why I think that. We are starting to see some of the good news on the economy.”

Zolan Kanno-Youngs is a White House correspondent covering a range of domestic and international issues in the Biden White House, including homeland security and extremism. He joined The Times in 2019 as the homeland security correspondent. @KannoYoungs

Alan Rappeport is an economic policy reporter, based in Washington. He covers the Treasury Department and writes about taxes, trade and fiscal matters. He previously worked for The Financial Times and The Economist. @arappeport

What is the debt ceiling? The debt ceiling, also called the debt limit, is a cap on the total amount of money that the federal government is authorized to borrow via U.S. Treasury securities, such as bills and savings bonds, to fulfill its financial obligations. Because the United States runs budget deficits, it must borrow huge sums of money to pay its bills.
When will the debt limit be breached? Congress passed legislation in December 2021 to raise the limit by $2.5 trillion and stave off the threat of default until 2023. On Jan. 13, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen warned that she expected the United States to hit the limit on Jan. 19 and that, unless the statutory cap were raised, her powers to delay a default could be exhausted by early June.
Why is there a limit on U.S. borrowing? According to the Constitution, Congress must authorize borrowing. The debt limit was instituted in the early 20th century so that the Treasury would not need to ask for permission each time it had to issue debt to pay bills.
What would happen if the debt limit was hit? Breaching the debt limit would lead to a first-ever default for the United States, creating financial chaos in the global economy. It would also force American officials to choose between continuing assistance like Social Security checks and paying interest on the country’s debt.

Article URL
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/21/us/politics/federal-budget-deficit.html

The federal government continued to pump huge sums of money into the economy to help workers and businesses cope with the pandemic.Credit...Emily Elconin for The New York Times

The U.S. budget deficit hit a record $1.7 trillion in the first half of the fiscal year.
The United States is doling out twice as much money as it takes in.

By Alan Rappeport
Published April 12, 2021
Updated Oct. 22, 2021
The United States budget deficit grew to a record $1.7 trillion in the six months since October, as the federal government continued to pump huge sums of money into the economy to help workers and businesses cope with the pandemic.

The figure comes in the wake of a $1.9 trillion economic rescue package that Congress passed in March and as the Biden administration and Democrats are considering spending trillions of dollars more on a sweeping legislative package to overhaul the nation’s infrastructure.

Federal spending is far outpacing revenue — the United States is doling out twice as much money as it takes in, having spent a record $3.4 trillion so far this fiscal year, which began Oct. 1, and collected just $1.7 trillion in tax revenue.

The spending continued at a record clip in March, when the government spent $927 billion, the highest total on record for any March and the third highest total of any month to date. The deficit for March was $660 billion.

A Treasury official said that the data showed a substantial increase from a year ago, when the pandemic was just setting in and the economy was starting to shed jobs. The budget deficit, which is the gap between what the government spends and what it takes in, is expected to continue to swell in the coming months as money from the stimulus bill continues to roll out.

In the first six months of the fiscal year, spending was up sharply for nutrition assistance programs, economic impact payments and expanded jobless benefits. Money for small-business loans made through the Paycheck Protection Program and funds for education and health providers also contributed to the record outlays.

Economic policymakers have said that the budget shortfall is a long-term concern but that it is manageable now.

“The U.S. federal budget is on an unsustainable path,” Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, said on CBS’s “60 Minutes” on Sunday. “Meaning the debt is growing faster than the economy. And that’s kind of unsustainable in the long run.”

He added: “That doesn’t mean debt is at an unsustainable level today. It’s not. We can service the debt we have.”

Alan Rappeport is an economic policy reporter, based in Washington. He covers the Treasury Department and writes about taxes, trade and fiscal matters. He previously worked for The Financial Times and The Economist. @arappeport

Article URL
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/12/business/united-states-budget-deficit.html
 

Most of the stop-motion puppets in “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio” are operated through mechanical gears in their heads. But the title character was fabricated via metal 3-D printing.Credit...Netflix

For ‘Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio,’ a Star Built From Tiny Gears and 3-D Printing
The studio behind stop-motion hits like ‘Corpse Bride’ and ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’ started work on the new film in 2008 but had to wait for the technology to catch up.

By Charles Solomon
Published Jan. 3, 2023
Updated Jan. 5, 2023
From its earliest stages of development more than 15 years ago, “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio” was envisioned as a stop-motion production. The director explained, “It was clear to me that the film needed to be done in stop-motion to serve the story about a puppet that lives in a world populated by other puppets who think they are not puppets.”

He also knew that key members of the cast had to be built by the British studio Mackinnon and Saunders. “They are the best in the world,” he said in a recent video interview. “The starring roles of the movie needed to be fabricated by them.” As the producer Lisa Henson put it, “They do things that other puppet builders do not have the patience or the expertise to do.”

“Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio” is the latest example of the efflorescence of stop-motion animation. For decades, the technique was overshadowed by the more expressive drawn animation and, later, by computer-generated imagery. But new technologies have allowed artists to create vivid performances that rival other media.

Artists and technicians at Mackinnon and Saunders pushed stop-motion technology in an entirely new direction for “Corpse Bride” (2005) by inventing systems of tiny gears that fit inside puppets’ heads. The animators adjusted the gears between frames to create subtle expressions: Victor, the title character’s groom, could raise an eyebrow or lift the edge of his lip in the start of smile. This technique also enlivened “Fantastic Mr. Fox” (2009) and “Frankenweenie” (2012).

“Tim Burton or Guillermo del Toro will bring us the story, then give us the space to say, ‘What can we do with these puppet characters? Let’s find something new to do,’” said Ian Mackinnon, a founder of the firm.

He likened the mechanics inside puppet heads to components of a Swiss watch. “Those heads are not much bigger than a ping-pong ball or a walnut,” he said, explaining that the animator moves the gears by putting a tiny tool into the character’s ear or the top of its head. “The gears are linked to the puppet’s silicone skin, enabling the animator to create the nuances you see on a big cinema screen,” he said.

The introduction of geared heads was part of a series of overlapping waves of innovation in stop-motion that brought visuals to the screen that had never been possible. Nick Park and the artists at the British Aardman Animations sculpted new subtleties into clay animation in “Creature Comforts” (1989) and “The Wrong Trousers” (1993). Meanwhile, Disney’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas” (1993) showcased the new technology of facial replacement. A library of three-dimensional expressions was sculpted and molded for each character; an animator snapped out one section of the face and replaced it with a slightly different one between exposures. Then the Portland, Ore.-based Laika Studios pushed this technique further, using 3-D printing to create faces, beginning with “Coraline” (2009).

For “Pinocchio,” which debuted on Netflix a few months after Disney released Robert Zemeckis’s partly animated version of the story, most of the puppets were built at ShadowMachine in Portland, where most of the film was shot. Candlewick, the human boy Pinocchio befriends in the film, “has threads set into the corners of his mouth which are attached to a double-barreled gear system,” explained Georgina Hayns, an alumna of Mackinnon and Saunders who was director of character fabrication at ShadowMachine. “If you turn the gear inside the ear clockwise, it pulls the upper thread and creates a smile. If you turn it anticlockwise, it pulls a lower thread which produces a frown. It really is amazing.”

That was the result of a process that began in 2008, when the Mackinnon and Saunders team made some early prototypes. “By the time Netflix greenlit the film in 2018, we were ready and waiting,” Mackinnon said. “If we’d tried to do ‘Pinocchio’ 10 or 15 years ago, the technology wouldn’t have been there.”

Although mechanical heads are used for most of the key characters in the film, Pinocchio himself was animated with replacement faces. Because he has to look like he’s made of wood, he needed to have a hard surface, the animation supervisor Brian Leif Hansen said, explaining that 3,000 of the faces were printed. “His expressions are snappy; the mechanical faces look softer and more fluid compared to Pinocchio. He’s built differently and animated in a different way to set him apart.”

The character is the first metal 3-D-printed puppet, Hansen said. Because he’s skinny, “the only way they could make him strong enough was to print the puppet in metal. He’s a strong little guy, quite difficult to break. The animators loved animating him.”

Thanks to a team of engineers and the puppet designer Richard Pickersgill, “we’ve moved the replacement technology forward a little bit,” Mackinnon said. The designer “gave Pinocchio spindly limbs and joints that look like Geppetto carved them by hand.”

The studio spent a year and a half prototyping Pinocchio before making the first production model. Eventually more than 20 puppets were built to ensure the animators had enough.

The studio has made figures as big as the “life-sized” Martians in “Mars Attacks” (1996), but most stop-motion puppets are about the size of Barbie dolls — Pinocchio is 9.5 inches tall. The sophisticated creations meant del Toro and his co-director, Mark Gustafson, could get the performances they needed. They looked for inspiration to the films of Hayao Miyazaki, whose characters think, pause and change their minds as they move.

“I had a road-to-Damascus moment watching ‘My Neighbor Totoro’ where the father tries to put his shoe on: He misses it twice, then gets it on the third try,” del Toro explained. “Miyazaki says if you animate the ordinary, it will be extraordinary. So we went for failed acts because we wanted to breathe life into these characters.”

He estimated that 35 shots had to be redone because “we said, ‘The character is moving, but I don’t see the character thinking or feeling.’ The little failed gestures or hesitations before a movement tell you, ‘This is a living character.’”

Gustafson said that failed gestures were especially difficult “because the intention has to be visible — it’s not actually a mistake. I think our brains are really wired to recognize when a gesture is false somehow, so we worked really hard at getting those things to feel as natural as we could.”

Artists can change or rework computer-generated and 2-D animation during production, but once stop-motion animators begin moving a puppet, they have to continue to the end of the scene — or start over. They can’t alter what they’ve already filmed, any more than an actor can stop midstride, walk backward a few steps and cross the set differently.

“Stop-motion is the art form in animation that is most analogous to live-action, because you are doing real movement, from point A to point B,” del Toro said. “You cannot edit. You’re dealing with real sets and real props, lit by real light. Stop-motion is to live-action what Ginger Rogers is to Fred Astaire: We do the same steps, backwards in high heels.”

MY THOUGHTS 

I love stop motion animation, I am a fan of guillermo del toro's work, good stuff folks

Article URL
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/03/movies/guillermo-del-toro-pinocchio-puppets-stop-motion.html
 

Haruhiko Kuroda, the Bank of Japan’s governor and the architect of its current policies.Credit...Richard A. Brooks/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Why Japan’s Sudden Shift on Bond Purchases Dealt a Global Jolt
The world has relied on ultralow interest rates in Japan. What will happen if they rise?

By Ben Dooley
Reporting from Tokyo

Jan. 3, 2023
Japan is the world’s largest creditor. At the end of 2021, it held roughly $3.2 trillion in foreign assets, 30 percent more than No. 2 Germany. As of October, it owned over a trillion dollars of U.S. government debt, more than China. Japanese banks are the world’s largest cross-border lenders, with nearly $4.8 trillion in claims in other countries.

Late last month, the world got an unexpected reminder of how integral Japan is to the global economy, when the country’s central bank unexpectedly announced that it was adjusting its stance on bond purchases.

To those unversed in the intricacies of monetary policy, the significance of Japan’s decision to raise the ceiling on its 10-year bond yields may not have been immediately clear. But for the finance industry, the surprising change raised expectations that the days of rock-bottom Japanese interest rates could be numbered — potentially further squeezing global credit markets that were already tightening as the world economy slowed.

Since this summer, the Bank of Japan has been an outlier, keeping its interest rates ultralow even as other central banks raced to keep up with the Federal Reserve, which has ratcheted up lending costs in an effort to tame high inflation.

As global rates have diverged from those in Japan, the value of the yen has fallen as investors sought better returns elsewhere. That has put pressure on the Bank of Japan to shift the world’s third-largest economy away from its decade-long commitment to cheap money, a policy known as monetary easing.

Japan’s deep integration into global financial networks means that there is a lot of money riding on the timing of any move away from that policy, and investors have spent years fruitlessly waiting for a sign.

As of mid-December, the overwhelming expectation was that the bank would hold off on any changes until spring, when Haruhiko Kuroda, the Bank of Japan’s governor and an architect of its current policies, is set to step down.

So when the bank made its bond yield announcement, which effectively raised interest rates, it caught virtually everyone off guard.

Mr. Kuroda has been adamant that the decision does not represent a fundamental change in monetary policy. He has insisted that it was intended to encourage trading in 10-year bonds — the bank’s preferred tool for controlling interest rates — which had slowed to a trickle under the bank’s tight controls.

But markets, at least in the short term, weren’t convinced. After the announcement, global stock markets dropped. The yen surged more than 3 percent. And bond yields shot up.

No one, perhaps not even Mr. Kuroda, knows what the bank will do next, said Paul Sheard, a former chief economist of S&P Global. But among some market participants there’s a belief that “when a central bank makes one move, a lot more are coming,” he said.

For “the median investor in the world who’s looking at Japan out of the corner of their eye,” he said, “suddenly you see something that looks like the first move in what could be monetary tightening. That’s like a game changer.”

To understand why, we have to go all the way back to 2013, when Shinzo Abe, then a newly elected prime minister, proposed aggressive policies intended to shock Japan’s economy out of its decades-long torpor.

The most important piece of his strategy was a monetary policy intended to make it easier and more attractive for companies and households to borrow money and spend it.

Among other things, Mr. Abe and his team aimed to push inflation up to 2 percent. Japanese prices had languished for decades: The cost of fried chicken at one convenience store chain hadn’t gone up since the 1980s. While that might seem good for consumers, economists argued that it inhibited companies’ growth, which, in turn, made them reluctant to raise wages.

A modest increase in inflation could break that stasis, they believed, creating a virtuous cycle of rising prices, increased corporate profits and higher wages.

The Bank of Japan told everyone who would listen that it would do whatever it took to achieve its goal of stable price increases. The message was clear: It’s better to spend now, while things are still cheap.

To prove it meant business, the bank started purchasing vast sums of equities and bonds, spending so much that it doubled the amount of currency in the economy in less than two years. (At its peak, in May of last year, it had grown over five times.)

Central banks following a conventional monetary policy tend to focus on controlling short-term interest rates and let markets determine long-term rates. But in 2016 — with inflation still dormant — Japan decided to attempt something very unusual: It would seek to directly control some longer-term rates as well, using an untested policy called “yield curve control.”

Financial institutions base their interest rates, whether on a bank loan or a corporate bond, in part on the expected yields from government bonds. Reducing the market’s role in determining the prices of those bonds, the Bank of Japan figured, would let it better control lending conditions.

The mechanism for accomplishing that depended on one of a bond’s most fundamental attributes: Its price and yield move in opposite directions. The lifetime value of a bond is fixed on the day it’s issued, so if you pay more for it, your returns — the yield — go down. If you pay less, they go up.

When the Bank of Japan introduced its new policy, it committed to buying as many bonds as necessary at whatever price was required to keep yields around zero percent on the 10-year bond, the benchmark for other rates.

Things didn’t quite go as planned.

Rates stayed low, and inflation did, in recent months, hit the 2 percent benchmark. But it kept climbing, reaching 3.7 percent in November, a 40-year high. And most of that wasn’t the good, wage-boosting, demand-driven inflation the Bank of Japan wanted. It was “bad” inflation created by supply shortages from the pandemic and Russia’s war on Ukraine.

What’s more, the growing gap between interest rates in Japan and elsewhere was pushing down the yen’s value, piling even more stress on the country’s highly import-dependent economy. That made some analysts speculate that the Bank of Japan would soon be forced to raise interest rates.

Which brings us up to December, when Mr. Kuroda suddenly announced that the bank would double the ceiling on 10-year bond yields, allowing them to fluctuate between plus and minus 0.5 percent, and effectively raising interest rates.

To many investors, the decision seemed like the first tentative step toward even bigger rate increases. As bond yields have jumped, the bank has had to spend heavily to defend its rate target.

Which raises the question, how much longer can the Bank of Japan stick to its guns?

The answer depends on a number of factors, including the performance of the global economy and whether the central bank feels it has finally reached its targets for wage growth and inflation, said Toshitaka Sekine, a professor of economics at Hitotsubashi University.

Most experts believe that the process of unwinding Mr. Kuroda’s monetary easing policy, when it happens, will take years. It is certain to be complicated: Many Japanese borrowers have become accustomed to cheap money — variable interest rates are common, for example — and a hasty retreat could strain households and firms alike.

It could also be painful for global markets that have come to take Japan’s loose monetary policy for granted. Years of anemic growth and a decade of superlow interest rates have pushed many Japanese investors to seek higher returns abroad, increasing their already prominent role in global credit markets.

Although unlikely, a rapid reversal by the Bank of Japan “could generate some hard-to-anticipate shock waves around the world,” said Brad Setser, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an expert on global trade and capital flows. “In the worst-case scenario, rapid rises in long-term Japanese rates push up long-term interest rates globally.”

Ben Dooley reports on Japan’s business and economy, with a special interest in social issues and the intersections between business and politics. @benjamindooley

MY THOUGHTS
One of the tragedies of the financial activity by the United States of America is the deterioration of the concept of debt. 
Debt used to be a thing you were happy not to have. But the USA federal government has made debt a currency, a tool to control affairs in humanity. 
The Japanese are owed over a trillion dollars, but they don't have the military to demand that money is given. Sequentially, all they can do is hold it or present it in financial schemes to others. 
Japan decides to provide USA's debt to others as currency. Sequentially, governments throughout humanity buy USA's debt to Japan which Japan gets a financial percentage of sale from. 
Personally, I will never buy anyone's debt nor will I buy what anyone else is owed. The USA military was already the most potent element in the usa through the cold war arms race, but the usa military has become switzeland in that it's existence allows the usa to keep producing debt, cause even with a unleavened debt ceiling what country can call in the usa's debt, especially a country absent a military like japan or germany. 
Japan's near future will be very interesting

Thoughts to the japanese or japan in a forum post
comment1 
https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/9982-70-japanese-organizations-wrote-president-biden-a-letter-to-give-african-americans-reparations-december-2022/?do=findComment&comment=57947

comment2
https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/9982-70-japanese-organizations-wrote-president-biden-a-letter-to-give-african-americans-reparations-december-2022/?do=findComment&comment=57951

Article URL
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/03/business/japan-bonds-interest-rates.html

Mr. Yokoyama plans to give away his land and equipment to a successor he has chosen.Credit...Noriko Hayashi for The New York Times

Japan’s business owners can’t find successors. This man gave his away.
By Ben Dooley and Hisako Ueno
Ben Dooley and Hisako Ueno traveled to Monbetsu, Japan, to report this story.

Hidekazu Yokoyama has spent three decades building a thriving logistics business on Japan’s snowy northern island of Hokkaido, an area that provides much of the country’s milk.

Last year, he decided to give it all away.

It was a radical solution for a problem that has become increasingly common in Japan, the world’s grayest society. As the country’s birthrate has plummeted and its population has grown older, the average age of business owners has risen to around 62. Nearly 60 percent of the country’s businesses report that they have no plan for what comes next.

While Mr. Yokoyama, 73, felt too old to carry on much longer, quitting wasn’t an option: Too many farmers had come to depend on his company. “I definitely couldn’t abandon the business,” he said. But his children weren’t interested in running it. Neither were his employees. And few potential owners wanted to move to the remote, frozen north.

So he placed a notice with a service that helps small-business owners in far-flung locales find someone to take over. The advertised sale price: zero yen.

Mr. Yokoyama’s struggle symbolizes one of the most potentially devastating economic impacts of Japan’s aging society. It is inevitable that many small and medium-size companies will go out of business as the population shrinks, but policymakers fear that the country could be hit by a surge in closures as aging owners retire en masse.

In an apocalyptic 2019 presentation, Japan’s trade ministry projected that by 2025, around 630,000 profitable businesses could close up shop, costing the economy $165 billion and as many as 6.5 million jobs.

Economic growth is already anemic, and the Japanese authorities have sprung into action in hopes of averting a catastrophe. Government offices have embarked on public relations campaigns to educate aging owners about options for continuing their businesses beyond their retirements and have set up service centers to help them find buyers. To sweeten the pot, the authorities have introduced large subsidies and tax breaks for new owners.

Still, the challenges remain formidable. One of the biggest obstacles to finding a successor has been tradition, said Tsuneo Watanabe, a director of Nihon M&A Center, a company that specializes in finding buyers for valuable small and medium-size enterprises. The company, founded in 1991, has become enormously lucrative, recording $359 million in revenue in 2021.

But building that business has been a long process. In years past, small-business owners, particularly those who ran the country’s many decades- or even centuries-old companies, assumed that their children or a trusted employee would take over. They had no interest in selling their life’s work to a stranger, much less a competitor.

Mergers and acquisitions “weren’t well regarded,” Mr. Watanabe said. “A lot of people felt that it was better to shut the company down than sell it.” Perceptions of the industry have improved over the years, but there are “still many businesspeople who aren’t even aware that M.&A. is an option,” he added.

While the market has found buyers for the businesses most ripe for the picking, it can seem nearly impossible for many small but economically vital companies to find someone to take over.

In 2021, government help centers and the top five merger-and-acquisitions services found buyers for only 2,413 businesses, according to Japan’s trade ministry. Another 44,000 were abandoned. Over 55 percent of those were still profitable when they closed.

Many of those businesses were in small towns and cities, where the succession problem is a potentially existential threat. The collapse of a business, whether a major local employer or a village’s only grocery store, can make it even harder for those places to survive the constant attrition of aging populations and urban flight that is hollowing out the countryside.

After a government-run matching program failed to find someone to take over for Mr. Yokoyama, a bank suggested that he turn to Relay, a company based in Kyushu, Japan’s southernmost main island.

Relay has differentiated itself by appealing to potential buyers’ sense of community and purpose. Its listings, featuring beaming proprietors in front of sushi shops and bucolic fields, are engineered to appeal to harried urbanites dreaming of a different lifestyle.

The company’s task in Mr. Yokoyama’s case wasn’t easy. For most Japanese, the town where his business is situated, Monbetsu, which has around 20,000 people and is shrinking, might as well be the North Pole. The only industries are fishing and farming, and they largely go into hibernation as the days grow short and snow piles up to roof eaves. In deep winter, some tourists come to eat salmon roe and scallops and see the ice floes that lock in the city’s modest port.

A street full of 1980s-era cabarets and restaurants is a snapshot of a more prosperous time when young fishermen gathered to let off steam and spend big paychecks. Today, faded posters peel off abandoned storefronts. The town’s biggest building is a new hospital.

In 2001, Monbetsu constructed a new elementary school building just around the corner from Mr. Yokoyama’s company. It closed after just 10 years.

In times past, the classrooms would have been filled with the grandchildren of local dairy farmers. But their own children have now mostly moved to cities in search of higher-paying, less onerous work.

With no obvious successors, the farms have folded one after another. Decades-high inflation brought on by the pandemic and Russia’s war in Ukraine has pushed dozens of holdouts into early retirement.

As local farmers have aged and their profits thinned, more of them have come to depend on Mr. Yokoyama for tasks like harvesting hay and clearing snow. His days start at 4 a.m. and end at 7 in the evening. He sleeps in a small room behind his office.

It would be “extremely difficult” if his business folded, said Isao Ikeno, the manager of a nearby dairy cooperative that has turned heavily to automation as workers have become harder to find.

On the cooperative’s farm, 17 employees tend to 3,000 head of cattle, and Mr. Yokoyama’s company fills in the gaps. No other area businesses can provide the services, Mr. Ikeno said.

Mr. Yokoyama began contemplating retirement about six years ago. But it wasn’t clear what would happen to the business.

While he had taken on a little over half a million dollars in debt, years of generous economic stimulus policies have kept interest rates at rock bottom, easing the burden, and the company’s annual profit margin was around 30 percent.

The ad he placed on Relay acknowledged that the job was hard, but it said that no experience was needed. The best candidate would be “young and ready to work.”

Whoever was chosen would take over the debts, but also inherit all of the business’s equipment and nearly 150 acres of prime farmland and forest. Mr. Yokoyama’s children will get nothing.

“I told them that if you want to take it over, I’d leave it to you, but if you don’t want to do it, I’m giving it all to the next guy,” he said.

Thirty inquiries poured in. Among those who expressed interest were a couple and a representative of a company that planned to expand. Mr. Yokoyama settled on a dark horse, 26-year-old Kai Fujisawa.

A friend had shown Mr. Fujisawa the ad on Relay, and Mr. Fujisawa immediately jumped in a car and showed up on Mr. Yokoyama’s doorstep, impressing him with his youth and enthusiasm.

Still, the transition hasn’t been smooth. Mr. Yokoyama is not entirely convinced that Mr. Fujisawa is the right person for the job. The learning curve is steeper than either of them had imagined, and Mr. Yokoyama’s grizzled, chain-smoking employees are skeptical that Mr. Fujisawa will be able to live up to the boss’s reputation.

Most of the company’s 17 employees are in their 50s and 60s, and it’s not clear where Mr. Fujisawa will find people to replace them as they retire.

“There’s a lot of pressure,” Mr. Fujisawa said. But “when I came here, I was prepared to do this for the rest of my life.”

Ben Dooley reports on Japan’s business and economy, with a special interest in social issues and the intersections between business and politics. @benjamindooley

Hisako Ueno has been reporting on Japanese politics, business, gender, labor and culture for The Times since 2012. She previously worked for the Tokyo bureau of The Los Angeles Times from 1999 to 2009. @hudidi1

MY THOUGHTS
Nippon's woes today is what happens when any government is created and uplifted by an enemy. I think about how Nippon was totally destroyed after the second phase of the world war. How Nippon was originally unsupported by the USA, but how the actions of the common folk flocking to socialistic forms and an anti usa zeal prompted the usa to use its imperial power to rebuild. 
And it was brilliant to those who were in trouble, the culture in japan no longer needed to change, those who wanted change were killed or imprisoned or made sick or silenced in one way or the other by the usa military. 
The business owners , many who fled Nippon were able to crawl back into Nippon and continue their culture or lifestyle unabated. The USA found in Nippon a totally militaristically impotent country, it made, that is a complete ally to the usa in government or financial affairs. 
But... the problems are here. Nippon never learned to grow on its own after the war between the states. In the meiji era Nippon internally changed on nippon's terms and related to the outside humanity whose militaristic technology knocked down their walls. Now Nippon simply acted as a slave to the USA in nearly all matters. Buying USA's debt, hiring USA's workers, moving their factories to the USA, Nippon commonly called Japan became USA's bitch to use a common negative term.
And while many praise Japan, the price as the article above proves is clear.

Article URL
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/03/business/japan-businesses-succession.html
 

Attending to a patient at the severe burns unit.Credit...Zied Ben Romdhane for The New York Times

In a Hospital Ward, the Wounds of a Failed Democracy Don’t Heal
Tunisia’s road to democracy began with a self-immolation, and such cases have filled hospital burn wards ever since, as elected leaders failed to deliver on a promise of prosperity.

By Vivian Yee
Vivian Yee, who covers North Africa for The Times, spent a week at the Trauma and Severe Burns Hospital in Ben Arous, near the Tunisian capital, where she watched doctors carry out their work.

Jan. 3, 2023
The most troublesome patient in the hospital’s severe burns unit was refusing to let the orderlies change the bandages that had encased him since he set himself on fire three months earlier, so Dr. Imen Jami burst into his room, her habitually knit brows drawn as tight as they would go, her lips pressed together in a magenta line.

“Look, I have someone in a coma, and I have no time,” she told the young man. “The final word is that you’ll get on the bed and change your bandages.”

“I’m so tired,” he moaned.

“You’re really not going to have them changed?” she said, looming over him.

“No, I will,” he said, quailing.

The doctor had seen this before: Tunisians who set themselves on fire in the throes of desperation often had little interest in recovering. Unable to support their families in a country that was coming apart, they had only the same old futility waiting for them back home.

In a sense, Tunisia’s 2010 revolution — and the wave of Arab Spring uprisings it inspired — began in this hospital burn ward near the capital, Tunis, and sometimes it seems as if its dying breaths are being taken there, too.

A decade ago, the Trauma and Severe Burns Hospital treated Mohamed Bouazizi, the 26-year-old fruit seller whose self-immolation came to stand for the rage that brought down a dictator and launched a democracy. Now it houses self-immolation patients whose own acts of protest changed nothing, and a host of doctors trying to escape. The country’s collective despair was so great that Tunisians turned once again to the one-man rule they had fought so fiercely to overthrow just a decade ago.

All the while, Dr. Jami had been there on the fourth floor.

She was there in the waning days of 2010, when Mr. Bouazizi was brought into the ward in critical condition, and there when the former dictator, President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, came to pose for a picture at his bedside in an unconvincing attempt to show the public that he cared. Less than three weeks later, on Jan. 4, 2011, Mr. Bouazizi was dead.

She was there in the days that followed, when a surge of young men from around the country inundated the hospital after their own copycat self-immolations.

Outside the walls of the hospital in the Tunis suburb of Ben Arous, Mr. Bouazizi’s death was galvanizing Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution. “Jobs, freedom, dignity,” protesters chanted, and soon the revolt spread from young, struggling men like Mr. Bouazizi to all kinds of Tunisians. By Jan. 14, 2011, Mr. Ben Ali had fled the country, and Tunisia’s uprising had set off others across the region.

The others ended in bloodshed. But for a while, it seemed, democracy was blooming in Tunisia — the Arab Spring’s last great hope. Yet even as Tunisians’ freedoms multiplied, bread got harder to afford, and democracy itself started to seem undignified.

The old regime’s crimes went largely unpunished. Parliament deadlocked. Corruption spread. Unemployment rose. Poverty deepened. Buffeted by inexperience, infighting and bad luck, 10 prime ministers in 10 years failed to make urgent economic changes.

The post-revolution government was dominated by an Islamist party, Ennahda, and religious-secular divisions polarized a society unsure about whether politicians who wanted to govern according to Islamic principles belonged in a democracy at all.

During what Tunisians called the “black decade” after the revolution, the Bouazizi copycats arrived at the hospital by the hundreds. A relative rarity before the revolution, the act of self-immolation soon accounted for a fifth of the burn ward’s cases.

Then, in 2019, Kais Saied — an austere constitutional law professor — was elected president. Harnessing Tunisians’ rage and regret over the revolution, he suspended Parliament in July 2021, sidelined political parties, undercut civil liberties and embraced one-man rule, all but burying the country’s brief experiment with democracy.

And many Tunisians cheered.

People like Dr. Jami and many of her colleagues wanted rescuing, and after a decade of watching elected leaders fumble, they had not seen a better candidate for savior than Mr. Saied.

More than a year after his election, however, the president had been unable to do much about the foundering economy, the soaring prices or the lack of decent jobs. Which was why an estimated 15,400 Tunisians boarded rickety boats bound for Europe last year, only for at least 570 of them to drown, and part of why young men kept setting themselves on fire.

In Tunisia, illegal migration to Europe by boat was called the “harga.” The word translated, literally, to “burning.”

On the burn ward, all the doctors raised their voices so patients could hear them through the thick layers of white bandages that shrouded their heads, but Dr. Jami was loudest of all. Her “good mornings” were trumpet blasts, her entrances laughter and thunder; she could get a roomful of staff laughing with a single line, or upend it with demands for help, now.

The daughter of a nurse, Dr. Jami had studied medicine because it was her father’s dream for her, joining the burn unit soon after it opened in 2008.

She and her office mate, a fellow general practitioner, Behija Gasri, had spent five days straight in the ward during the revolution, changing diapers and mopping hallways themselves because no one else could reach the hospital. So many self-immolation cases were brought in that they ran out of beds and started putting patients on chairs.

Chaos and upheaval: That was all the revolution had brought her, she often thought.

In the decade that followed, most of Tunisia’s self-immolation cases were brought to this hospital, North Africa’s premier burn treatment center, their numbers growing just as the medical staff caring for them shrank. The increasingly bleak economy had pushed thousands of Tunisian doctors to leave the country for better opportunities abroad, including half the burn unit’s senior specialists, and now there was far more work and far less money for the ones who had stayed behind.

But Dr. Jami and Dr. Gasri were still here, even if survival and resilience in the face of adversity, it often seemed, had earned them little more than the chance to survive yet more adversity.

Doing the rounds of their patients every morning in early October, the gaggle of doctors in scrubs and rubber clogs — many of them women, most of them bespectacled, and all of them tired — tended to pass the self-immolation patient’s room without comment.

Day after day, he lay in the dark as the small TV on the wall cast ghostly light on his face, curling and uncurling the unbandaged fingers on his right hand.

Changing his bandages was always an ordeal. When orderlies wheeled him back to his room after Dr. Jami’s scolding, he was groaning in pain.

“Slowly, slowly!” he shouted as they shifted him back onto the bed. This time, Dr. Jami’s office mate, Dr. Gasri, was there to greet him. She spoke softly.

“Help us help you get better soon,” she said.

He said nothing, except to ask a nurse for a new diaper.

Dr. Gasri had the graven, planed face of a Byzantine mosaic saint, the impression of piety reinforced by a daily uniform of white head scarf and white coat. More than a head shorter than Dr. Jami, she moved quietly down hallways where her office mate whirled and strode.

During morning rounds, Dr. Jami massaged Dr. Gasri’s shoulders, patted upper arms in apology as she squeezed past the nurses, whispered jokes in people’s ears. She blew brusque little kisses in greeting, thanks and farewell. Dr. Gasri just smiled.

When Dr. Gasri first joined the unit in its early years, she had barely been able to take it. She fainted the first time she saw and smelled the burned flesh under the bandages.

Still, it was rewarding work. Former patients often came back to thank her and pray for her, she said. Sometimes they brought gifts from their home regions: dates sweet as caramel from the city of Tozeur, or, once, a bottle of fresh milk a farmer had gotten up early to deliver all the way from impoverished Kasserine. By the time it reached Ben Arous, it had gone bad.

Now a former patient was waiting for her in the hall, there with not a gift but a plea.

Ahmed Yaakoubi had first been admitted in 2012 after burning his lower legs in a car accident. Recovery was supposed to take two years, but for nearly a decade now, he had been unable to come up with the money for regular bandage replacements and follow-up treatment. At 25, unable to fully control his lower legs, walking with a limp, he couldn’t find work.

Dr. Gasri smiled at him as they shook hands, but what she had to say was serious.

“I don’t want to lie to you,” she said. “Your legs are worn out. You can’t go on like this.”

He hadn’t changed the bandages that still swaddled both legs from the knee down for four days now, risking infection and maybe even amputation. The charity his neighbors pressed on him after the accident had tapered off four years later, when he started to walk again, though he said one neighbor who was a nurse kept selling him discounted bandages.

But years had turned to a decade, Tunisians’ budgets had gone from modest to minuscule, and now nobody was giving. He felt he was a burden on the neighbor, who could no longer conceal his impatience.

Ten dinars — about $3 — for each hospital visit, 20 for fresh bandages. At the pharmacy, some products he was supposed to use had tripled in price. And he was meant to change the wrappings every day.

“I can’t even afford to eat,” Mr. Yaakoubi told Dr. Gasri. “How can I buy new bandages?”

She told him to come back on Monday. Maybe she would have something for him then. She would ask a few relatives to chip in, and, probably, dip into her own pocket.

The burn unit’s founder and head, Amen Allah Messadi, had set up an association to raise money for patients who couldn’t afford physical therapy, pressure garments, laser therapy, prosthetics and bandages, which was to say most patients. The erratic public health care system instituted after the revolution covered only the formally employed, and by the World Bank’s estimate, nearly half of Tunisians eked out a living off the books.

But the association had paused its fund-raising when Covid-19 hit, and donations dried up as times got harder. These days, it was often the staff who gave, stuffing spare dinars into an envelope that Dr. Gasri kept to help those in need.

Money had never seemed so tight when Ben Ali, the former dictator, was in power. As the regime’s heavily state-controlled approach opened up to private investment, the country’s middle class was considered sound, its education and health care systems solid, its markets’ prices steady.

Yet citified coastal Tunisia was much wealthier than the country’s rural inland, the gap between the Ben Ali cronies who controlled much of the economy and the rest stoked resentment, and the young people who made up nearly a third of Tunisia’s 11 million people, like Mr. Bouazizi, were desperate for decent jobs. He had set himself on fire to protest police harassment after municipal officials confiscated the fruit he was selling and, according to his family, slapped him.

A decade of democracy brought elections, freedom of expression, a thriving press, a muscular civil society and independent institutions, all things the country had never had under French colonial rule or the two dictators who followed. But such intangibles meant little to the revolutionaries who had demanded better lives — materially, and fast.

The foreign debt and economic structure that the new Tunisia inherited from the old Tunisia — the country imported expensive things and exported cheap ones — would have made that a challenge even for experienced leadership, and Tunisia’s new leaders were green, more focused on a new constitution than fixing the economy.

Early governments ineptly tried to hire and borrow their way into prosperity; later governments all failed to overhaul the economy.

But‌ they might have avoided disaster ‌if ‌Western countries had stepped up with far more aid and debt relief, and if not for a run of bad luck: a financial crisis in Europe, a war in neighboring Libya and terrorist attacks by Islamic extremists that crippled the country’s vital tourism industry.

The attacks deepened suspicion of Ennahda, vitriol that eventually tarnished the whole Parliament that the Islamist party had dominated.

The decline of faith in democracy could be measured in voter turnout. Back in 2011, during the first parliamentary elections after the revolution, 92 percent of voters went to the polls. By 2019, when Mr. Saied was elected as an incorruptible-seeming outsider, just 41 percent bothered.

Or it could be measured in self-immolations. With every fresh economic downturn, more people set themselves on fire, and eight years into Tunisia’s democratic experiment, the doctors whom Dr. Messadi had worked hard to recruit started leaving the burn unit, one by one. That left only Dr. Messadi, Dr. Jami, Dr. Gasri and two senior specialists — one of them debating whether to move abroad.

In France, where Tunisian doctors often emigrated, the pay wasn’t much better, at least not at first. But the equipment, facilities, regulations, malpractice insurance and hours were, and many of the unit’s young doctors said they believed there would be less burnout and depression.

In France, there wouldn’t be a political crisis with no sure outcome, or an economy that seemed headed for collapse.

In July, Mr. Saied rammed through a new Constitution in a referendum, demoting Parliament to more of an advisory body and giving himself the kind of presidential powers no leader had enjoyed since Mr. Ben Ali. Western experts warned that the new charter would hasten the end of Tunisia’s democracy.

Then he urged people to vote for a new, revamped Parliament, one that did away with the influence of Ennahda and other political parties. But only about 11 percent of eligible voters showed up for the Dec. 17 elections.

For Dr. Gasri, the surge of hope she had felt during the revolution was still down there somewhere, though it felt harder to remember these days. She said she would understand if her son, who was studying for an architecture degree, left for a few years’ professional experience in Europe, but she wanted him to come back someday.

She would stay.

“If we all leave,” she said, “what will happen to Tunisia?”

To Dr. Jami, it felt like the revolution had been the beginning of a long plunge into darkness. She said she spent most days now in a funk of stomach pain, fatigue and stress.

“Get me a man,” she said, hunting not for a ring but a visa to a Western country. “Get me out of this country.” It was a joke, but if she didn’t have to support her elderly mother, she said, she would be trying to leave.

The latest blow to the doctors had come when Covid-19 hit the hospitals hard, forcing intensive care specialists to the front lines, even as the strapped Health Ministry had to cut residents’ pay.

It was amid the death and chaos that Mr. Saied mounted his power grab. Dr. Jami said she had been cautiously relieved at his intervention. Dr. Gasri was just hoping for the best.

Now it had been more than a year. The staff tried not to dwell on the fact that, with the economy the way it was, with Mr. Saied apparently unable to fix things, many more young men who had tried to self-immolate might come their way.

“It’s one of the best countries, but I want to leave because they destroyed it,” Dr. Jami said to one of the physical therapists during a rare break one afternoon. Her face was soft with tiredness. “They didn’t leave us with any reasons to stay.”

She meant the politicians they had voted for, dutifully, election after election. Soon after, she told Dr. Messadi she wanted to leave early, and went home.

Ahmed Ellali contributed reporting.

MY THOUGHTS

Financial poverty is a powerful thing and many governments or communities in humanity, through a recent heritage of white european domination don't have the culture to handle how to be poor. It is easier to flee to another country, to burn yourself alive, than to be fiscal poor.
Secondly, though more potently, democracy, the rule of the people always exist. The form of government doesn't matter, the people always rule, the question is, how do the people want to be ruled. Sometimes most folk accept someone with a crown. sometimes most folk accept people voted in. Sometimes most folk accept individuals in a minority populace among them deciding among themselves. but the people always rule and yes, even when a commonly called dictator is the head.
Lastly, or rarely stated, the fiscal wealth of the governments deemed wealthiest in humanity, all comes from slavery/genocides/wars/various levels of abuse. Countries like tunisia, who are larger than city states,  who are trying to make financial changes absent the ability to commit genocides/enslavements/wars/abuses to others especially, are always going to have a hard time. Yes, Germany or Japan or China didn't need so much of that abusive power to others but all of them were given money by the usa to prevent them from joining an enemy in the commonly called cold war. To many countries are deemed financially successful absent the truth to their fiscal profit admitted in media alongside.

In Amendment

The quote by the tunisian woman about getting a man for immigration is a great public admission, when it comes to the nature of male or female relationships concerning the immigrant community and those in the countries of wealth.

Article URL
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/03/world/middleeast/tunisia-democracy.html

Good Multilog, 

@Troy Marcus Garvey/booker t washington/ web dubois tend to engender long multilog among black people in the usa for their time, post war between the states, was the most important time for Black people in the USA since, in terms of deciding how the community will act in the immediate future to modernity. 

In the end, all three leaders got what they wanted in part in the black community, not in majority. 

I can say I know , offline, black people , bLack descended of enslaved <BDE>, who have left the usa for the caribbean or africa to happiness or success. 

I know black people offline who have owned business for decades, some for a shorter time,  and have grown wealth. 

I know black people offline who are elected officials, or work in government positions,  and have fought and gained some rights through the legal system. 

Garvey didn't get his larger goal for two simple truth: 1) White people in majority have never supported Blacks, especially BDE's , leaving en masse from the usa. Whites in the USA  have always opposed that.  2) The Earth had no space. Whites killed the native american to make the american continent, were or are BDE's willing to harm black people in africa or the caribbean to gain? The history of Liberia gives an exhibit that a mass move would generate a huge black versus black violent spree wherever BDE's land in a black country. And most BDE's knew and know this and aren't interested in being a black reflection of the white american.

Washington didn't get his larger goal for one simple truth: 1) No community in the usa gains wealth without abusing another community or abusing its own community. And Washington was unwilling to accept that fact. He felt the Black community could gain wealth comparable to whites without murdering somebody for land, without enslaving or abusing somebody for labor, without being allowed illegal financial activity. But, he was dysfunctional in that disallowance and the black community since the war between the states absent enslaving some group, absent murdering some group, absent illegal allowances hasn't been able to financially have well springs. 

Dubois when younger, didn't get his larger goal for one simple truth: 1) Sooner or later a community under another will need or warrant or want more than legal equality and financial opportunity. The BDE community wanted more than what Dubois offered. A talented tenth and a racially just legal framework isn't what most black people needed or wanted or warranted. They needed more, wanted more, and warranted more. Dubois when older realized that but time had passed on opportunity. 

All three wanted betterment for the Black community en large or the BDE subcommunity in focus, all three had plans that required a gamble that relied on whites at some level. Dubois when younger gambled that subservient black labor will allow for whites to push for equal law but whites saw too much money and wanted too much money in abusive law to push for equal law. Washington gambled with an agrarian or comforting black community whites will have the patience watch black wealth support their own moreso but whites wanted or needed money at a faster rate than agrarian black life provided and thus jim crow. Garvey gambled white american's european desires like in argentina will support a larger black exodus but white americans in the usa, white statians, are not interested in living in a country absent a second class non white populace, and thus they kicked garvey, who is Black American but in a USA context a willing immigrant not a BDE, out using a black BDE no less.  And it was honest. One of the things that plague the modern BDE community today is most BDE are not aligned to the views of the BDE wealthy or the BDE financially bettered. To rephrase , the BDE one percent in the usa[black elephants/black donkeys/black millionaires/black church leaders/black ceo's of white firms , or similar], absent the usa racial environment would be strung up by the BDE 99%. 

The forum post where the comment above refer toThe thoughts stem from the following
https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/9959-booker-t-washingtons-atlanta-exposition-speech-september-18-1895/#comment-57892

MY THOUGHTS TO BOOKER T WASHINGTON's SPEECH in the forum post

Elders I know have issues with Clarke's views, but beyond that, I find it humourous how anyone from the Black Descended of Enslaved <BDE> speak of self reliance when many of the BDE with any significant wealth got it from relying on whites. 
Frederick Douglass and by extension the free blacks before and during and immediately after the war between the states/Booker T Washington and by extension the Historical Black Colleges/WEB Dubois and by extention the NAACP/ The entire Black Christian community after the war between the states. 
All of them talked about self reliance while all of them relied on white wealth for their survival or thriving.
I will love to see Washington and the larger Black college or black church community post war between the states without white reliance.

I will go through his speech and make replies. Exceprts from his speech are in double quotations"""", my replies in brackets <>

""No enterprise seeking the material, civil, or moral welfare of this section can disregard this element of our population and reach the highest success""
<This is a historic lie, before the war between the states the southern states were the financial breadbasket of the usa and after a ten year period the south was again. People forget before and after the war between the states, the south was the key to usa growth and in each instance it was for white and against black. Washington is historically false, if one measures success of a region in a country by its financial value compared to others. IT was when blacks fled white terror that the south truly lost its financial potency but that was because absent cheap or free labor their financial model doesn't work, and what happened, the usa invited tons of poor white people who went midwest, northeast, west coast, and the south became the fiscally poorest region... now in defense, washington refers to civil or moral welfare, but the problem is that no region in the usa had a civil or moral welfare that washington could state as an example. It wasn't like the northern states were beacons of positive multiracial life>

""I but convey to you, Mr. President and Directors, the sentiment of the masses of my race when I say that in no way have the value and manhood of the American Negro been more fittingly and generously recognized than by the managers of this magnificent Exposition at every stage of its progress. ""
<Washington is in error and lying. How dare he speak for the masses of black people. One of the problems many black leaders touted by whites have, is their way of speaking for the largess of black people. I am 100% certain most black people didn't cae about this expo and moreover only wanted some freedom from whites or the usa, if they could get it>

""It is a recognition that will do more to cement the friendship of the two races than any occurrence since the dawn of our freedom.""
<Washington at the end of the first paragraph has done nothing but spoken like a whore to her clients, stroking whites. He used the term 'our freedom' . One of the biggest problems in the BDE community in the usa is the view of some in it that all were made free during the rebellion against the british empire, not only is it not true, but suggesting it ignores the reality of bde life>

""Ignorant and inexperienced, it is not strange that in the first years of our new life we began at the top instead of at the bottom; that a seat in Congress or the State Legislature was more sought than real estate or industrial skill; that the political convention or stump speaking had more attractions than starting a dairy farm or truck garden.""
<Booker T Washington misses the word opportunity all together. He claims black people were ignorant or inexperienced , to why we sought governmental posts over fiscal ventures, but we sought government post cause they were opportune. White people in th us a took land, stole land, was given land. Washington suggest unstraightly, that black people who took no land, who killed for no land, who were given no land should venture into financial enterprises as if we are no different than whites... I support my point that he married a white asian. White asians since new york was new amsterdam were allowed financial opportunity that blacks were not. maybe in seeing his wife's community he felt BDE's need do the same but the white asian community is not the BDE... lastly, WAshington seems ignorant to the concept that government officials can operate businesses. He seems to suggest that black people venturing for political office are barred from business ownership, that isn't true, it requires a different tact or strategy but is doable, maybe he should had helped, but his financiers feared black power, they wanted black wealth or activity to be in tandem with what whites are doing, not a separate force free from white influence>

""To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land, or who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern white man, who is their next door neighbor, I would say: "Cast down your bucket where you are" — cast it down in making friends in every manly way of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded. Cast it down in agriculture, mechanics, in commerce, in domestic service, and in the professions. And in this connection it is well to bear in mind that whatever other sins the South may be called to bear, when it comes to business, pure and simple, it is in the South that the Negro is given a man's chance in the commercial world, and in nothing is this Exposition more eloquent than in emphasizing this chance. ""
<One of the lessons in Booker T WAshington's life that all BDE need to consider, is never associate your individual life with the collective life in your community. Like Frederick Douglass, like WEB Dubois, their personal lives affored them views that most other BDE's personal lives didn't afford. He speaks of cultivating friendly relations to the southern white man, I wonder is that before they hang your parents or after they hang your children? 
In foresight, his view that BDE should make friends to all races in the USA was achieved, modern USA was built by BDE's sacrificing their own potential for making friends to all other races in the USA. And he was correct, the financial potential of the south as a region in the usa is still better for Black people than any other region, which says a lot. Yes, in the north east or west coast you find the wealthiest black communities in the usa but in the south, you find the greatest financial footprint of Black people in general>

""Our greatest danger is, that in the great leap from slavery to freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live by the productions of our hands, and fail to keep in mind that we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify common labor and put brains and skill into the common occupations of life; shall prosper in proportion as we learn to draw the line between the superficial and the substantial, the ornamental gewgaws of life and the useful. No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top. Nor should we permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities.""
<My mother's father's mother was a sharecropper. The issue isn't that black people don't want to till fields, the issue is, do we own the field we are tilling. BDE's tilled a lot in the late 1800s and early 1900s and never owned the land they tilled, making white people more money and only one step above their forebears who were forced. Now some black people will be grieved by such sharecropping, I know my mother's father was but ... why can't we permit  greivances to overshadow opportunities when the shadow of grievances mutes any light from opportunities. His point is what BDE's did from the 1860s to 2023, the time of this writing, we ate crow over and over as white people aabused us and made money off of us. Yes, the modern black community has millionaires, but the price was too high. The shadow of grievances has never lessened never been made smaller and the light from opportunities has only gotten dim, while the whites in the usa found peace and balance with their advantages , even welcoming many others to take advantage of>

""To those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South, were I permitted I would repeat what I say to my own race, "Cast down your bucket where you are." Cast it down among the 8,000,000 Negroes whose habits you know, whose fidelity and love you have tested in days when to have proved treacherous meant the ruin of your firesides. Cast down your bucket among these people who have, without strikes and labor wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forests, built your railroads and cities, and brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth, and helped make possible this magnificent representation of the progress of the South. Casting down your bucket among my people, helping and encouraging them as you are doing on these grounds, and to education of head, hand, and heart, you will find that they will buy your surplus land, make blossom the waste places in your fields, and run your factories. While doing this, you can be sure in the future, as in the past, that you and your families will be surrounded by the most patient, faithful, law-abiding, and unresentful people that the world has seen. As we have proved our loyalty to you in the past, in nursing your children, watching by the sick bed of your mothers and fathers, and often following them with tear-dimmed eyes to their graves, so in the future, in our humble way, we shall stand by you with a devotion that no foreigner can approach, ready to lay down our lives, if need be, in defense of yours, interlacing our industrial, commercial, civil, and religious life with yours in a way that shall make the interests of both races one. In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.""
<this is a great plea by washington, a wise plea, but one totally unheeded. When italians from southern italy first came to the usa, they came to the south. White southerners praised them for accepting less wage and not being of the visage of the negro. Many italians went back to italy but came back to the usa and went north this time. Booker T Washington was pleading for the white southerner to treat the Black southerner in a way white southerners for the most part had no inclination or rearing to do , and that is as a fellow citizen civilian. Jim Crow was essentially the white southerner's reply to Booker T Washington, a system in white BDE's were terrorized and white immigrants were supported or aided by white southerners over BDE's at every turn.>

""There is no defense or security for any of us except in the highest intelligence and development of all. If anywhere there are efforts tending to curtail the fullest growth of the Negro, let these efforts be turned into stimulating, encouraging, and making him the most useful and intelligent citizen. Effort or means so invested will pay a thousand percent interest. These efforts will be twice blessed--"blessing him that gives and him that takes.
"There is no escape through law of man or God from the inevitable: “The laws of changeless justice bind Oppressor with oppressed; And close as sin and suffering joined We march to fate abreast.”
Nearly sixteen millions of hands will aid you in pulling the load upwards, or they will pull you against the load downwards. We shall constitute one third and more of the ignorance and crime of the South, or one third its intelligence and progress; we shall contribute one third to the business and industrial prosperity of the South, or we shall prove a veritable body of death, stagnating, depressing, retarding every effort to advance the body politic.""
<From the founding of the USA a message given by many, indigenous/BDE/white has been racially united the usa stand or propser, racially multivided the usa falter or fall. The USA never was racially united and find itself in modernity atop the human collection of countries based on militaristic power... can the usa stay aop the pile absent racially unity in itself... I don't know, history is complex, the factors that lead to a countries demise are one part inevitable, other part surprise.  >

""Gentlemen of the Exposition, as we present to you our humble effort at an exhibition of our progress, you must not expect overmuch. Starting thirty years ago with ownership here and there in a few quilts and pumpkins and chickens (gathered from miscellaneous sources), remember the path that has led from these to the inventions and production of agricultural implements, buggies, steam engines, newspapers, book, statuary, carving, paintings, the management of drug stores and banks has not been trodden without contact with thorns and thistles. While we take pride in what we exhibit as a result of our independent efforts, we do not for a moment forget that our part in this exhibition would fall far short of your expectations but for the constant help that has come to our educational life, not only from the Southern States, but especially from Northern philanthropists, who have made their gifts a constant stream of blessing and encouragement.""
<this paragraph refutes the concept of self reliance that clarke attributes to booker t washington>

""The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremist folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing. No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized. It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercises of these privileges. The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera house.""
<Booker T Washington would be happy today at the many in the Black American community [canada to argentina] who live in the USA and treat whites with a clean slate from their past or present terrorizations of blacks. And I think he foresaw the impotency to black elected officials in the usa that I tout constantly. But, it must be said, black elected officials in the usa's great weakness historically is that they never related to government in a way that reflected the BDE condition. In the end, BDE eelcted officials treated government like whites when they needed to treat government reflecting the black condition. BDE's and most Blaks in general  don't have private sector power/opportunity/influence, so the public sector needs to be  treated differently. In South Carolina we needed our Black majority senate to empower south carolina government to own land and start business, use a different method to get blacks involved in business than through the private sector but black elected officials were convinced in the white usa view that public and private must be separate. The irony is, Black elected officials after the 1960s party swap, believe in unbounded government spending but still haven't reflected the black communities needs, supporting programs for all when BDE elected officials in the usa would better serve BDE communities by favoring BDE communities with government dollars , not making blanket programs for all the races>

""In conclusion, may I repeat that nothing in thirty years has given us more hope and encouragement, and drawn us so near to you of the white race, as this opportunity offered by the Exposition; and here bending, as it were, over the altar that represents the results of the struggles of your race and mine, both starting practically empty-handed three decades ago, I pledge that in your effort to work out the great and intricate problem which God has laid at the doors of the South you shall have at all times the patient, sympathetic help of my race; only let this be constantly in mind that, while from
representations in these buildings of the product of field, of forest, of mine, of factory, letters, and art, much good will come, yet far above and beyond material benefit, will be that higher good, that let us pray God will come, in a blotting out of sectional differences and racial animosities and suspicions, in a determination to administer absolute justice, in a willing obedience among all classes to the mandates of law. This, this, coupled with our material prosperity, will bring into our beloved South a new heaven and a new earth.""
<In conclusion , White terrorists against Black people, hooded or not, aside the white jew financed National association for the advancement of colored people , killed Booker T Washington's dream of a Southern Unity between Blacks side Whites side all others. White terror made most correctly doubt the effort in the Black community and the NAACP serving white jew interests knew the white southerner unlike the white northerner who has a larger percentage of catholics/quakers/jews or others in the white fold, will never accept a multi white union that white jews needed. So the NAACP was a staunch opponent to Tuskegee and a majority of the black colleges goals. The tragedy is Marcus Garvey gave all black americans the truest answer. If you want to be for self then you need to be about one self. HAving other's as the neighbor weakens one's control, it is that simple. And no matter whether you want private sector or public sector success, as long as either sector has to be shared to another group, you will never have the complete control or freedom you need to strive beyond any limitation others by default bring >
 

The director Ryan Coogler on the set of “Wakanda Forever.” Does he want to direct more “Black Panther” movies? “I’ll do it as long as folks will have me.”Credit...Annette Brown/Marvel

The ‘Black Panther’ Sequel That Never Was

Writer-director Ryan Coogler and co-screenwriter Joe Robert Cole reveal the original plot for “Wakanda Forever” and discuss working in the Marvel universe.

By Reggie Ugwu

The “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” screenwriters Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole are just coming up for air. A month after release, the much anticipated follow-up to the original “Black Panther” (2018) is well situated, still screening at more than 3,000 theaters heading into the holiday weekend. The film has received mostly positive reviews from critics and holds the year’s second-highest performance at the box office, after “Top Gun: Maverick.” To date, it has grossed more than $420 million domestically and nearly $800 million overall.

Things could have gone much differently.

“This film was difficult in ways that only the people who made it would know,” Coogler said in a recent interview. “There are things we put in there that felt revolutionary, that challenged the definition of having ‘a good time’ in a movie like this.”

The death of Chadwick Boseman, who played the title role in the original film — a noble but untested leader of the fictional African promised land Wakanda — forced a radical reimagining of the franchise. Coogler and Cole had recently sent Boseman a completed first draft of the script when the actor succumbed to a secret bout with colon cancer.

Their eventual rewrite opened with the death of Boseman’s character, T’Challa, turning the $250 million superhero film that followed into what can be fairly described as an extended meditation on grief and recovery.

In a recent joint conversation over video, the screenwriters discussed their original vision for a “Black Panther” sequel, how they addressed the loss of Boseman, and balancing the demands of their story with those of the broader Marvel Cinematic Universe.

These are edited — and spoiler-filled — excerpts from the conversation.

What was it like collaborating this time?

RYAN COOGLER Last time we went back and forth. Joe had already started when I came on. I think I tried to go for a draft, but I was taking too long and so he jumped in. Then we would get notes from the studio, and we would just kind of divide and conquer. On the second one, we were doing it over the pandemic, so we couldn’t meet up. But Final Draft [the screenwriting software] came out with this update where we could both work in the script at the same time. It was an amazing feature. Very productive, very fun.

JOE ROBERT COLE It allowed us to bridge that feeling of being in a room and just spitballing ideas.

COOGLER Then we took that hit, bro, when Chad passed. I couldn’t believe what was happening. I didn’t know how we were going to pull ourselves up and figure it out. Thank God for Joe and the collaborative process, man. It would’ve been impossible for me to write this thing on my own.

In the initial draft of the script, before Chadwick’s death, how were you looking at the story? What were the challenges?

COOGLER It was, “What are we going to do about the Blip?” [In Marvel’s “Avengers: Infinity War,” T’Challa is one of billions of people who suddenly vanish, only to be brought back by the Avengers five years later.] That was the challenge. It was absolutely nothing like what we made. It was going to be a father-son story from the perspective of a father, because the first movie had been a father-son story from the perspective of the sons.

In the script, T’Challa was a dad who’d had this forced five-year absence from his son’s life. The first scene was an animated sequence. You hear Nakia [T’Challa’s love interest, played by Lupita Nyong’o] talking to Toussaint [the couple’s child, introduced in “Wakanda Forever” in a post-credits sequence]. She says, “Tell me what you know about your father.” You realize that he doesn’t know his dad was the Black Panther. He’s never met him, and Nakia is remarried to a Haitian dude. Then, we cut to reality and it’s the night that everybody comes back from the Blip. You see T’Challa meet the kid for the first time.

Then it cuts ahead three years and he’s essentially co-parenting. We had some crazy scenes in there for Chad, man. Our code name for the movie was “Summer Break,” and the movie was about a summer that the kid spends with his dad. For his eighth birthday, they do a ritual where they go out into the bush and have to live off the land. But something happens and T’Challa has to go save the world with his son on his hip. That was the movie.

Was Namor, the leader of the undersea nation Talokan in “Wakanda Forever,” still the villain?

COOGLER Yeah. But it was a combination. Val [the C.I.A. director, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus] was much more active. It was basically a three-way conflict between Wakanda, the U.S. and Talokan. But it was all mostly from the child’s perspective.

In the new version, the opening scene is T’Challa’s death. Why did you decide to start there?

COLE Just practically, everyone was going to be waiting to see how we dealt with it, so doing it right up front made sense. In terms of the characters, we needed to introduce a different version of Shuri [T’Challa’s sister, played by Letitia Wright]. We’re showing the moment that she becomes a different person than the person we met. She’s the smartest person in the world, but she can’t save her brother. What does that do to you?

COOGLER We wanted to have an emotionally intelligent conversation. It’s about the transformative quality of grief and trauma. There’s this expectation with emotional trauma that you just need time. “Oh, give them a couple weeks off; they’ll come back to work and get back to it.” But that person is completely different in some ways. You just don’t see it because the change isn’t visible.

T’Challa’s death is attributed to an illness, but it seems sudden and inexplicable, which profoundly unsettles Shuri. Why did you make that choice?

COOGLER We wanted to keep it simple. At the end of the day, what mattered is that she had a self-expectation of being able to be solve it and she failed. And we didn’t want her to have anywhere to displace her anger. If somebody else would’ve taken T’Challa out, Shuri would’ve looked for that person. We wanted it to be a situation where the only place to go was internal.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s character has appeared in other Marvel properties and is being set up as a major antagonist in the studio’s future projects, including the “Thunderbolts” movie due in 2024. Is it challenging to incorporate characters or story lines from the broader Marvel Cinematic Universe?

COLE Ryan will have a different perspective as the director, but I’ve never had a conversation where I was asked to incorporate something that didn’t feel organic. The dynamic of the U.S. being an instigator and Western powers being an instigator, that always existed. It wasn’t, “Oh, we need to find a reason to make this character exist.” It was, “Oh, this is already in here and there’s this wonderful actress available.” It always starts from the story and the ideas.

COOGLER Yeah, nobody was shoehorned in or asked to be put into the movie or anything like that. Actually, in this version, [Louis-Dreyfus’s role] was pared back in order to make space for dealing with T’Challa’s death. And we had Val in there before she even appeared in any of the other movies, before “Black Widow” and [the series] “Falcon and the Winter Soldier.” People assume that we were told to put her in, but she was there from the beginning.

Ryan, what’s your appetite to tell more stories in the world of Wakanda?

COOGLER I feel blessed that I have the opportunity to work on these movies, bro. When I got asked to do the first one, it was like a moving train. I thank God every day that I was able to jump on it and meet these people, these actors, and to meet Chadwick during some of the last years of his life. I’ll do it as long as folks will have me. But I think it’s bigger than just me or Joe. Between the first and second movie, we made $2 billion at the box office, which is what matters the most to corporations. So I hope that it continues, man. I hope people are still making movies about Wakanda long after we’re gone.

Reggie Ugwu is a pop culture reporter covering a range of subjects, including film, television, music and internet culture. Before joining The Times in 2017, he was a reporter for BuzzFeed News and Billboard magazine. @uugwuu

URL : https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/23/arts/ryan-coogler-black-panther-wakanda-forever.html

Jacobs-Jenkins, far left, on the “Kindred” set during filming. “In honoring Octavia’s book, I’m trying to find new things to talk about,” he said.Credit...Tina Rowden/FX

‘Kindred’ Creator Wants Viewers to ‘Question Their Assumptions’

In his TV adaptation of the Octavia Butler novel, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins changed parts of the story but kept the author’s focus on “making the familial political.”

By Salamishah Tillet

Dec. 26, 2022

“If a ‘Kindred’ movie is ever made, I wouldn’t be involved,” Octavia Butler wrote in a letter in 2000. “It won’t be my movie, and I suspect it won’t look much like my book.”

It was yet another Butler prediction that was mostly on target, though she was wrong about the format. Adapted by the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins for FX on Hulu, “Kindred” is neither a film nor a completely faithful interpretation of the novel. But it comes at a time when there is more interest in Butler’s body of work than ever before, and in how her prolific writing, mainly science fiction novels, continues to resonate with our world more than 15 years after her death.

“Kindred” is Butler’s most well-known and often-taught novel. Published in 1979, it tells the story of Dana Franklin, a 26-year-old African American writer who repeatedly and unexpectedly travels from 1976 to a mid-19th-century plantation in Maryland. Each time Dana arrives in the past, she finds herself saving the life of Rufus Weylin, her white slaveholding ancestor; she returns to the present only when her own life is at risk.

In a 1988 interview with the literary critic Larry McCaffery, Butler said that “Kindred,” with its blend of genres, periods and antebellum histories, was informed by ideological debates she had during college in the 1960s, about the extent to which slaves should have rebelled against their masters.

Knowing this, Jacobs-Jenkins sought to capture those tensions while updating the story to convey the complexity of our post-Obama racial reality. A lifelong Butler fan, he wanted to turn “Kindred” into a television series as far back as 2010, when he debuted his first full-length play, “Neighbors,” at the Public Theater.

The drama was well regarded, but it was Jacobs-Jenkins’s 2014 Obie-award-winning play, “An Octoroon,” that established him as one of America’s most exciting young playwrights. A satirical adaptation of Dion Boucicault’s “The Octoroon,” a 19th-century melodrama about the tragic love story between a European-educated white plantation owner and the play’s titular character, an enslaved woman, the play inspired critical raves and hot ticket sales. In his review for The New York Times, Ben Brantley wrote that its success “seemed to confirm the reputation of its author as one of this country’s most original and illuminating writers about race.”

Even then, Jacobs-Jenkins remained committed to “Kindred.” In 2015, he persuaded Courtney Lee-Mitchell, the rights holder of the novel, that it should be a television series and not a movie as previously imagined by other potential producers and even by Butler herself. The decision to stretch the story over multiple seasons has drawn some criticism. (All eight episodes of Season 1 are available on Hulu, but the series has not yet been renewed.)

Nevertheless, Jacobs-Jenkins hopes that his expansion of the novel’s universe encourages more people to discover Butler’s writing for themselves.

“After watching this, I want people to question their assumptions about what they think they know about history, about themselves,” he said. “I want them to read Octavia’s work.”

In a video interview earlier this month, Jacobs-Jenkins talked about his introduction to Butler’s writing, the motivations behind some of his changes to her story and why he thinks television and theaters need even more stories about slavery. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.

When did you first come in contact with “Kindred”?

My relationship with Butler preceded my engagement with “Kindred.” I was one of those kids reading Stephen King on the playground for no good reason, and Ray Bradbury’s novels were important transitional objects for me too. I was like 12 or 13 when I had a babysitter who went to Howard, who was a Black nerd, too. She told me, “You should read Octavia Butler.” So I started with her Patternist series. And when I got to college, I read her on an African American studies syllabus and remember thinking, Oh, this person I read for fun is important academically. That is also when I learned of “Kindred,” which was oddly one of my later introductions to her work.

Before, when I was reading her, it felt very much still like a secret; it felt good to be a part of that weird underground. And now, she’s been mainstreamed in this gigantic way.

How did this adaptation come about?

Slavery is the material of my creative life. I remember becoming obsessed with the visual work of Kara Walker, Glenn Ligon and Kerry James Marshall and wondered why they were so ahead of theater. So back then, I said, I’m going to deep-dive these people, and I’m going to write a play based on my deep dive. I just inhaled whatever their discourse was and tried to translate it into a theater space. And the truth is, my creative life is also ultimately guided by fandom on some level, and I remember rereading “Kindred” in 2010 and thinking, This is a TV show. It was a eureka moment.

I immediately started figuring out how to get the rights. It had been under option since 1979 because people kept trying to make a movie out of it. And I was like, It’s not a movie. Because the whole book is about the experience of time’s passage and watching people transform, witnessing their development, growth, decay and shift of their allegiances. It took six years for me to get the rights, and then my task became trying to translate it and ultimately peel back the layers for people.

Speaking of time passages, her novel was set in 1976 to coincide with the bicentennial year of the Declaration of Independence. Why did you set the series in 2016?

Along the way, I became very friendly with Merrilee Heifetz, Butler’s literary executor and her lifelong agent. One of the things she said to me was, “Octavia would’ve wanted you to make this for now.” So I took that to heart. I think 2016 was that last gasp of naïveté about how we had processed the legacies of this racial regime that the country’s founded on. Do you remember the day after Obama was elected, suddenly, there was a discussion of a phrase called post-race? I remember asking, “What is that?” I also think because people did not see the results of the 2016 [presidential] election coming, we suddenly felt like we were backsliding as a country. “Kindred” was the ultimate metaphor for that, too.

Another surprising change was your inclusion of her mother as a major character. What inspired that story line?

Merrilee also told me that Octavia referred to this book as one she never quite cracked. That interested me because this is her most widely read and known book, and that also sent me to her archives, which had just been cataloged at the Huntington Library.

I read every draft of “Kindred,” and there are ones in which she experimented with this mother figure. In her canon, she’s obsessed with mothers. I don’t want to be psychoanalyzing another artist, but her relationship with her mother was very complicated. Merrilee told me once that she would say, “Octavia, I want you to write a memoir.” And she would say, “I’ve already written a memoir; it’s called ‘Kindred.’”

Unlike many other contemporary representations of enslaved people in television and film, Dana is not by herself. She has a community in each of her periods to help her. Why was this important to portray?

I think Octavia was obsessed with family. I mean, it’s called “Kindred,” and it is about making the familial political. My approach was to always think of what she was doing and try to echo or expand on that universe — I took all my cues from her, except for setting it in 2016. At the same time, she was always trying to understand why tribalism exists, why genes are so varied as a concept, how they’re weaponized to oppress people and what oppression ultimately is rooted in.

Dana has to make some hard choices for herself and often risks the lives of other enslaved African Americans to ensure that she continues to exist in the present. How did you approach bringing her moral ambiguity to the screen?

That’s an essential part of the book, and I think that’s what makes Dana interesting. Most folks are not participating in active insurrection but are fighting in small ways to maintain their agency. This is driven home in Dana, who says to herself: “Wait a minute, to ensure my existence, I have become someone who might destroy or erase the existences of countless people. I want to be perceived as good, and I want to think that my goodness will rub off on Rufus too.” But playing both sides isn’t how justice happens. You wind up being morally compromised in all your actions if you are still thinking about yourself. That’s the interesting challenge she has to negotiate.

Why did you think a multi-season arc was best for this story versus adapting it as a single-season limited series?

I just didn’t think you could do this book in eight hours. It’s about being with people over time and really feeling these tectonic shifts in their personhood. I thought the idea of squeezing in six different actors for Rufus would have felt like a party trick. I’m sure that someone out there could have made that thing, but I just really wanted to give us the fullest canvas I could to tell the story.

Do you ever worry that audiences will grow weary of stories on slavery?

There is this interesting quota that we all want to put on stories about slavery, and I think that question is often asked only of Black creatives. There are a thousand shows on the air about rich white families doing evil sympathetically, and no one puts a quota on that. I think it’s interesting that there’s this desire to police any storytelling about a creative’s history. I mean, this is my history and my family history.

I also think people are worried, afraid of, or sick of the tropes and stereotypes that come with this work and are waiting for the familiar scene in which some female enslaved person is raped or someone is tied to a pole or a tree and whipped. But in honoring Octavia’s book, I’m trying to find new things to talk about. We should never stop telling these stories, especially when people try to erase them from history books.

Salamishah Tillet is a contributing critic at large for The Times and a professor at Rutgers University. She won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2022, for columns examining race and Black perspectives as the arts and entertainment world responded to the Black Lives Matter moment with new works. @salamishah

URL : https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/26/arts/television/kindred-branden-jacobs-jenkins-octavia-butler.html

Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) in his office on Capitol Hill in Washington on Dec. 13, 2022. (Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times)

Shelby, One of the Senate's Last Big Spenders, 'Got Everything' for Alabama

Catie Edmondson and Carl Hulse

Mon, December 26, 2022 at 2:14 PM EST

SHELBY POINT, Ala. — For the first time in years, there are signs of dramatic transformation on the banks of the Mobile River. The waterway is dug wider and deeper by the day. Mobile’s airport will soon move in. And sitting watch from the waterfront is a 3-foot bronze bust of the man who brought home the money to finance it: Sen. Richard C. Shelby.

Determined to the point of obsession to harness the potential of Alabama’s only seaport, Shelby, who has served in Congress for more than four decades, has used his perch on the powerful committee that controls federal spending to bring in more than $1 billion to modernize the city’s harbor, procuring funding for projects including new wharves and better railways. The result is one of the fastest-growing ports of its kind, which today contributes to one in seven jobs in the state.

It is also something of a monument to a waning way of doing business on Capitol Hill, one that has fueled many a bipartisan deal — including the $1.7 trillion spending bill that cleared Congress last week, averting a government shutdown — and whose demise has contributed to the dysfunction and paralysis that has gripped Congress in recent years.

Shelby, who is retiring at 88, is one of the last of the big-time pork barrel legends who managed to sustain the flow of money to his state even as anti-spending fervor gripped his party during the rise of the Tea Party and never quite let go.

The Alabama senator did not just use his seat on the Appropriations Committee to turn the expanding port into an economic engine. Applying his influence, seniority, craftiness and deep knowledge of the arcane and secretive congressional spending process, he single-handedly transformed the landscape of his home state, harnessing billions of federal dollars to conjure the creation and expansion of university buildings and research programs, airports and seaports, and military and space facilities.

Shelby honed his tactics at a time when lawmakers across the political spectrum were willing to set aside ideology and unite behind a common zeal for grabbing federal money for their states and districts. That smoothed the path to passing major spending deals and keeping the government running in large part because those lawmakers had a vested interest in securing wins for their constituents.

He unapologetically followed in the footsteps of predecessors known in congressional parlance as “old bull appropriators,” like Republican Ted Stevens of Alaska, and Democrats Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia and Daniel K. Inouye of Hawaii. They saw their primary task in Congress as steering as much money as they could to their states, which they saw as neglected in favor of more populous ones with more influence.

“They trained me,” Shelby said.

The ascendant right-wing Republicans who wield the greatest influence in Congress these days have received different training altogether.

They are lawmakers who reflexively vote against any federal funding measure and regard big spenders like Shelby as establishment stooges who have been corrupted by the lure of wasteful government spending. And as the party prepares to assume the House majority next week, they have made it clear that they will demand severe cuts, potentially leading to the kind of spending stalemate that has become commonplace in recent years.

“Other people would say, ‘Oh you shouldn’t do anything for your state, you shouldn’t spend any money on this.’ I differ with that,” Shelby said last week, sitting in his office in Washington, feet away from his desk that once belonged to another Southern senator who used his perch in Congress to build his state, Lyndon B. Johnson.

Part of the task of a senator, he argued, is to help build the conditions for his state’s prosperity.

“I’m a pretty conservative guy in a lot of ways,” Shelby said. “But I thought that’s the role Congress has played since the Erie Canal.”

As Shelby’s contributions have sprung up across his home state, so too have the monuments in his honor. Beyond the statue at the Port of Mobile, which was unveiled early this month, there are no fewer than seven buildings in Alabama named for him — mostly academic buildings, but also a missile intelligence center. An eighth, a federal courthouse, is on the way.

“No one will ever accuse Richard Shelby of being timid or thinking small,” said Jo Bonner, the president of the University of South Alabama, and a former Republican congressman who served five terms. The senator’s ability to “dream big and look years down the road,” he said, made Shelby “the most consequential elected official in Alabama history.”

Bradley Byrne, a former Republican congressman from Mobile, recalled marveling when he first arrived to Congress at how thoroughly Shelby had stuffed the year-end spending bill.

“Senator, you got a whole lot of stuff for Alabama in that bill,” Byrne recalled telling Shelby.

“Bradley,” Shelby replied in his signature baritone drawl, “I got everything.”

Born in Birmingham during the Great Depression, Shelby said he had never even met a Republican growing up. A lawyer by trade, he began in politics as a conservative Democrat, first in the Alabama Senate, then as a U.S. congressman. By the time Shelby had climbed the ranks of seniority in the Senate, becoming the chair of the appropriations panel after helming three others, including the Intelligence Committee, he had changed parties as part of the vanguard of the Southern realignment.

Outside of his push for federal money, Shelby legislated and voted like a conventional conservative when it came to social and economic issues, and his relationship with the Clinton administration soured when, in 1993, he greeted the new president’s economic plan with the memorable phrase: “The taxman cometh.”

His enthusiasm for earmarks has long drawn detractors. Citizens Against Government Waste, a nonpartisan organization that opposes the use of earmarks, once published a report titled “Senator Shelby’s pork parade.”

“Sen. Shelby has long used his seniority on the Appropriations Committee to receive far more earmarks than his peers,” including last year, “when he received nearly twice as many dollars in earmarks as the next-highest recipient,” said Sean Kennedy, the group’s director of policy and research.

Even as the term “earmark” became a four-letter word in his party in the 2000s, Shelby remained unabashed about the parade of federal funds he steered his state’s way. When local cartoonists published images of Shelby depicting him as one of the state’s chief benefactors, such as one of Shelby carrying a pig in a large sack bearing a money symbol captioned, “Alabama’s Santa Claus,” his wife would display them at their home. It was a reminder, Shelby said, “to keep my humor.”

Shelby’s work was about “trying to make sure we got our fair share,” said Sandy Stimpson, the mayor of Mobile, where an estimated one in five people lives in poverty.

Shelby has funded roads and bridges and hospitals and public libraries and drinking water systems; university research into topics as varied as the prevention of diseases in local foods like catfish and oranges, to improved monitoring systems for coastal flooding and hurricanes, to the combustion behavior of liquid oxygen.

For some of his biggest priorities — such as the Redstone Arsenal, the military installation near Huntsville that houses Army missile programs, the FBI, and the Marshall Space Flight Center — Shelby secured vast infusions of federal funds bit by bit each year, shoehorning them into bill after bill over the course of decades.

“I thought the best thing I could do with federal money was not pave somebody’s driveway,” Shelby said. What he tried to do instead was “to build institutions, and then infrastructure that would create more of a competitive environment for the long run.”

At Redstone Arsenal, he successfully lobbied the Air Force to build the new U.S. Space Command’s headquarters, and pushed the FBI to expand its footprint there, an investment that has now topped $2.48 billion, much of it built by earmarks. And he sent billions of dollars to support research and expand jobs at NASA’s civilian rocketry and spacecraft propulsion research center there.

Sometimes his advocacy came in the form of a few paragraphs. In 2011, when lawmakers were rushing to approve a short-term spending bill to ensure the government did not shut down, Shelby tucked in language that blocked NASA from scrapping an effort to commission rockets with “heavy-lift” capabilities, a move that would have eliminated hundreds of jobs at Redstone Arsenal.

Shelby, in part for personal reasons, has also taken a special interest in Alabama’s universities, which have been some of the biggest beneficiaries of his largess. In 1987, during Shelby’s first year in the Senate, his wife, the first woman to become a tenured professor at Georgetown University’s business school, suffered kidney failure from lupus. The family turned to the medical staff at the University of Alabama, Birmingham.

“UAB saved her life,” Shelby says now. “I realized what they had there, and could have there.”

Since then, Shelby has secured funding for four academic buildings — all of them hubs for scientific research and teaching, none of them smaller than 150,000 square feet, and most built in the federal style with Doric columns. There is Shelby Hall at the University of Alabama; Shelby Hall at the University of South Alabama; the 12-story, 340,000 square foot Shelby Biomedical Research Building at the University of Alabama, Birmingham; and the Shelby Center for Science and Technology at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, two-thirds of which was built with federal funds.

At Tuscaloosa, more than $60 million secured by Shelby helped build what became one of the largest academic buildings on the University of Alabama campus, a 200,000-square-foot hall that houses more than 70 research labs, three lecture halls and more than 120 offices for faculty and graduate students.

“It allowed us to put students in laboratory facilities that otherwise they would not have been able to be a part of,” said Dr. Chuck Karr, the president of the University of Alabama, Huntsville, and a previous engineering dean at the University of Alabama. “It really served as the catalyst for other growth.”

When local officials unveiled the bust of Shelby at the Port of Mobile earlier this month, they also surprised him by announcing that they were privately financing two engineering and computing scholarships in his name at the University of South Alabama.

Seated in his office weeks later, he was more interested in talking about the scholarships than the twice-life-size bronze edifice modeled after him.

“If you have tried to educate everybody in your community — everybody,” Shelby said, “you’re going to create opportunity.”

Statues, he said with a mischievous glint in his eye, “are for dogs and birds.”

© 2022 The New York Times Company

URL : https://news.yahoo.com/shelby-one-senates-last-big-191432668.html

MY THOUGHTS

At the end the biggest issue I have is the notion of anti action in modern elected officials. I think of black elected officials to black districts, how many black elected officials in my lifetime have done absolutely nothing for their districts. If every black elected official to a black district did as shelby the black community in the usa would have more. I am 100% certain. The question is how do you change the culture of black elected officials. 

Black Home Movies

Sir Solomon Jones’ Home Movies, 1925-1926

The Sir Solomon Jones home films are a dynamic showcase of Black living. His movies are some of the earliest accessible intracommunity chronicles of Black life. Solomon Jones displays the intimacy of hairdressing, football games, and Turkey Day in this silent survey.

URL

https://blackfilmarchive.com/Sir-Solomon-Jones-Home-Movies-1925-1926

URL

https://beineckelibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1058/collection_resources/35014

Wedding Reception

What does tenderness look like? In this short home movie, Thomas F. Freeman records the pomp and circumstance of the union of two hearts.

URL

https://blackfilmarchive.com/Wedding-Reception

URL

https://texasarchive.org/2011_00779

Giving Thanks

MELT YOUR HEART

“One year, [we] gave a boy about 8 years old a coat, tried it on made sure it fit him, he took it off and gave it back to me and I asked, ‘Why are you giving it back?’ and he said, ‘You mean I can keep this?’ and I said, ‘Yes,it’s for you,’” Richard Mantell, vice president of Middle Schools with the United Federation of Teachers, said. “And he came up to me and hugged me and it was hard to fight back tears.” 
Article Link 
[ https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2022/11/20/hundreds-of-children-from-shelters-participate-in-thanksgiving-giveaway ] 

BEING OPPONENT DOES NOT ALWAYS EQUAL BEING ENEMY

Jon Stewart: "Penalizing someone for having a thought I don't think is the way to change their minds or gain understanding. This is a grown ass man and the idea that you would say to him, we're going to put you in a time out. You have to sit in the corner and stare at the wall until you no longer believe that the jews control the international banking system. Like, we have to get passed this, in the country, the ability to... Look, people think this.  People think jews control Hollywood. People think jews control the banks. and to pretend that they don't, and to not deal with it in a straight forward manner. We will never gain any kind of understanding with each other. "

Colbert:"what do you imagine the right manner to be....what is the response"

Stewart:"First, I think reflexively naming things anti semitism is reductive as some of the things they might be saying, it immediately shuts down a conversation. ... Comedy is reductive, and I think part of what it is, is we play with tropes, because everyone has prejudices in their lives, and in the way they view things. And comics rely on those prejudices as a short hand for our material. Even the wokest of comics plays with tropes, to a certain extent. But my point is the most interesting thing to come out of this in my mind is something Kanye said. On his tour that he was doing after he said that, and then he got interviewed by five different people because the media model is arson and conflict. He said something fascinating in my mind. HE said hurt people hurt people and if the point of all this is then to heal people, the only way to heal a wound is to open it up and cleanse it. and that stings. that hurts. But you have to expose it to air. and I'm afraid the general tenor of conversation in this country is to cover it up, bury it, put it to the outskirts and don't deal with it and what I would say is, look at it from, a black perspective. Its, a culture that feels its wealth has been extracted by different groups, whites, jews, things, whether it is true or not isn't the issue. That's the feeling in that community. And if you don't understand that's where it is coming from, then you can't deal with it. and you can't sit down with them and explain that ... being in an industry isn't the same as having a nefarious and controlling interest in that industry and intention, right. And that has been the anti semitic trope. But you need to be able to meet people from what their community is feeling as well."

Colbert:"so you saying the way is to deconstruct it and tell them why it isn't with facts"

Stewart:"that's right, but if your not allowed to say it. You know dave said something in the snl monologue that I thought was constructive, as well. He said it shouldn't be this hard to talk about things. And that is what we're talking about. Look I can't pretend that there aren't a [expletive] ton of people in this country and this world who believe that the jews have an unreasonable amount of control over the systems. and they wield it as puppet masters. I've been called anti-semitic because I'm against Israel's treatment of Palestinians. I'm called other things from other people based on other opinions that I have. But those shut down debates. They're used as a cudgel, and whether it be comedy or discussion or anything else. If we don't have the wherewithal to meet each other with what is reality then how do we move forward is my question. I don't enjoy it. Don't get me wrong. When people i admire or whose music I like come out and say how many of you are in show business, you know... here is the deal... we have our own tropes. Like a white person's success is because of privilege, a minority's success is empowerment, a jew's success, that's conspiracy. You feel that. I feel that. But I have to be able to express that to people. If I can't say, that is Bull shit and explain why, then where do we go? and if we all just shut it down then we retreat to our little corners of misinformation and it metastasizes. And the whole point of all this is to not let it metastasize. And to get it out in the air and talk about it."
Video link 
[ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6V_sEqfIL9Q ] 

Title: Sableye and Palmon Plushies for Charity
Artist: Tamarinfrog
[ https://www.deviantart.com/tamarinfrog/art/Sableye-and-Palmon-Plushies-for-Charity-938117299 ] 

Hello everyone, it's time for a new Charity Project!

A Charity-Guild Project!

This time we will be drawing or crafting Digimon/Pokemon as PLUSHIES!! 

This project will benefit the Make-A-Wish Foundation [ https://makeawish.ca/ ] 

Each submission received will add $2.50 to the charity pool.

If you are looking to sponsor this project, please send a note or email charityguild@tommyspuppetlab.com

How to Submit:

You can submit to your gallery and submit to this folder [ https://www.deviantart.com/charity-guild/gallery/85373471/plushiemon-collab ] (Please tag me and mention this journal too please) 

You may add your submission to sta.sh [ http://sta.sh/ ] or dropbox/drive and note me your submission if you wish to refrain from contributing to Deviant"Art" 

We have a channel on our Discord server where you can submit

You can also email to charityguild@tommyspuppetlab.com

Submission rules:

All Deviant"Art" submission rules apply [ https://www.deviantart.com/about/policy/submission/ ] 

Artificial Intelligence (AI "art") is strictly prohibited from any of these projects. All submissions will be checked.

In order to enter, please comment on the posted journal which character(s) you are drawing. First come first serve, and reservations will be held for 2 weeks. After that, anyone can claim that character again.

All gens (1-9) and Digimon forms allowed. Even Wailord. 

Do not add a background to your submission. I prefer transparent backgrounds, no big deal if you don't know how, just submit it on plain white background.

Anyone can enter regardless of skill. I will judge your art by your effort however. No quick doodles. Art from the heart is what matters most! Again, NO AI IS ALLOWED

If drawing on paper, please use UNLINED paper or it will be turned down!

 NO BASES!!

No stock is allowed with exception of brushes, textures, pallets, etc... The work must be 100% yours at the end! No lazy work please!

Minimum canvas size 1200x1200. However you are welcome to use a bigger canvas if needed.

To submit, please see above

No work older than the launch date! November 21st

Deadline: January 5th, 2023

INVITATIONAL - for all information
[ https://www.deviantart.com/tommygk/journal/Draw-Craft-Pokemon-Digimon-as-Plushies-for-Charity-937980393 ]
 

Port Richmond High School students whip up Thanksgiving feast
By Jillian Jorgensen Staten Island
PUBLISHED 2:45 PM ET Nov. 23, 2022
Preparing a Thanksgiving dinner is always a production. But it is extra crazy when you’re preparing to feed hundreds of hungry teenagers who happen to be your classmates.

“In this oven, we have some stuffing and turkey waiting to go out. In the other room we have some mac and cheese and more turkey,” James Ryan, a culinary arts teacher at Port Richmond High School, said. “Some of the students in my eighth period class [are] plating up the pumpkin pies for desserts.”

What You Need To Know
Hundreds of students in Port Richmond High School's culinary arts program worked together to create a Thanksgiving feast for their classmates

They cooked about 300 pounds of turkey, along with sides like mashed potatoes and stuffing

The feast gave them an opportunity to show off the skills they are learning
It was something principal Andrew Greenfield is proud of
Led by their teachers, every student in Port Richmond High School’s culinary arts program helped put together a massive Thanksgiving feast. It featured about 300 pounds of turkey, 75 pounds of potatoes 100 pounds of yas and 32 pumpkin pies, Ryan said.

“We're preparing here for probably about 400-500 students,” Ryan said.

It's a highlight for students in the culinary arts program, who spend all four years getting hands-on cooking experience. They're taught national food safety courses and have the opportunity to get their city food handling license. The popular program serves about 350 students a year.

All of them work on the Thanksgiving meal, with each class tackling a different dish.

“All 12 of our classes have had their hands in it. Not literally, but yeah, almost literally,” Ryan said.

And when the bell rang, the crowds arrived to grab their meals. For students who had worked hard on the feast, it was a moment to savor.

“It honestly feels amazing. I really love how we were able to come together and [prepare] such a big feast for the whole high school and it's just, I'm happy that all the work paid off,” junior Madison Gigliello said.

The meal initially started out smaller, with culinary students just cooking for one another. Over time it grew.

“Then last year after COVID, Mr. Greenfield and Ms. Woodman decided we need everyone together. We're serving a whole school. And it was a hit,” Ryan said.

It’s something principal Andrew Greenfield is proud of.

“What I love about this day is that we don't do a Thanksgiving feast for some students or families. But we do it for our entire school community,” Greenfield said.

And it’s part of what it makes so special for the culinary arts students.

“Every Port Richmond student comes here to try our food and take time out of their day to come try it,” junior Robert Eckman said.

The line stretched down the hallway. After grabbing a plate, students could sit down in the school’s cafe and enjoy a performance by the jazz band.

“You know, everybody’s Thanksgiving at home looks a little bit different, so we try to have a traditional Thanksgiving feast here at school, so everybody can get a taste of that,” assistant principal Suzanne Woodman said.

ARTICLE
https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/education/2022/11/23/port-richmond-high-school-students-whip-up-thanksgiving-feast?cid=share_clip

Families spend hours in the cold waiting for ICE appointments
By Eric Feldman New York City
PUBLISHED 11:00 PM ET Nov. 22, 2022
It was just after 2:30 a.m. on a crisp, cold New York City night. The temperature read 34 degrees, but it felt colder. It was the first truly cold day of autumn.

“It’s pretty cold, even my foot falls asleep, even I can’t move my whole hand,” said Edi Kiste, who was bundled up in a line outside immigration offices in downtown Manhattan.

She spoke with NY1 as she held her two-year-old daughter, who spent the entire night outside with her.

“I bundled her up with three pants, a jacket, and like two polo shirts inside,” she said.

She said they were still cold.

On Lafayette Street, there are many strollers and children at this very early hour, all bundled up, all waiting.

One mom appeared to breastfeed her daughter on the curb.

These families are here for the long haul, bringing out cardboard boxes, backpacks and blankets to create makeshift beds.

They are choosing to spend the night on concrete.

Laura Godoi said she arrived outside 26 Federal Plaza at 7 p.m., which was 13 hours before her appointment with immigration officials.

“It gives hypothermia,” she said, describing the wait and the cold weather.

There’s a reason why so many people are lining up on a cold November night with their children.

They are waiting for their appointments with U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, also known as ICE.

Many of those NY1 met said they are required to report to ICE after crossing the southern border in recent months.

By 3:38 a.m., the line has only grown.

“We got like 174 people,” said Carlos Estevez, looking at a manila folder he brought to organize everyone in line.

Estevez is not a community organizer. He himself was in line for his own ICE appointment.

He brought the folder because of his past experience lining up for his appointment — and could help explain why so many people are out here overnight.

“They say you can’t enter,” he said.

In a statement to NY1, an ICE spokesperson said the agency is “working to address current processing delays at some ICE offices,” attributing the delays being exacerbated by COVID-19 in recent years.

ICE only lets in however many people the agency can see in one day, no matter how many have appointments set up or how long the line is overnight.

On this night, it’s Estevez’s third overnight trip. Same for Angel Gomez, who said the night before, he got in line at 2 a.m. But that was too late.

Nancy Angeles had a friend waiting in line. Just before 4:30 a.m., she opened her car door, allowing a new group of the people in line to get inside her warm car.

“Whether they’re immigrants or not, they’re people,” she said.

By this time, the line wrapped not only around the block, but continued across the street.

At 5 a.m., the makeshift beds were folded up, because there was an effort to organize the lines.

Estevez led the charge, even though it’s not his job.

Within an hour, ICE started checking people in from two lines, one for families and the other for everyone else.

People got through past the sunrise until 7:48 a.m.

There were still what looked like at least 100 people in line.

“That’s it for the day,” said an ICE agent to the crowd.

The crowd stood there, wondering what to do next. Some talked to ICE agents. Others took pictures of a QR code provided by ICE to follow-up.

People in line, who spoke with NY1, were frustrated. Leonardo Caso showed up at 5 a.m. Edi Fernandez arrived at 4:30 a.m.

Both said they were too late for their scheduled appointments.

“You get up early, and well, they don’t give you a solution,” said Fernandez.

ICE officials said people who miss appointments should also reach out by email.

“When I send them, they didn’t answer me,” said Hamida Al-Hassam, who added that he also missed his appointment, despite getting in line around 3 a.m.

NY1’s video of the overnight experience outside 26 Federal Plaza is generating a response in Washington, D.C.

“There needs to be a more efficient and humane way for ICE to schedule and process people for check-ins and other appearances,” said a spokesperson for Sen. Chuck Schumer. “We are in touch with ICE and advocacy organizations to urge prompt improvements.”

Adrian Pandev is an immigration lawyer based in New York City. NY1 showed him the scene outside 26 Federal Plaza.

“It just shows that the system is not at capacity. It’s over capacity,” he said. “What a mess.”

He thinks most are trying to check in with ICE, as required, within 60 days of crossing the southern border.

“These people are waiting in the streets to comply with the rules,” he said.

He said each day they’re denied their appointments, it pushes them closer to missing their deadline, possibly complicating their status in the U.S.

“Noncitizens would not be deemed a no-show for their appointments if they utilize the QR code,” an ICE spokesperson said to NY1. “ICE would reschedule them.”

An ICE spokesperson said missed appointments do not have to be counted against people in line if they take the proper action.

ARTICLE
https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/politics/2022/11/23/families-spend-hours-in-the-cold-waiting-for-ice-appointments?cid=share_clip
 

The Honey

Wakanda- yes, do I have artistic issues... I have artistic issues with everything in art. But, I am overhjoyed of this financial news. Happy for all the Black folk involved first, but everybody else as well. 
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/black-panther-wakanda-forever-box-office-sequel-1235260713/

The Pot
When I look at it, barring SChrumpf's death. Biden has the most important role in Schrumpf not making a comeback to the White House. 
Can Biden succeed in two years?
https://twitter.com/NEWSMAX/status/1592709116715094016
 

Elvis Mitchell on the set of Is That Black Enough For You?!? Hannah Kozak/Netflix

Hollywood’s Black film problem, explained by Elvis Mitchell
The venerated film critic on the unheralded Black influence on everything from soundtracks to Don’t Worry Darling.

By Alissa Wilkinson@alissamariealissa@vox.com  Nov 11, 2022, 7:30am EST

Over the past few years, movies like Black Panther and Get Out have raked in both accolades and box office returns, and the Oscar nominations hit new diversity records. To the casual observer, it may seem like Hollywood has made massive strides in moving from being overwhelmingly dominated by white actors, directors, and writers and toward a more inclusive environment. But from the standpoint of history, it’s startling how little has changed — and what that tells us about the industry.

That’s why Elvis Mitchell’s documentary Is That Black Enough For You?!?, which starts streaming on Netflix on November 11, is so revealing. The veteran critic and journalist, a former New York Times film critic, has, among many other pursuits, hosted KCRW’s phenomenal interview show The Treatment since 1996. He brings a wry and curious lens to the history of Black film in Hollywood, weaving interviews with renowned Black actors and filmmakers from Harry Belafonte to Zendaya into his own story. In so doing, he challenges many of the settled ideas about the film canon, Hollywood history, and what it’s meant to be a Black artist on screen.

I met Mitchell at a hotel on Manhattan’s Lower East Side to talk about those matters and a lot more. I wanted to ask him about Hollywood’s claims to inclusivity, about the still-common axiom that “Black films don’t travel,” and about why all of this history is really not so different from today. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Alissa Wilkinson side Elvis Mitchell interview BEGIN

Alissa Wilkinson

You say in the film that Hollywood appointed itself “the myth-maker” for the world. Early studio heads saw themselves as the guardians of America’s morality and morale, and the exporters of a message about America to the world.

But as you demonstrate, the story Hollywood told about Black people was often demeaning, and very far from the truth. What kind of an effect does that have on the myth that the country and the world internalize?

Elvis Mitchell

I think [Hollywood] was unique to film culture, different from any place else in the world. American movies were made by people who fled [their home countries] under enormous persecution, and then decided to create out of whole cloth this ideal of what America was — this America that they wanted to come to. And the America that they created is still being seen — it’s something popular culture is still responding to.

We noticed as we were putting the movie together that so many of the people on camera — Samuel L. Jackson, Suzanne de Passe, Charles Burnett, Laurence Fishburne — talked about Westerns. The myth became that there was never a Black person on a horse. That would have been empowerment; as soon as you put a Black person on a horse, you’re saying that they have some control over where they’re going, literally, within their lives. We can’t do that.

Back when Paul Thomas Anderson was talking about his film Boogie Nights, he talked about how absurd the idea of a Black cowboy is. So even Paul Thomas Anderson has been kind of rolled under by the idea the movies have created about what cowboys are supposed to be, rather than what they actually were.

So much of Black culture has been about responding to myths created about Black people through various forms of media. That response came from actors as much as filmmakers, because so many of these movies are not directed by Black people. Actors took some claim over [reclaiming the truth about being Black], and that confidence and that brio becomes this really transfixing quality.

Alissa Wilkinson

But it’s not just about telling America what it is, or what its own history is, but also exporting an idea of America and its history to people who aren’t American. My sense as a film critic is that we still see the reverberations of world perceptions of American Black culture through that influence.

Elvis Mitchell

That gets to this message that’s constantly pushed in Hollywood — that Black film won’t sell overseas.

Alissa Wilkinson

Exactly.

Elvis Mitchell

This shibboleth that exists to this very day, one that was constantly fed and cared for, that Black movies “don’t travel.” But think about [renowned Senegalese filmmaker] Ousmane Sembène in Africa, seeing what Ossie Davis is doing [in America], or seeing 1972’s Sounder, and being inspired by that, and creating his own ... I’m not going to say mythology, but his own worldview about Black masculinity. When that’s missing, what does that do to the culture?

It’s very convenient to say, “This stuff doesn’t travel.” Because it’s still this peculiar view of Black culture, even though it seeps in and subsumes everything. When you hear somebody on Fox say “24/7” — that’s hip-hop. They’re terrified by the “fist bump,” but they’ll say something is happening “24/7,” and thus they’re missing the entire point of their argument.

Alissa Wilkinson

Yes — here Ossie Davis is making films like Cotton Comes to Harlem and Black Girl, with roles in which Black characters can exercise self-determination, and it sparks something for filmmakers because their imaginations are expanded.

At the same time, though, you bring up that Sidney Poitier was, at one point, the number one box office draw, and yet Hollywood executives couldn’t imagine that any other Black actor could also be popular with a broader audience. The thinking is that it’s just Poitier; it’s an exception, it’s an anomaly, it’s just this one guy.

It reminded me of how people talk about huge, massive hits like Black Panther or Get Out today. There’s still a reluctance to greenlight big-budget Black films, because the thinking is, “Oh, well, that was a fluke.”

Elvis Mitchell

And what happens? We get a white remake of Get Out, called Don’t Worry Darling.

Alissa Wilkinson

You said it.

Elvis Mitchell

So at the same time, we have to be careful about the way we deal with Black film, because [Hollywood doesn’t think there are] “genres” in Black film; it’s just “Black film.” So when any Black film fails, it is a “Black film” that is failing, not that movie.

I remember when Black Panther came out, I talked to so many people, including Oprah, who said, “This is going to bring in a whole new way of [making] film.” No, it’s not. Because what happens when a film succeeds in a major way? It’s imitated. How many Jurassic World [imitations] have there been since the first Black Panther movie? And now, how many imitations of Black Panther have we seen? The answer is none, because they’re still treated as if lightning struck.

Alissa Wilkinson

Absolutely. Hollywood loves to make big creature movies, even if none of them hit quite like Jurassic Park. And this goes to something I think about a lot, which is that Hollywood is fundamentally conservative. Often people think of Hollywood as a very progressive, forward-looking industry, but it’s risk-averse and prone to sticking with whatever they know — which becomes a problem when what you know is stuck in some false idea of reality.

Do you think the reluctance to mainstream Black film in the industry is due to failure of imagination, built-in biases that they’d be horrified to be accused of, or what?

Elvis Mitchell

How much time do you have? Let’s send out for lunch.

To your point, Hollywood is a community that thinks of itself as being incredibly liberal, except when it comes to exercising that liberal impulse. Maybe they think their liberalism and commerce are two different things, but no, they’re not.

While we were trying to get [Is That Black Enough For You?!?] going, it got shut down by Covid; this was all happening at the same time that the country was reeling from the George Floyd attack, and the responses to that.

Back then, I would get these calls, saying, “So we want to put together this blue ribbon panel to figure out what we can do to make things [in Hollywood] different.” Look, we don’t need a panel. I don’t have time for this. I have three words for you: Hire Black people. It’s as simple as that. And not just one [Black person], but several, so the one person doesn’t have to labor under the burden of having to explain all of Black culture.

Alissa Wilkinson

Your film feels a little bit like a story about all the people who have been told that something “simply isn’t done” or “just can’t be done.” But when it is done, it’s a wild success — like Melvin van Peebles self-financing Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song because no studio would make it, and then it being a huge, era-defining hit. I sort of feel like that might apply to your own film — am I right? I can imagine people saying, “We can’t do this, nobody’s going to watch it, nobody’s going to be interested.”

Elvis Mitchell

People in effect said that when they turned down this same material in a book pitch. I thought, oh, this is the kind of thing that could go on a bookshelf next to Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, or Pictures at a Revolution. This isn’t esoterica. I’m not talking about a wave of art films.

In fact, these movies are not only enormous successes as movies, but they also created these soundtracks that were enormous successes, and then were imitated in ways that were enormous successes.

People who know and understand film history say, “Why hasn’t this documentary happened before?” I say, “I don’t know. If a tree falls in the forest, and there’s nobody to hear it, is that a legacy?” I mean, this is what this comes down to. I hate to torture a metaphor like that, but if it’s not reported on, then it’s not a legacy — if it’s not examined, if there’s not context offered.

Alissa Wilkinson

I think a problem is that people get very emotional and defensive when you threaten their canon, their idea of who did what first.

Why do you think this is?

Elvis Mitchell

There is this consistent boxing up of Black film culture. It’s this. It’s solely this. It is only this. It is Sidney Poitier. It is Black filmmakers finally getting a chance to work in the 1960s. It’s this thing that Melvin van Peebles has tried to fight his way, and then after that Spike Lee, and Robert Townsend, and so many filmmakers.

One of the reasons I wanted to present the idea of the dangers of canonical thought is that nobody tends to think about blackface in Alfred Hitchcock, in the 1937 film Young and Innocent. I remember seeing that as a kid, and thinking, “Oh my god, there’s blackface in an Alfred Hitchcock movie?” Or there is this idea in canonical thought that 1939 is the greatest movie era in American movie history. Some of us disagree with that.

Alissa Wilkinson

But it’s accepted as fact, along with the idea that a set of white filmmakers changed film in the early 1970s. There’s truth to it, but there’s more to the story.

Elvis Mitchell

They end up feeding into that river of myth. “These filmmakers came and changed everything” — well, they did sometimes, but they didn’t exist in a vacuum.

Alissa Wilkinson

Getting a chance to see these things on screen, in front of me, might be what’s good about doing this in film form instead of a book. I had honestly never really been struck by the similarities between depictions of Mickey Mouse and minstrelsy, but of course, it was obvious once you showed it to me in the film.

Elvis Mitchell

This feels like this innocent thing. In fact, it is not. Or, I’m not going to say it’s not innocent, but certainly there are layers to this that need to be pulled away, so we can see the entirety of it.

Mickey wasn’t keeping on gloves so he doesn’t leave any clues for a CSI team or something. “These are Mickey Mouse’s fingerprints, now we know who killed him.”

Alissa Wilkinson

Music is really important to this film, and it’s especially interesting to hear about how releasing a soundtrack before the movie’s release — pretty common now — was virtually unheard of before Super Fly.

Elvis Mitchell

By releasing the soundtrack [before the movie], and having it be such an immediate success, it created a must-see feeling around the movie. And it was constantly being played. If you drove around LA, you heard the commercial for the release of Super Fly. People respond to these songs, and then go out and buy the soundtrack. It is that rare case where you had people listen to the soundtrack before they saw the movie. So they created their own movie in their head through Curtis Mayfield’s soundtrack. And the movie, in some ways, couldn’t live up to that movie they created in their head.

Let’s be honest, those songs are better than the movie. There’s great stuff in the movie, but as a dramatic creation, as a narrative with its own life, that soundtrack is extraordinary. The soundtrack was a huge artistic and commercial success, and every song was released as a single. This isn’t like you’re making A Hard Day’s Night, and the Beatles are already a hit; this is something that becomes a mainstream hit that then propels the movie to enormous success. Shaft followed its example, and it started to happen so much that by the time Saturday Night Fever was coming out, they had the soundtrack out two months before the movie.

Then music videos also started coming out before the movie, and that became the coin of the realm for the ’80s, that the soundtrack was as important, if not more so, than the film. Super Fly did that.

Alissa Wilkinson

Now that’s all TikTok, 10-second clips. This summer the music from Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis started circulating on TikTok before the movie came out. I’m not even sure people knew what it was from, or that the “Hound Dog” remix was based on an Elvis song.

Every year I’ve been doing this job, and especially when Oscar season arrives, the industry starts touting how far they’ve come in terms of inclusivity — the whole #OscarsSoWhite issue having pushed it recently. That is, frankly, embarrassing, when you actually look at who gets jobs and who wins awards.

Elvis Mitchell

Here’s the example. Suzanne de Passe was nominated for Best Original Screenplay in 1973 [for co-writing Lady Sings the Blues]. How many other Black women have been nominated since that, in that category? None.

So when people would say to me, “Are you afraid this documentary’s going to seem dated?” No.

My fear is that it will never seem dated. In the film, Zendaya says, “It’d be great to see Black kids playing together on camera, or to see more Black people in a sci-fi fantasy.” Was that going to seem like old hat by the time this movie came out? No.

It’s weird to show this history to young people and have them go, “God, nothing has changed.” This is the thing that I wanted to try to find a way to deal with, too: Every decade we hear about this “resurgence in Black film.” But where did it go? It didn’t go anywhere; it just wasn’t being covered.

To your question, maybe in some fundamental way things have changed, but it’s still about trying to wrest some control of this narrative. Certainly, the visibility of the phenomenon may change, but Black women aren’t getting opportunities to write movies. It’s as simple as that.

It would be fun to say, “Well, god, in the three years since I’ve started working on this, so much has changed.” No.

Alissa Wilkinson side Elvis Mitchell interview END

Is That Black Enough For You?!? premieres on Netflix on November 11.

ARTICLE
https://www.vox.com/23447401/elvis-mitchell-black-enough-interview

Unknown photographer

Betty Gabriel: The Unsung Black Scream Queen
"THERE IS A LOT OF HORROR WITHIN THE BLACK FEMALE EXPERIENCE IN THIS COUNTRY," THE ACTRESS SAID. "THERE IS A LOT TO BE MINED THERE."

BY RIVEA RUFF · UPDATED OCTOBER 28, 2022
When the term “scream queen” is brought up annually around this time, images of white women narrowly escaping the clutches of a crazed killer or evil entity across film franchises or pivotal genre entries come to mind. Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode, locked in a 45-year-long battle against Michael Myers. Neve Campbell as Sidney Prescott, opposing the various murderers donning the famed Ghostface mask in the Scream franchise. Naomi Watts as the longsuffering mother fighting supernatural forces in The Ring and Shut-In, or scratching for survival in Funny Games or Goodnight Mommy.

Less often mentioned are the contributions that Black women have made to the genre. Marlene Clark’s conflicted bloodthirst in 1973’s Ganja & Hess. Rachel True‘s vengeful teenage witch in 1996’s The Craft. Naomie Harris as a post-Apocalyptic warrior in 2002’s 28 Days Later.

But perhaps the most prolific yet often overlooked of these in the current era of horror is Betty Gabriel.

Starring in titles like violence thriller The Purge: Election Year, futuristic sci-fi/horror Upgrade, Screenlife slasher Unfriended: Dark Web, cybercrime horror-thriller limited series Clickbait, and of course, Jordan Peele’s innovatively genre-pushing racial horror, Get Out, Gabriel has broken the mold of the disposable Black friend of the protagonist or the film’s first victim.

Gabriel’s performance as “Georgina,” the white grandmother of villain Rose Armitage (Allison Williams), inhabiting the body of an unnamed Black woman, is one of the most iconic in the genre’s history, hands down. Though she had only a handful of lines in the film, her spine-tingling, smiling-yet-tearful monologue about the kindness of the Armitage family is one of the most recognizable frames of the film. Subtle yet chilling, it’s the strongest clue of the horror at the root of the story before the hand is revealed in the film’s third act. And it helped set the tone for a renaissance of Black horror that has begun over the last 6 years.

“I hadn’t really been aware that my contribution to the horror genre was significant in any way,” Gabriel says in conversation with ESSENCE about her status as a staple of modern horror. “I take it with gratitude.”

Ironically not much of a horror film watcher herself – “I will get nightmares,” she says laughing – Gabriel fell into starring in a string of scaries by pure happenstance.

“Starting out, you don’t really have much of a choice. You just take whatever work you can get,” the actress says. “Blumhouse, which was the main producer behind a lot of these films, kept hiring me, and I kept on saying yes to them. It wasn’t like I had a choice between this and a rom-com. It was a choice between this and not working.”

“But I think perhaps on a subconscious, universal level, there is something about me that is drawn to these films, or they’re drawn to me.”

Her first foray into chills and thrills came in 2016, for the second sequel in the wildly popular dystopian action horror franchise, The Purge: Election Year. Playing on societal fears over the turn the nation would take during the election cycle taking place in the real world just months later (and preluding some real-life political horrors that came about during the next Presidential term), the film tackled topics of politics and policy through the lenses of race, class, and religion – with a healthy dose of violence and mayhem, of course.

Gabriel portrayed Laney Rucker, an ex-purger known as “La Pequeña Muerta” in her youth, now an EMT assisting victims of violence each purge night, fighting to keep a peaceful senator in line for presidency alive for the night with the hope of Purge eradication on the horizon.

“It’s something I don’t really like to consume as an audience member, but as an individual, these are things that I definitely am haunted by,” she says of her connection to the material. “Just complete and utter chaos, the breakdown of our system, the guns constantly being a part of our everyday reality, and oppression.”

“It’s one of those movies where it’s like, ‘Is this horror? Or is this just a really messed up version of reality that might come true, that kind of [already] is true?'”

But her true big break into horror icon status came after a pretty harrowing audition process for Blumhouse’s new horror feature, written by that one comedian from Key & Peele.

“I was backpacking through the mountains of Peru, as one does when you’re soul-searching and single,” she reveals. “So, I didn’t have any technology, no smartphone, no wifi, nothing. I was going to an internet cafe once or twice a week, paying 10 cents for an hour for internet, and I got the email audition notice.”

Initially inclined to pass the process up, with no access to camera equipment, internet access, or even too many other people around who knew English, Gabriel tried to let this one go and move on. But something about the opportunity wouldn’t let her rest.

“I went to the hostel, and went to bed, and just couldn’t sleep. So, I just woke up and went, ‘Ugh…I’ve got to figure this out. I’ve got to figure out how to get that tape in. I can’t pass this up.'”

That realization led to a 24-hour bus ride to the next village over to visit a documentary filmmaker she stumbled across through a referral on Facebook, who not only had access to all the equipment she needed to film and upload her audition for the role but was from Chicago and knew English.

“We actually shot it outside. There were birds chirping throughout the whole thing,” she laughs. “12 hours later, it was uploaded and submitted.”

The rest, of course, is horror movie history. Get Out led to a renewed interest in horror films centering Black protagonists in authentically Black experiences, making way for films like Spell, His House, 2021 reboot sequel Candyman and shows like Lovecraft Country and Them.

“I think that ultimately, we’re being more inclusive, and we’re being a bit more aware in how we don’t fully invite people to the table,” Gabriel says of the increased space that’s been made for Black people in the horror genre. “And I do mean certain ‘we’s.’ The ‘we’s’ in power. We pat ourselves on the back for issuing crumbs. In any genre, I hope it isn’t a trend. Hopefully, we see more beautiful Black women on screen.”

Beyond the expression of horror in front of the screen, Gabriel is hopeful that the trend toward stories told by Black creators and about Black experiences continues, with increase.

“I think with the horror genre in particular, there’s so much to be mined there, because there is a lot of horror within the Black female experience in this country,” she says. “I look forward to that being conveyed, and in a way that’s profound, and not necessarily [gratuitous].”

Like many modern film watchers, Gabriel has a hard time viewing “Black struggle” and racialized violence against Black bodies committed to screen, though she sees the horrific stories they portray as valuable expressions.

“I do find myself not able to watch certain stories that really focus on slavery. I just find it challenging and retraumatizing. But that’s not to say that they’re not important and that I don’t try,” she said. “And, there’s always an audience for any story.”

“Personally, I think there’s something [special] to striking a balance between horrifying images, and transcendent nuances that we don’t always think about or see. Or things maybe we know on some level, but we haven’t quite seen [conveyed].”

“I look forward to seeing horror evolve in general. I personally am drawn to subtlety, with lots of layers and complexities about the human experience,” she continues. “I think that’s what made Get Out so wildly successful was that everyone related to this protagonist. Even though a white person will never know what it is to be a Black person, something about that journey was relatable and universal. So, I hope that is the future of horror, with Black stories and Black people behind and in front of the camera.”

Indeed, as Get Out opened Hollywood’s eyes to the bankability of Black horror, it opened doors personally for Gabriel, who has gone on to star in 17 more projects since the film’s release, 4 of which fall into the horror genre. The actress revealed that her role as Sophie Brewer in Netflix’s cyber-kidnapping thriller Clickbait, was the most pivotal on her journey through the genre.

“For me, that was the most personal, because it was the most extensive journey that I had been on playing a character,” she says. “It was my first time playing a lead, and though it wasn’t my first time playing a mom, I was a mother who had to really be the mother and keep the family together, while also having all these secrets and all this shame that she was processing and dealing with.”

Though the actress was considering stepping away from horror altogether in an effort to avoid typecasting, another horror project from a director of color recently came her way that was simply too good to pass up. Now presented with a choice, she chose horror once again – this time from another BIPOC perspective not often seen in American theaters.

The as-yet-untitled horror slated for a 2023/24 release comes from Indian director Bishal Dutta and centers on ancient Indian legends and personal immigrant experiences, subject matter which is likely to resonate with Black viewers just as much as our South Asian brothers and sisters. She also joins season 3 of Prime Video’s action drama Jack Ryan this November, and Discovery’s Manhunt, dramatizing the search for John Wilkes Booth in the days after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.

“I think we’re in such an anxious place collectively that [horror is] really manifesting itself in a lot of stories,” Gabriel says. “So, yeah, I don’t think you can escape it.”

ARTICLE
https://www.essence.com/celebrity/betty-gabriel-unsung-black-scream-queen/

West Coast Blues Society Caravan of All Stars - soundcheck
Videographer: Ronald Reed

SGT SMOKING BLACK animated trailer FROM DEMUZ COMICS

Why I Keep Coming Back to Reconstruction

By Jamelle Bouie

Opinion Columnist

I write frequently about the Reconstruction period after the Civil War, not to make predictions or analogies but to show how a previous generation of Americans grappled with their own set of questions about the scope and reach of our Constitution, our government and our democracy.

The scholarship on Reconstruction is vast and comprehensive. But my touchstone for thinking about the period continues to be W.E.B. Du Bois’s “Black Reconstruction,” published in 1935 after years of painstaking research that was often inhibited by segregation and the racism of Southern institutions of higher education.

I return to Du Bois, even as I read more recent work, because he offers a framework that is useful, I think, for analyzing the struggle for democracy in our own time.

The central conceit of Du Bois’s landmark study — whose full title is “Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880” — is that the period was a grand struggle between “two theories of the future of America,” rooted in the relationship of American labor to American democracy.

“What were to be the limits of democratic control in the United States?” Du Bois asks. “Was the rule of the mass of Americans to be unlimited, and the right to rule extended to all men regardless of race and color?” And if not, he continues, “How would property and privilege be protected?”

On one side in the conflict over these questions was “an autocracy determined at any price to amass wealth and power”; on the other was an “abolition-democracy based on freedom, intelligence and power for all men.”

The term “abolition-democracy” began with Du Bois and is worth further exploration.

Abolition-democracy, Du Bois writes, was the “liberal movement among both laborers and small capitalists” who saw “the danger of slavery to both capital and labor.” Its standard-bearers were abolitionists like Wendell Phillips and radical antislavery politicians like Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens, and in its eyes, “the only real object” of the Civil War was the abolition of slavery and “it was convinced that this could be thoroughly accomplished only if the emancipated Negroes became free citizens and voters.”

It was also clear to some within abolition-democracy that “freedom in order to be free required a minimum of capital in addition to political rights.” In this way, abolition-democracy was an anticipation of social democratic ideology, although few of its proponents, in Du Bois’s view, grasped the full significance of their analysis of the relationship between political freedom, civil rights and economic security.

Opposing abolition-democracy, in Du Bois’s telling, were the reactionaries of the former Confederate South who sought to “re-establish slavery by force.” The South, he writes, “opposed Negro education, opposed land and capital for Negroes, and violently and bitterly opposed any political power. It fought every conception inch by inch: no real emancipation, limited civil rights, no Negro schools, no votes for Negroes.”

Between these two sides lay Northern industry and capital. It wanted profits and it would join whichever force enabled it to expand its power and reach. Initially, this meant abolition-democracy, as Northern industry feared the return of a South that might threaten its political and economic dominance. It “swung inevitably toward democracy” rather than allow the “continuation of Southern oligarchy,” Du Bois writes.

It’s here that we see the contradiction inherent in the alliance between Northern industry and abolition-democracy. The machinery of democracy in the South “put such power in the hands of Southern labor that, with intelligent and unselfish leadership and a clarifying ideal, it could have rebuilt the economic foundations of Southern society, confiscated and redistributed wealth, and built a real democracy of industry for the masses of men.”

This — the extent to which democracy in the South threatened to undermine the imperatives of capital — was simply too much for Northern industry to bear. And so it turned against abolition-democracy, already faltering as it was in the face of Southern reaction. “Brute force was allowed to use its unchecked power,” Du Bois writes, “to destroy the possibility of democracy in the South, and thereby make the transition from democracy to plutocracy all the easier and more inevitable.”

In the end, “it was not race and culture calling out of the South in 1876; it was property and privilege, shrieking to its kind, and privilege and property heard and recognized the voice of its own.” What killed Reconstruction — beyond the ideological limitations of its champions and the vehemence of its opponents — was a “counterrevolution of property,” North and South.

Why is this still a useful framework for understanding the United States, close to a century after Du Bois conceived and developed this argument? As a concept, abolition-democracy captures something vital and important: Democratic life cannot flourish as long as it is bound by and shaped around hierarchies of status. The fight for political equality cannot be separated from the fight for equality more broadly.

In other words, the reason I keep coming back to “Black Reconstruction” is that Du Bois’s mode of analysis can help us (or, at least, me) look past so much of the ephemera of our politics to focus on what matters most: the roles of power, privilege and, most important, capital in shaping our political order and structuring our conflicts with one another.

ARTICLE
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/25/opinion/reconstruction-civil-war-du-bois.html

MY THOUGHTS

The question is simple. If all humans are equal in a space then how do the poor not rip from the rich or how do the rich not enslave the poor? The USA has no answer. Never had one.  In Haiti or France or Russia the poor ripped from the rich. In the USA... the lower rich ripped from the upper rich, but the poor of the usa still had needs and from the war between the states to the gregorian year two thousand and twenty two, the poor have tried to merit to satisfaction while not taking from the rich. But, patience is a thing rarely stated when people talk of peace. and absent patience, the poor can't wait to take, the rich can't wait to enslave. 

Biden and Trump Share One Thing
Oct. 24, 2022

By Yuval Levin

Mr. Levin, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is a contributing Opinion writer.

Back in January, looking ahead to the midterm election year, President Biden said that he expected to be featured prominently by Democrats running for Congress. “I’m going to be out on the road a lot, making the case around the country, with my colleagues who are up for re-election,” he predicted.

It has not turned out that way. Instead, many Democratic candidates have practiced the delicate dance that politicians of both parties have had to master over the past two decades — keeping their distance from a president of their own party while not openly repudiating him.

The four presidents we have had so far in this century have been peculiarly unpopular. George W. Bush had a stretch of high approval after the Sept. 11 attacks but spent much of his second term underwater (often deeply). A chart of Barack Obama’s public approval looks faintly like a W — briefly rising above 50 percent around the two elections he won and at the very end of his term, but he otherwise spent much of his eight years in the 40s. Donald Trump is the only president during the seven decades that Gallup has been regularly tracking approval ratings who never once topped the 50 percent mark. Joe Biden floated above that mark early in his term but hasn’t seen it since.

It’s not just in terms of public support that recent presidents have been weak. This can be hard to grasp because we still live with the bromides of “the imperial presidency” — a term made famous by the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in the 1970s to describe an office drunk with power and towering over American government. We implicitly think this is still the case.

But this persistent cliché keeps us from seeing the real contours of our strange constitutional moment. Joe Biden and Donald Trump may well be the two weakest presidents since before the progressive era.

They have been weak presidents of different sorts. Mr. Biden has largely declined to set priorities for his administration and has been so desperate not to divide his party that he has been nearly paralyzed. Think of any other modern president, including Mr. Trump, and you can probably list two or three issues he particularly cared about. Can you come up with such a list for Mr. Biden? Other than the withdrawal from Afghanistan, is there any major initiative his administration has pursued because it was singularly what the president wanted to do?

Even when he has overreached in his use of administrative power — as with the legally dubious forgiveness of student loans — Mr. Biden has often acted under pressure from party activists. On many important measures in Congress, Mr. Biden’s views do not appear to have been decisive, and he has not been essential to the negotiations that led to any of the bipartisan deals he has signed.

Mr. Trump exhibited another kind of weakness. During his presidency, he dominated most news cycles and sought to operate outside the formal framework of presidential power in ways that ultimately posed real threats to the constitutional system. But within that system, where our government actually governs, he was feckless and chaotic, and largely failed to exert meaningful control even over his subordinates. His most significant achievement was in the realm of presidential power that requires the least persistent follow-through: the appointment of judges, including three Supreme Court justices, where the president’s role ends almost as soon as it begins. In other arenas, he generally couldn’t steer any one course long enough to get very far.

Astonishingly blatant insubordination was routine in Mr. Trump’s White House, and it was matched by a bipartisan tendency in Congress to regard the president’s words as devoid of meaning and his actions as always open to reversal. No one took him seriously as an executive.

The administrative state — that tangle of agencies that compose the executive branch, some formally independent and others more answerable to the White House — remains a formidable force in this era. But its growth has not always strengthened our presidents. This is most obvious in Republican administrations, as the chief executive strains to wrangle career officials and independent regulators who often want to steer a course different from his. But those same agencies operate in Democratic administrations, and even if the course they steer better suits a left-leaning president, their autonomous strength can render him institutionally weaker.

The same might be said of presidential appointees. One measure of a president’s administrative prowess is whether his midlevel political appointees can readily imagine what the president would do if he were in their jobs and act accordingly. This has been fairly easy to do under most modern presidents. But under both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump, many appointees could be forgiven for having no idea how the president would want them to make key decisions — Mr. Trump because he was so unpredictable, and Mr. Biden because he so rarely has set clear goals.

These distinct but related forms of presidential weakness gesture toward two key elements of the job. Alexander Hamilton argued that a strong chief executive exhibits energetic decision-making and “steady administration.” Both elements are necessary, and the absence of either, Hamilton suggested, “implies a feeble execution of the government.”

Those of us who would like to see Congress reassert itself might hope for a silver lining in such presidential feebleness. But the evidence of recent Congresses suggests those hopes are misguided. The past couple of years have seen the passage of some meaningful bipartisan measures — on public health, infrastructure, gun control, manufacturing and more. But they have often revealed the contemporary Congress’s own weaknesses — the gangs of senators have often worked around rather than through the committee system and regular order — more than they have remedied them.

This should not surprise us. The president and Congress don’t have the same job, and the weakness of one does not make the other stronger. On the contrary, it often distorts the work of the other and invites more weakness in return.

When that happens, partisanship rushes in to fill the void and soon makes for a vicious cycle: Congress and the presidency increasingly incline to the same sort of work — neither legislative nor executive but more like partisan performance art — and both grow more forgetful of their core responsibilities.

This is a particular problem for our presidents because, unlike Congress’s job, the president’s role is defined by obligations he must meet. As the political scientists Joseph Bessette and Gary Schmitt have argued, the presidency is better understood as a collection of duties than an arrangement of powers, and presidential strength is often a function of living up to those responsibilities.

It is by doing the chief executive’s core work — faithful, predictable execution of statutes; steady administrative rule-making that can last beyond the next election; cleareyed prioritization and prudential action within the law in response to pressing national challenges — that a president can wield and therefore fortify the strengths of the office. Playing chief pundit and willfully blurring the line between rhetoric and action is a recipe not for influence but for haplessness.

Until our chief executives grasp that the burdens of their office are its strengths, they will remain baffled by their own debility and unable to marshal the public to their side.

ARTICLE
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/24/opinion/biden-trump-weak-presidents.html

MY THOUGHTS
I think of presidents in the USA in era's based on a president that defined the era. In my view we are in the Ronald Reagan presidents era. 
Ronald Reagan like all presidents after him has a few things in common. 
All are huge militarists, increasing military power in hundreds of percent in various forms.
All are domestic incapables, varying plans of domestic agenda that are bound to create more problems or fail in terms of leading to multiracial comradery and are not comprehensive enough for a multiracial populace that is differed not only in appearance/phenotype but differ in financial qualities/financial potencies/heritage concerning the usa and with a general negativity in inter racial relationships between themselves or in themselves.
All are media barons, they each were very successful in the presentation of potential greatness.
All are legislative obsolescences, each have dysfunctional legislative history <from woeful to nonexistent> before they became president. 

That explains why under the reagan presidencies the military has grown so vast.  The populace of the usa has displayed ever growing dysfunction between its races. The role of media has become more important than any legislative or governing quality. Legislative quality is so low.

Putin Is Onto Us
Oct. 25, 2022

By Thomas L. Friedman
Opinion Columnist

As the Russian Army continues to falter in Ukraine, the world is worrying that Vladimir Putin could use a tactical nuclear weapon. Maybe — but for now, I think Putin is assembling a different weapon. It’s an oil and gas bomb that he’s fusing right before our eyes and with our inadvertent help — and he could easily detonate it this winter.

If he does, it could send prices of home heating oil and gasoline into the stratosphere. The political fallout, Putin surely hopes, will divide the Western alliance and prompt many countries — including ours, where both MAGA Republicans and progressives are expressing concerns about the spiraling cost of the Ukraine conflict — to seek a dirty deal with the man in the Kremlin, pronto.

In short: Putin is now fighting a ground war to break through Ukraine’s lines and a two-front energy war to break Ukraine’s will and that of its allies. He’s trying to smash Ukraine’s electricity system to ensure a long, cold winter there while putting himself in position (in ways that I’ll explain) to drive up energy costs for all of Ukraine’s allies. And because we — America and the West — do not have an energy strategy in place to dampen the impact of Putin’s energy bomb, this is a frightening prospect.

When it comes to energy, we want five things at once that are incompatible — and Putin is onto us:

1. We want to decarbonize our economy as fast as we can to mitigate the very real dangers of climate change.

2. We want the cheapest possible gasoline and heating oil prices so we can drive our cars as fast and as much as we want — and never have to put on a sweater indoors or do anything to conserve energy.

3. We want to tell the petrodictators in Iran, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia to take a hike.

4. We want to be able to treat U.S. oil and gas companies as pariahs and dinosaurs that should pump us out of this current oil crisis and then go off in the woods and die and let solar and wind take over.

5. Oh, and we don’t want any new oil and gas pipelines or wind and solar transmission lines to spoil our backyards.

I understand why people want all five — now. I want all five! But they involve trade-offs, which too few of us want to acknowledge or debate. In an energy war like the one we’re in now, you need to be clear about your goals and priorities. As a country, and as a Western alliance, we have no ladder of priorities on energy, just competing aspirations and magical thinking that we can have it all.

If we persist in that, we are going to be in for a world of hurt if Putin drops the energy bomb that I think he’s assembling for Christmas. Here’s what I think is his strategy: It starts with getting the United States to draw down its Strategic Petroleum Reserve. It is a huge stock of crude oil stored in giant caverns that we can draw on in an emergency to offset any cutoff in our domestic production or imports. Last Wednesday, President Biden announced the release of 15 million more barrels from the reserve in December, completing a plan he laid out earlier to release a total of 180 million barrels in an effort to keep gasoline prices at the pump as low as possible — in advance of the midterm elections. (He didn’t say the last part. He didn’t need to.)

According to a report in The Washington Post, the reserve contained “405.1 million barrels as of Oct. 14. That’s about 57 percent of its maximum authorized storage capacity of 714 million barrels.”

I sympathize with the president. People were really hurting from $5- and $6-a-gallon gasoline. But using the reserve — which was designed to cushion us in the face of a sudden shut-off in domestic or global production — to shave a dime or a quarter off a gallon of gasoline before elections is a dicey business, even if the president has a plan for refilling it in the coming months.

Putin wants America to use up as much of its Strategic Petroleum Reserve cushion now — just like the way the Germans gave up on nuclear energy and he got them addicted to Russia’s cheap natural gas. Then, when Russian gas was cut off because of the Ukraine war, German homes and factories had to frantically cut back and scramble for more expensive alternatives.

Next, Putin is watching the European Union gear up for a ban on seaborne imports of crude oil from Russia, starting Dec. 5. This embargo — along with Germany and Poland’s move to stop pipeline imports — should cover roughly 90 percent of the European Union’s current oil imports from Russia.

As a recent report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., noted, “Crucially, the sanctions also ban E.U. companies from providing shipping insurance, brokering services or financing for oil exports from Russia to third countries.”

The U.S. Treasury and European Union believe that without that insurance, the number of customers for Russian oil will shrink dramatically, so they are telling the Russians that they can get the insurance for their oil tankers from the few Western insurance companies that dominate the industry only if they lower the price of their crude oil exports to a level set by the Europeans and the United States.

My sources in the oil industry tell me they seriously doubt this Western price fixing will work. Russia’s OPEC Plus partner Saudi Arabia is certainly not interested in seeing such a buyers’ price-fixing precedent set. Moreover, international oil trading is full of shady characters — does the name Marc Rich ring a bell? — who thrive on market distortions. Oil tankers carry transponders that track their locations. But tankers engaged in shady activities will turn their transponders off and reappear days after they’ve made a ship-to-ship transfer or will transfer their cargo into storage tanks somewhere in Asia for re-export, in effect laundering their Russian oil. Oil in just one very large tanker can be worth roughly $250 million, so the incentives are enormous.

Now add one more dodgy player to the mix: China. It has all kinds of long-term, fixed-price contracts to import liquefied natural gas from the Middle East at roughly $100 a barrel of oil equivalent. But because of President Xi Jinping’s crazy approach to containing Covid — in recent months some 300 million citizens have been under full or partial lockdown — China’s economy has slowed considerably, as has its gas consumption. As a result, an oil industry source tells me, China has been taking some of the L.N.G. sold to it on those fixed-price contracts for domestic use and reselling it to Europe and other gas-starved countries for $300 a barrel of oil equivalent.

Now that Xi has locked in his third term as general secretary of the Communist Party, many expect that he will ease up on his lockdowns. If China goes back to anything near its normal gas consumption and stops re-exporting its excess, the global gas market will become even more scarily tight.

Last, as I noted, Putin is trying to destroy Ukraine’s ability to generate electricity. Today more than one million Ukrainians are without power, and as one Ukrainian lawmaker tweeted last week, “Total darkness and cold are coming.”

So add all of this up and then suppose, come December, Putin announces he is halting all Russian oil and gas exports for 30 or 60 days to countries supporting Ukraine, rather than submit to the European Union’s fixing of his oil price. He could afford that for a short while. That would be Putin’s energy bomb and Christmas present to the West. In this tight market, oil could go to $200 a barrel, with a commensurate rise in the price of natural gas. We’re talking $10 to $12 a gallon at the pump in the United States.

The beauty for Putin of an energy bomb is that unlike setting off a nuclear bomb — which would unite the whole world against him — setting off an oil price bomb would divide the West from Ukraine.

Obviously, I am just guessing that this is what Putin is up to, and if the world goes into recession, it could take energy prices down with it. But we would be wise to have a real counterstrategy in place, especially because, while some in Europe have managed to stock up on natural gas for this winter, rebuilding those stocks for 2023 without Russian gas and with China returning to normal could be very costly.

If Biden wants America to be the arsenal of democracy to protect us and our democratic allies — and not leave us begging Saudi Arabia, Russia, Venezuela or Iran to produce more oil and gas — we need a robust energy arsenal as much as a military one. Because we are in an energy war! Biden needs to make a major speech, making clear that for the foreseeable future, we need more of every kind of energy we have. American oil and gas investors need to know that as long as they produce in the cleanest way possible, invest in carbon capture and ensure that any new pipelines they build will be compatible with transporting hydrogen — probably the best clean fuel coming down the road in the next decade — they have a welcome place in America’s energy future, alongside the solar, wind, hydro and other clean energy producers that Biden has heroically boosted through his climate legislation.

I know. This is not ideal. This is not where I hoped we would be in 2022. But this is where we are, and anything else really is magical thinking — and the one person who will not be fooled by it is Vladimir Putin.

ARTICLE
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/25/opinion/putin-energy-gas-prices.html

MY THOUGHTS

The problem with Biden is he became president on his not being Schrumptf. The problem is, not being like Scrumpft means , not having your own initiative, not doing things your way against others input, not caring about opinion, not focusing on your base. 
And that is a problem cause, the voting group to Biden want green energy regardless of the financial costs. They want to kill the domestic oil industry with no retort from said industry. They want countries that benefit from oil that are far more potent than the countries with faux elected officials to do as they are told when it comes to energy.
And Biden in trying to satisfy the usa populace aside his voting base can't approach the foreign lands as a bully, but can't cut them off. 
In the end, Biden wanted to be president... Kamala Harris wanted to be vice president
 

IN AMENDMENT

An unverified image

Danielle Deadwyler had trepidations about playing Emmett Till’s mother “because it’s a joyous endeavor, but it’s a painful one, too.”Credit...Simone Niamani Thompson for The New York Times

Danielle Deadwyler Is the Beating Heart of ‘Till’
After critically acclaimed turns in “Station Eleven” and “The Harder They Fall,” her latest role hit close to home. That’s why she was hesitant to take it on.

By Sarah Bahr
Oct. 24, 2022
Danielle Deadwyler’s eyes are an instrument that she can play with precise control.

In HBO Max’s postapocalyptic drama “Station Eleven,” they stare into your soul as Deadwyler’s graphic novelist character, Miranda, soaks in the world around her. In Netflix’s all-Black western “The Harder They Fall,” they’re the last thing a baddie sees before he’s killed by Deadwyler’s quippy gunslinger, Cuffee.

And in her latest film, Chinonye Chukwu’s “Till,” about Emmett Till, the 14-year-old whose gruesome murder in Mississippi in 1955 by white supremacists helped spark the civil rights movement, they often fill your entire screen, tortured and unblinking in shocked grief, eyelids fluttering in painful remembrance. Though the actress has been an outsize presence in smaller screen roles in recent years, “Till” is her first lead part in a feature film.

“I’d been reared in the history, but I didn’t know the intimacy of it,” Deadwyler, 40, said of Mamie and Emmett’s relationship in a recent interview on a rainy evening at the Park Lane Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. “So this was a chance to show what it meant to be Mamie both in public and in private, and how she was intentional about and navigating those two identities.”

Deadwyler’s expressive eyes are only the beginning of her critically acclaimed performance as Emmett’s doting mother, Mamie Till-Mobley. Reviewing the film for The New York Times, Manohla Dargis praised Deadwyler’s range. “With fixed intensity and supple quicksilver emotional changes,” she wrote, “Deadwyler rises to the occasion as Mamie, delivering a quiet, centralizing performance that works contrapuntally with the story’s heaviness, its profundity and violence.”

DEADWYLER GREW UP with three siblings in southwest Atlanta, the daughter of a legal secretary and a railroad supervisor. Her mother, she said, was intent on giving the children a diverse cultural life.

“My mom was like, ‘You can’t go to U.G.A,’” she said, referring to the University of Georgia. “She had intentions for us to get out of a certain comfort zone.”

As a youngster, Deadwyler dabbled in theater and dance, taking her first dance class when she was just 4 after her mother saw her shimmying to “Soul Train,” and falling in love with theater in high school.

But she didn’t necessarily want to be an actor, she said, nor did she even fathom becoming one.

“It was just a part of my life since I was a kid,” she said, sitting cross-legged on the couch in a loose white button-up over black slacks and black crew socks. “It was lifeblood.”

She stayed close to home for college, majoring in history at Spelman while continuing to perform in plays. She earned a master’s degree in American studies from Columbia in New York, writing her thesis on sex-positive representations of women in hip-hop. (In 2017 she earned a second master’s degree, in creative writing at Ashland University in Ohio.)

When she was rejected for the women’s studies graduate program at Emory University in Atlanta — “I cried in the bathroom at the trust fund where I was interning,” she said — she turned to teaching at an elementary charter school for two years. But with her youthful looks and wiry frame, Deadwyler struggled to be taken seriously. “Quinta Brunson’s character on ‘Abbott Elementary’ looks young, but she has a teacherly presence,” Deadwyler said, clutching her knees to her chest. “I just looked young — I was fresh out of grad school. The kids were like, ‘What grade are you in?’”

But then came her big break: a role as the Lady in Yellow in “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” mounted by True Colors Theater in Atlanta in 2009.

Screen work soon followed, including the lead in the 2012 TV drama “A Cross to Bear,” playing a homeless, alcoholic mother. She also began booking small television roles: the antagonist LaQuita Maxwell on Tyler Perry’s prime-time soap opera “The Haves and the Have Nots,” a recurring role as Yoli on the Starz drama “P-Valley,” and memorable parts in FX’s “Atlanta” and HBO’s “Watchmen.”

The latter was the performance that came to mind when Patrick Somerville, creator of “Station Eleven,” was looking to cast his Miranda, the artist whose graphic novel drives the show’s narrative arc.

“Her eyes can do anything,” he said. “You can feel how substantial the person is inside her whether or not she’s talking.”

He put her through a lot of last-minute rewrites, but “she was never concerned with change,” he said. “She was always her own center. I was always impressed by her unbelievable confidence.”

HER BIGGEST LEAP to date, “Till,” is one she almost didn’t take.

Mamie Till-Mobley is best known for insisting on an open-casket viewing for her son’s corpse, to show the world what a mob of white men did to him, but the film focuses on her transformation from shellshocked parent to fervent activist. “My reps sent me the script, and I was like, ‘Do I want to do this?’” said Deadwyler, who is the single mother of a 12-year-old son, “because it’s a joyous endeavor, but it’s a painful one, too.”

In the end, the role of Mamie resonated in her bones.

For her audition, she submitted a self-tape that included the scene in which she knots a tie around Emmett’s neck — using her son, Ezra, as a stand-in — as he prepares to go down to Mississippi, telling him to “be small.” Then, in a video call with Chukwu, she re-enacted the moment when Mamie sees Emmett’s corpse for the first time. (“I warned my son, ‘Hey, man, you might hear some weird noises,’” she said.)

Chukwu, the director, said she knew immediately that she was watching something special.

“When I’m casting, I look at whether actors can communicate a story with their eyes,” she said. “Are they able to get underneath the words in a nonverbal way? Are they willing and able to dive into the work in a way that demands a vulnerability and focusedness? I saw all of that in her audition tape.”

Deadwyler’s wordless ability to act with her whole body informed how she shot the film, Chukwu said.

“I knew that I wanted the audience to see this Black woman’s humanity and that faces would be important,” she said. “But when I saw how much command and power Danielle had, I leaned into that even more.”

Mamie’s testimony scene in the courtroom, for instance — a seven-page powder keg of grief, frustration and rage — is shot in one long take. Chukwu said she originally planned on eight or nine other setups, but when Deadwyler received a standing ovation from the cast and crew on the first take — a close-up on her face — Chukwu decided: She didn’t need any more.

Deadwyler said the weight of Mamie’s suffering, her choice to fight battles for future generations even when she knows she cannot win in the present, settled into every part of her body on set. But the minute they wrapped for the day, a waiting car would take her home, Mahalia Jackson gospel songs on the stereo.

“It’s a sonic shift,” she said. “It’s the same thing with Mamie: There’s a private self and a public self.”

Yet there were lighthearted moments on set that reflected Deadwyler’s sense of humor. “At first I thought she was very serious, and that she’d get very annoyed with me, because I’m not,” said Whoopi Goldberg, who plays Mamie’s mother and served as a producer of the film. “But she is also very silly.”

Despite the film’s enthusiastic reception among both critics and audiences — it currently has a 99 percent fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes — it was a project that took more than two decades to reach the big screen, Goldberg said.

“People would say, ‘You know, nobody wants to see that story,’” she said. “You’d say, ‘No, people do want to see it.’ I guess it was the reckoning that happened that finally got people interested in telling these stories.” (“Till” is the second project focused on Mamie and Emmett’s story to be released this year, after the ABC mini-series “Women of the Movement.”)

“It has modern-day resonance,” Deadwyler said, adding that she has discussed the story with her son because “it would be neglectful for me to not talk to him about the possibilities.”

AFTER THE PUBLICITY TOUR for “Till,” Deadwyler plans to take a moment — just a moment — to soak it all in. She can also be seen starring alongside Zoe Saldaña in the new Netflix limited series “From Scratch,” based on Tembi Locke’s memoir about an American student who falls in love with an Italian chef. And she has a few film projects in the works, among them Kourosh Ahari’s sci-fi thriller “Parallel” and Netflix’s star-studded airport Christmas thriller “Carry On.”

“I want to collaborate with people,” she said. “And I’m looking forward to being approached for more projects, vs. doing 80, 100 auditions per year.”

In the meantime, after being told that her face can be seen in ads atop New York taxis, she marveled at her change in fortune, though she hadn’t seen one yet. “I would like to go quietly into the dark,” she said, laughing.

Deadwyler’s laugh is a curious thing, a sound you haven’t heard much onscreen: It’s a deep, rumbling, full-bodied “HA HA HA” that you can hear echoing down the hall long after the door closes. “Me, a serious person?” she says, eyes twinkling. “No.”

I ask what else people get wrong about her.

There’s that laugh again.

“Everything.”

ARTICLE
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/24/movies/danielle-deadwyler-till.html

The director Chinonye Chukwu planned to focus on faces all along. But “when I saw how much command and power Danielle had, I leaned into that even more.”Credit...Simone Niamani Thompson for The New York Times

MY THOUGHTS

She is just so sexy:)
 

An extinct volcano in Virunga National Park, parts of which are inside an oil block on auction by the Democratic Republic of Congo.Credit...Juergen Baetz/DPA, via Associated Press

A Power Balance Shifts as Europe, Facing a Gas Crisis, Turns to Africa for Help
Officials from Algeria to Mozambique say they hope to take advantage of an abrupt change in a long-unequal relationship.

By Max Bearak, Melissa Eddy and Dionne Searcey
Published Oct. 27, 2022
Updated Oct. 28, 2022

European leaders have been converging on Africa’s capital cities, eager to find alternatives to Russian natural gas — sparking hope among their counterparts in Africa that the invasion of Ukraine may tilt the scales in the continent’s unequal relationship with Europe, attracting a new wave of gas investments despite pressure to pivot to renewables.

In September, Poland’s president arrived in Senegal in pursuit of gas deals. In May, the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, came seeking the same thing and in recent weeks told the German Parliament that Europe’s energy crisis necessitated working “together with countries where there is the possibility of developing new gas fields,” while keeping pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“With the war, it’s a U-turn,” said Mamadou Fall Kane, energy adviser to the president of Senegal. “The narrative has changed.”

The flurry of European overtures has led to new or fast-tracked energy projects, with talk of more to come. The hope in African capitals is that Europe’s appetite will mean the financing of gas facilities not just for export but for use at home. In parts of the continent, the economic stakes are enormous.

Italian government ministers have accompanied executives from Eni, one of the largest energy companies in the world, to Algeria, Angola and the Republic of Congo as well as to Mozambique, where a natural-gas terminal operated by Eni is expected to begin supplying gas to Europe in a matter of days. Eni is now discussing an additional terminal with the Mozambican government.

And in recent weeks, officials from the Democratic Republic of Congo have embarked on an international marketing tour to draw the attention of U.S. and European companies to new oil and gas blocks they have put up for auction. Climate activists have denounced the auction because it includes oil blocks that overlap a gorilla sanctuary as well as fragile peatlands that store immense amounts of carbon dioxide, a planet-warming greenhouse gas.

In interviews, African leaders lamented that it had taken a war, thousands of miles away in Ukraine, to give them bargaining power on energy deals, and they described what they saw as a double standard. Europe, after all, used not just natural gas, but far dirtier fuels like coal, for hundreds of years to drive an age of empire-building and industrialization.

Their main complaint: Less developed nations should be free to burn more gas in coming years, despite the climate crisis and the need for the world cut back on fossil fuels, because their citizens deserve higher standards of living and greater access to reliable electricity and other basics. But European and international lenders have made it far too costly, Africa’s leaders say.

Instead, European leaders have often seemed to preach to Africans about reducing carbon dioxide emissions while providing little of the necessary financing to help build green energy alternatives, all while continuing to emit far more than Africa.

“Just two to three months ago, those same Europeans who were lecturing us on ‘no gas’ say they’ll make a compromise,” said Amani Abou-Zeid, the African Union’s commissioner for energy and infrastructure. “We are trying to survive. But instead we are being infantilized.”

A recent political cartoon < https://twitter.com/fatenaggad/status/1573599884053192704 > by the Tanzanian artist Gado, widely shared on social media, captured that frustration after John Kerry, the United States climate envoy, spoke last month at an environmental conference in Senegal.

In the cartoon, which paraphrases his speech, Mr. Kerry stands at a podium and delivers a remark that reflects the lecture many African leaders feel they’ve been receiving from Western counterparts. “Well guess what, folks?” he says while smiling next to billowing American flags. “Mother Nature does not measure where the emissions come from. We are all responsible for this.”

As he speaks, clouds of pollution puff out of his mouth.

Mr. Kerry did, in fact, note Africa’s relatively tiny contribution to emissions in the speech and the world’s shared interest in addressing climate change. And, in past comments, he has said African countries have a right to use fossil fuels to develop their economies.

The argument by some African officials is that natural gas, more affordable and cleaner than oil and coal, should serve as a transitional fuel for the continent to bridge the gap to renewables like wind or solar, just as it has in Europe.

In an interview shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, Mr. Kerry said the atmosphere could handle some new fossil fuel plants in developing nations as long as the world’s 20 largest economies, which produce 80 percent of global emissions, were transitioning away from dirty energy.

Western governments have aimed to promote growth in renewable energy in less-developed countries through a so-called just transition in which they partly underwrite new projects. Last year, the United States, Britain, Germany, France and the European Union pledged $8.5 billion in grants and loans to help South Africa transition away from coal, a major influx of money for renewables on the continent.

Yet, it was a rare one. In general, Western investment in renewables in African countries has been even more paltry than in fossil-fuel projects.

Energy poverty on the continent has suffocated the growth of industries that create jobs and undergird economies. More than 600 million Africans do not have access to power and nearly a billion use firewood and charcoal, fuels that are causing significant respiratory problems and death, to heat their homes and cook.

Electrifying every African home could be done by 2030 with investments of just $25 billion a year, according to the International Energy Agency, a fraction of what’s invested in global energy today.

Experts say that Western concern over African countries’ desire to burn more gas at home in coming years is misplaced from a climate-change perspective. The International Energy Agency projected this year that if African countries developed all their known gas reserves, Africa’s contribution to global emissions would only rise to an estimated 3.5 percent from 3 percent.

Outside of the continent’s biggest emitters (coal-dependent South Africa, as well as the established oil and gas producers of North Africa) the 47 other African countries combined emit less than even some of Europe’s smaller economies, like Greece. With Western investments in gas suddenly growing again, those disparities are likely to remain.

Just this month, Britain announced as many as 100 new domestic gas drilling licenses despite studies from its own government indicating the best way to lower energy costs in the long term would be to shift away from fossil fuels. In August, President Biden said he would resume selling leases for oil and gas drilling on federal land. And in July, the Group of 7, the international club of major industrialized democracies, watered down a pledge to stop funding fossil fuel projects abroad, saying the war presented “exceptional circumstances.”

Acknowledging the double standard is just the beginning, African leaders said in interviews. More important, Europe needs to come around to financing African gas projects quickly, and not just with an eye toward exports to Europe.

“We must move urgently beyond grandstanding,” said Akinwumi Adesina, the president of the African Development Bank. “Even Europe’s energy transition was not possible without gas. Reality is reality.”

Lenders like the African Development Bank have been putting money into gas for years, but without an influx of finance from Europe, projects could take decades to get started.

Gas prices in Europe have been falling because the continent’s major economies have managed to replace most of their Russian gas supply with imports from Norway, North Africa and the United States. Experts predict much of Europe’s gas needs in coming years to be fulfilled by those countries as well as Qatar, which is expected to open the world’s largest gas facility in 2025.

Even with the flurry of visits to Africa from European leaders, some of the projects and proposals there come with significant hurdles.

Italy’s Eni, which is partially state-owned, bought a floating natural gas platform off the coast of the Republic of Congo for more than half a billion dollars. Company executives and government officials, who visited after the outbreak of war, began to fast track the project so that it could deliver gas by next year. By 2024, the company also expects to double its imports from Algeria, which is already connected to Italy across the Mediterranean Sea by a pipeline.

Eni executives are discussing a second floating terminal in Mozambique even as an Islamist insurgency in the country’s north continues to threaten a sprawling onshore energy project there. Offshore platforms typically yield less gas but are quicker to set up.

“With the war, suddenly there was new urgency,” said an Eni spokeswoman who declined to be identified, citing company policy. “It accelerated a shift to new gas sources that was years in the making.”

The visit to Senegal by the German chancellor has not yet yielded a deal, Senegal’s energy adviser said. The Senegalese government has been working with B.P. and Kosmos Energy, a U.S. company, to develop a gas field off its coast that is expected to start production next year, according to Kosmos.

The war’s ripple effects have also resurrected talks on a long-dormant trans-Saharan pipeline project that would supply Europe with Nigerian gas via Niger, another country on the German chancellor’s itinerary — and another one battling a metastasizing Islamist insurgency.

Last month, Mr. Kerry traveled to Congo, one of the most populous and least-electrified countries in Africa, for a climate conference and asked President Félix Tshisekedi to remove the blocks from auction that are in environmentally sensitive areas.

An aide to Mr. Tshisekedi said the blocks remain on auction.

In an interview in September, the Congolese president said his country had no plans to endanger important environmental areas but had every right to exploit its gas and oil, just as the United States has done. “Requesting us to change our behavior and protect our forest, and not provide the resources and the know-how — it’s delusional,” Mr. Tshisekedi said.

ARTICLE
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/27/climate/europe-africa-natural-gas.html#:~:text=A Power Balance Shifts as Europe%2C Facing a,German chancellor%2C Olaf Scholz%2C in May. Andreas Rinke%2FReuters

MY THOUGHTS

People talk about post industrial but the reality is humanity has never been post industrial and growing industry requires more energy. The whole green movement is based on the idea that the white european imperial powers which include the usa side western european governments can shift their energy concerns while telling the countries they dominated to do with less energy and become beholden to white european energy needs to maintain supremacy of white european communities. 
The goal in green energy is utilizing the earth's physical condition to allow powerful countries to change their fiscal output while chaining poorer countries to it. and it all relates to china. China is first among non white european countries and it earned that through heavy energy consumption.