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Will redistricting give Republicans an advantage?

However, the GOP's advantage isn't entirely due to efforts to reclaim seats presently held by Democratic legislators or to eliminate blue districts.

FILE - In this May 30, 2013 file photo, Texas state Sen. Juan "Chuy" Hinojosa looks at maps on display prior to a Senate Redistricting committee hearing, in Austin, Texas. The first efforts by the Obama administration to restore protections under the newly hollowed Voting Rights Act begin Monday in Texas over allegations that Republicans intentionally discriminated against minorities when drawing new election maps. (AP Photo/Eric Gay, File)

Eric Gay

Rather, Republicans in some states are looking to pad their margins in districts where competition for control, in previous years, was fierce.

“A lot of what we’re seeing happening is not so much flipping Democratic-held districts into Republican-held districts. There’s a little of that, obviously,” David Hopkins, a political science professor at Boston College, told the Washington Examiner. “What we’re seeing much more commonly is the shoring up of vulnerable Republican districts and turning them into much safer Republican districts.”

To restore the majority they lost in 2018, House Republicans will need to gain at least five seats in 2022. Except for the six states with populations so low that they have just one congressman, practically every state is now faced with the prospect of drawing congressional boundaries that will define politics for the next ten years. Some states are depending on bipartisan committees to decide where the boundaries will be drawn, generally based on the most current census data. Others are resorting to their legislatures' elected officials to draft the maps, providing Republicans an advantage in the process because they control more state legislatures and governorships than Democrats.This would empower Republicans in red states to draw maps that will better protect GOP incumbents in future elections, when the party's prospects may be even worse than they are in 2022. The new Texas map, which Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law late last month, is an example of this. Despite the fact that Texas gained two House seats as a result of population increase over the last decade, the map only produces one additional reliably Republican district.

Texas’s current congressional delegation is made up of 23 Republican congressmen and 13 Democratic congressmen. Under the new map, Texas will have 24 solid or likely Republican districts, 13 solid or likely Democratic districts, and one competitive district, according to FiveThirtyEight .

But Republicans gave their House members comfortable margins in some of the most competitive districts they hold.

Rep. Beth Van Duyne, a Republican from Texas' 24th District, won by fewer than 2 points in 2020. Previously, the district included a vast swath of suburban areas between Dallas and Fort Worth. Van Duyne's district has a 22-point Republican lead under the revised plan, with lines twisting through bluer sections of Dallas-Fort Worth. According to David Daley, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan election organization FairVote, the redistricting process has so far shown that there will be fewer swing districts in elections over the next decade.

“Republicans have really effectively taken the districts where they were vulnerable to a blue wave in red states and made them uncompetitive moving forward,” Daley told the Washington Examiner.

Because of the aim of restricting prospects for losses in the years ahead, certain new Republican-drawn maps might make red states even redder heading into the 2018 elections. The state of Utah, for example, is now represented entirely by Republicans in Congress. Last year, though, Rep. Burgess Owen narrowly defeated first-term Democratic Rep. Ben McAdams in Utah's 4th District, which the GOP won by less than a point. Under the new map, Utah's 4th District is now the state's most reliably red, with a Republican edge of 31 points.However, certain Republican attempts to draft advantageous maps are already being criticized. The Republican-controlled state legislature in North Carolina approved a plan that would add two safe GOP seats while removing two safe Democratic districts. Under the revised map, North Carolina's 2nd District, which is presently controlled by Democratic Rep. G.K. Butterfield, would become extremely competitive. Butterfield is set to announce his retirement this week, according to reports.

Butterfield’s district was previously majority minority, but the Legislature redrew it to be majority white.

The NAACP of North Carolina and other groups have filed lawsuits against the drafting of the map, alleging partisan and racial gerrymandering.

Daley cited a Supreme Court case, Rucho v. Common Cause, that in 2019 made complaints about gerrymandering on the basis of partisanship much more difficult to argue in court.

“The arguments that we’re going to see are going to be racial gerrymander arguments,” Daley said of coming challenges to GOP maps.

However, lawmakers in North Carolina and other states are likely to argue that their redistricting decisions were based on Democratic voter concentrations rather than minority voter concentrations, posing a "fascinating question" that will be answered during the fight over new maps, according to Daley.

source https://usagag.com/2021/11/18/will-redistricting-give-republicans-an-advantage/

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American Humanist

Shelby Steele, a best-selling author and senior scholar at the Hoover Institution, has spent more than three decades delving into the psychology of race in America. However, his uncommon capacity to see under the surface of a person has led him to commit an unforgivable mistake of our time: forgetting that ethnic groups are made up of individual human beings. “The mistake everybody makes when they look at race,” he once explained, “is to look at race.”

The key insight running through Steele’s five books, many essays, and various film projects is that race in America is never what it appears. “I have long believed that race is a mask through which other human needs manifest themselves,” he asserted in his Emmy Award–winning 1990 documentary, Seven Days in Bensonhurst. “I think we often make race an issue as a way of not knowing other things about ourselves.”

Steele’s writing often begins by recounting a personal experience, from which he draws a larger historical and cultural meaning. For instance, his 1990 book, The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America, opens with the story of a dinner party that went downhill after a comment made by the only other black person in attendance. “I didn’t realize my ambition to get ahead would pull me into a world where my daughter would lose touch with her blackness,” the man said with an air of accusation. “Over the course of the evening,” Steele recalls, “we have talked about money, past and present addictions, child abuse, even politics. . . . But this subject, race, sinks us into one of those shaming silences where eye contact terrorizes. . . . An autopsy of this party might read: Death induced by an abrupt and lethal injection of the American race issue.”

To his critics, Steele’s approach amounts to a form of mind-reading, or, as the critical race theorist Patricia Williams put it in a New York Times review of the book, the “use of psychology as politics,” which risks “substituting limited personal circumstances for broader historical analyses.” There are surely limits to the argumentative use of subjective experience, but Steele strikes an honest balance between private self and public reality. “I don’t tell you that I’m some objective scholar on high and I’ve just evaluated the data and come to this conclusion,” he said on C-SPAN in 2006. “I show you how these thoughts and feelings and ideas evolve out of my own experience because I want to communicate with people on that level: as human beings.”

Resistance to Steele’s work has more to do with his conclusions than with the limits of psychology or personal experience. “Shelby Steele has aptly pointed out that much that is said and done today that makes no sense in itself is a result of a desperate desire of whites to avoid being considered racists and a desperate desire of blacks to avoid being considered inferior,” his longtime friend and fellow commentator Thomas Sowell observes. Following George Floyd’s murder and the unrest that followed it last year, Steele’s ideas have particular urgency.

Born in 1946 in Phoenix, a working-class suburb off Chicago’s South Side, Steele grew up in the crucible of segregation and came of age in the civil rights era. Attending protests form some of his earliest memories. His parents, Shelby Sr. and Ruth Steele, were founding members of the Congress of Racial Equality and schooled their four children in the Gandhian discipline of nonviolent resistance.

Steele’s African-American father was born in Camp Nelson, Kentucky, in 1900—the son of a former slave—before venturing north, where he worked as a truck driver. With only a third-grade education, Shelby Sr. was a gentle, self-taught man, who preferred to persuade others to his position on civil rights through discussion. Though Steele’s mother was white and qualified for the Daughters of the American Revolution, the unwritten rules of northern segregation dictated that the family live on the black side of town. “Their point, as an interracial couple,” Steele writes of his parents, “was that they were not making a point.”

Steele’s parents were founding members of the Congress of Racial Equality, which led this mid-1960s demonstration in Chicago. (ROBERT ABBOTT SENGSTACKE/GETTY IMAGES)

The risks of their parents’ activism meant that the kids would sometimes be sent to stay with friends until things “cooled down.” The Steeles believed that race was a barrier to the individual humanity of all Americans; activism was their patriotism.

Steele never thought much about his multiracial background. If anything, it put the lie to race. But Steele’s family life could not protect him from the indignities of segregation. He didn’t eat in a restaurant until he was an adult because his parents were never sure where it was acceptable for blacks to be and did not want to face the indignity of being kicked out. The only work Steele could find in farm-laden Phoenix was agricultural. “My life had to always be negotiated around my failure to be white.” Even today, when he walks into a hotel or restaurant, Steele has “segregation flashbacks” of how restricted life once was.

Steele attended an abysmal all-black elementary school, where a white teacher emotionally and physically terrorized him. His parents then boycotted the school—leading to the first lawsuit of its kind north of the Mason-Dixon line—and eventually got it closed down. Steele was virtually illiterate when he entered an integrated middle school, but one of his new teachers ignited a love for reading by lending him an adventure book. “Out of childhood despair and without any conscious attention, I developed a parallel self—a rather fearless self that wanted to make its own sense of things.” Before long, Steele was penning letters to the editor of the local paper, reading James Baldwin and Richard Wright, and composing love letters on his friends’ behalf.

Steele’s account of his childhood gives the impression of a highly sensitive boy observing his own complex reactions to the upside-down world around him. But Steele says that racial oppression, in his case, didn’t result in low self-esteem or self-hatred. When he was 11 or 12, for instance, Steele tried out for a batboy position with an all-white local baseball team, knowing full well that blacks weren’t allowed to participate. “I was at that age when wanting something very badly involves as much denial as longing.” Eventually, seeing no other competitors for the job, the coach relented. But on the team’s first away game, the coach, who had changed his mind, stopped Steele at the door of the bus. “They don’t allow coloreds,” the coach said. “I can’t use you anymore.”

“It was as though my very insides dropped out and I was utterly hollow,” Steele remembers. “I wanted to cry, felt all the precursors for a collapse into tears, but I did not cry, and I never cried.” Instead, he recalled, “I had what I would much later understand to be an existential experience. This had been an encounter with the absurd, and the world was simply no longer as firm for me as it had been. So my loss of faith was not in myself; it was in the world. Ironically, this put me a little above the world and gave my own judgments a new authority. . . . If anything, this experience was a passage to higher self-esteem.”

By the time Steele entered Coe College, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa (where he met his wife, Rita Silverman), the activism of his parents’ generation had shifted the nation’s moral terrain. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed into law during his first year.

Paradoxically, the explosion of Black Power and the ghetto riots of the late 1960s soon followed the unprecedented progress of the early civil rights movement. Among Steele’s key observations is that extreme forms of activism often emerge after a society has begun to transform itself. “There is no determinism between one’s racial wounds and the acting out of black rage—a phrase that came into use only after the 1964 Civil Rights Bill,” Steele writes. “Anger in the oppressed is a response to perceived opportunity, not to injustice. And expressions of anger escalate not with more injustice but with less injustice.”

Steele embodied this paradox. By the mid-1960s, he had “come into a new, uncompromising idea of what it meant to be black.” The leader of multiple student protest groups on campus, he grew disillusioned with the sacrificial moral witness of his parents’ activism. “Suddenly the nonviolence that looked courageous in the face of the mob looks a little obeisant and supplicating when the mob disappears.”

A few months before his senior year, Steele attended a Black Power rally, where comedian and activist Dick Gregory delivered a lecture on a new counterculture consciousness for blacks that was “hip” to the structural determinism of racism in America. The idea that your own country will always hate you might seem like cause for despair, but Steele experienced it as a relief. “Standing there in that church I realized that no one—least of all the government—had the moral authority to tell me to be responsible for much of anything,” he recalls. “Now America had to prove itself to me.”

Still, the opportunities available to Steele after the 1960s were undeniable. His first teaching gig came with higher pay than his parents had ever earned. They were punished for their activism; he was rewarded for his.

Fresh out of college, from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, Steele participated in four Great Society programs, helped develop some of the first black-studies curricula, and took an extended trip to Africa to visit countries newly liberated from colonial rule. But the social programs in which Steele worked were mired in corruption and rapidly descended into chaos. “It was my first experience with the utter thrill of untested good intentions,” he recalls. The programs, asking nothing of recipients, achieved little good. Indeed, despite billions of dollars in federal aid, the black underclass swelled after the 1960s, while the previous generation had made progress during an era of open racism. Likewise, what Steele found in Africa was not a New Jerusalem but woefully underdeveloped societies, filled with people struggling with the challenges of newfound freedoms.

As Steele moved on to become an English professor at the San José State University, where he would spend 20 years, new academic trends—racial and ethnic studies departments, preferential admissions, “diversity” and “multiculturalism” initiatives—seemed only to sink minority students and faculty more deeply in a mind-set of grievance. Steele developed what he would call “race fatigue,” an existential tension emerging from the space between one’s racial mask and one’s human reality. “It came as a disappointment to realize the two could not be the same, that being black in no way spared me the burden of being myself.” Gradually, he retreated from Black Power and returned to his parents’ civil rights traditionalism—except now, such a stance was no longer considered liberal.

Steele’s first book, The Content of Our Character, which earned him the National Book Critics Circle Award, begins with a striking observation: the racial struggle in America has been primarily over moral authority—which is to say, innocence. Since the dawn of American slavery, the distinction of race in American life has been used to sanction the power of one race over another. But given the moral intuitions of human beings, we don’t typically pursue power without believing in our own innocence. Thus, racism stems from the compulsion to use racial difference as validation of our own goodness and superiority. Historically, a claim of white innocence and black guilt grounded white supremacy.

When the United States finally acknowledged its long history of racism against blacks at the height of the civil rights movement, white Americans experienced a loss of innocence, and black Americans gained a degree of moral authority. In Steele’s eyes, this is perhaps the most underappreciated historical shift of the twentieth century. Though the indictment of racism was long overdue, the underlying logic of white supremacy—that race signifies guilt or innocence—lived on in an inverted form. Since the acknowledgment of black victimization and white wrongdoing gave blacks their first experience of power, black power became inseparable from white guilt.

“Many whites began to act guilty to appear innocent of racism—by contrast with other, less enlightened whites.”

At the very moment that blacks experienced greater freedom, an impulse emerged to identify more deeply with—and even take pride in—the group’s history of victimization. This embrace of past historical suffering as a way forward also opened those blacks choosing assimilation and individualism over group identity to the charge of betraying their race. Meantime, white Americans, feeling guilt over past racism, could regain moral authority and innocence only by assuming responsibility for black advancement—for example, by supporting affirmative action, welfare expansion, public housing, and other programs associated with President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.

Many white Americans thus began to act guilty in order to appear innocent of racism—especially by contrast with other, less enlightened whites. It didn’t matter whether the policies they supported in adopting this stance really helped blacks. Black power, in turn, increasingly meant using past oppression to extract benefits from a society desperate to overcome racism. And because the essence of black power is morally and politically incoherent—it condemns American society for not fully accepting blacks while also insisting that blacks don’t need the acceptance of morally depraved whites—the result is inertia.

Steele’s key insight has been to recognize this as the underlying racial contract of the post–civil rights era. But the terms of the contract keep redemption forever out of reach. More than a half century after the civil rights movement, whites are more sensitive to racism than ever before, yet blacks still lag behind. Steele argues that the incentives of this alignment interrupted the natural course of development for black Americans: we have confused the racial masks with the human beings beneath them. The need for historical innocence, on the one hand, and moral power, on the other, has reimposed the color line at the very moment that it should be fading away.

The only escape from this trap, in Steele’s view, is to return to the humanism that inspired the civil rights movement: dissolving the union of race and moral authority by emphasizing our common humanity and shared national destiny. Lest we forget, it is evil to judge people by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character, and human beings can’t be trusted to use race for the good.

The potential for prejudice will always exist wherever visibly distinct groups of people live together. It is only through the discipline of democratic principles surrounding individual freedom that multiethnic societies can restrain the impulse toward racial tribalism. A more honest antiracism would not compare our present reality with some quasi-utopia, free of disparity and bias, and blame any gap on whites; it would approach race issues as a two-way street of moral effort to root out what remains of unjust discrimination and develop the human potential of formerly oppressed groups.

After the success of his first book, Steele came to be known as a “black conservative.” In the contorted logic of post-1960s liberalism, a black conservative is not necessarily conservative in the conventional sense; he simply rejects the totalizing framework of black victimization. Black conservatives stand accused of failing to love their own people, but their real sin lies in taking off the mask in front of whites.

In his second book, A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America (1998), Steele explores the predicament of the black conservative. When a society is determined to redeem itself from history, it often projects an idealized version of itself. Those who stand in the way of achieving that ideal are then stigmatized. Thus, black conservatives find themselves tarred as “racists” or “Uncle Toms.” In what Steele calls redemptive liberalism, policies about race are pursued less for what they accomplish than for what they represent: recovering lost innocence, the expiation of shame, the feeling of redemption. “Because our truest motivations for using race are always ulterior,” Steele writes, “every race-based policy or program—from segregation to affirmative action—is a duplicity in which what we say merely rationalizes goals that we are unable or unwilling to state.”

For instance, it’s hard to think of a policy that could possibly be worse for a group of people after four centuries of oppression than lowering standards for them in the precise areas they need to develop most, such as education. Following 50 years of affirmative action, black Americans today have among the highest dropout rates and lowest GPAs of any student group. But if the real purpose of preferential treatment is not to develop black potential but to liberate the larger society from the stigma of racism, this persistent policy failure is easier to understand.

When we identify an issue or policy by race, we look past its human source—whether it’s poor math skills or broken families or violent crime. As Steele puts it: “Wherever we self-consciously use race—whether out of hate or love—as a tool, a convenience, a proxy for disadvantage, a currency of entitlement, a means to power, a basis for group preferences, then we are using it precisely to gain the license to break the normal human and democratic principles we live by for some ulterior reason.”

An important theme underlying Steele’s work is what Jean-Paul Sartre called the “burden of freedom.” The experience of freedom can be painful, even humiliating, if we lack the individual agency needed to thrive. Freedom is not deliverance but possibility. To be free is to be responsible for one’s choices—including the suffering that can sometimes follow. The interplay between suffering and responsibility is the very basis of individual development. Non-freedom can offer comfort because it spares us the shame of failing to live up to our potential. To escape the burden of freedom, we can insist that we are victims of larger forces.

Black Americans long ago conceived of freedom as “the promised land.” When they finally arrived at it, they discovered that it entailed a new accountability. It was only then that racism became the singular cultural explanation for black America’s fate. Yet if racism has so completely defined the black experience, how does one explain the world-changing contemporary force of black American culture in music, literature, style, language, and sports? For Steele, the greatest challenge facing black Americans today is accepting the burden of freedom. “I’m free,” he declares. “When I was born I wasn’t.”

In his 2006 book, White Guilt: How Black and White Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era, Steele elaborates further on these themes. Describing how, on a long drive back from Los Angeles in 1998, he had listened to news of President Bill Clinton’s scandal involving Monica Lewinsky, Steele recalls that President Dwight Eisenhower, in the 1950s, was rumored to use the word “nigger” on the golf course occasionally. He wonders at how each scandal, if switched in time, would have ruined these presidents. How can the country have evolved so much on social issues like race and gender and yet decline in terms of personal morality?

When the hypocrisy of an established order comes to light—such as the distance between America’s commitment to republican freedoms and its historical denial of rights to millions of people because of their skin color—the protest against that order attains moral legitimacy, often with an accompanying fearlessness. The battle against racism eventually opened the floodgates to other forms of social protest and group activism—from the women’s and gay rights movements to the sexual revolution, the antiwar movement, and environmentalism. Each movement framed its grievance against the country in similar terms of oppressor and oppressed; each condemned America as structurally unjust. The new Left that emerged from the counterculture was less concerned with correcting obvious and addressable problems, however, than in establishing a new historical innocence in relation to America’s past sins. By dissociating itself from the past, the counterculture would seek to restore moral authority to the nation.

Though much of the counterculture, Steele believes, was inevitable, it came at the cost of stigmatizing the principles that made the country flourish and that had inspired the civil rights movement itself: individual (not group) rights, equality under the law, due process, meritocracy, free speech. If the nation’s principles were merely about protecting the privileges of straight white men, as the counterculture maintained, why not suspend those principles to benefit minorities? The shift from negative rights to positive rights—from individual freedom to privileges based on group identity—shifted the goalposts, from equality between individuals to equity between groups, from freedom to social justice. Just as America moved closer to living up to its ideals, it recommitted its original sin: the use of group identity as a means to power.

In his most recent book, Shame: How America’s Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country (2015), Steele contends that the same crisis of moral legitimacy that fueled the counterculture also led to today’s culture war. A new American “Other” emerged as the presumed enemy not just of blacks but of all excluded groups: the unreconstructed, straight, white, conservative, Christian male. America descended into perpetual symbolic warfare between two national identities: one committed to dissociating the country from historical shame, the other to maintaining some semblance of historical continuity.

In 2007, Steele published a short, lesser known, book, A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win. Despite the book’s ill-judged subtitle, many of its arguments proved prescient. Like Steele, Barack Obama was born to a black father and a white mother, but unlike him, Obama lived an integrated and cosmopolitan life with the white side of his family, with his black father largely absent. Obama self-consciously sought out an authentic black identity, as though in search of a father. Steele was among the first to identify a tension in Obama’s character between his appeal to whites as a candidate who could transcend race and relieve white guilt and his conformity to a black identity that feeds off white guilt. “What gave Barack Obama the idea that he could plausibly run for the presidency of the United States?” Steele asks. “Was it that he had evolved a compelling vision for the nation grounded in deeply held personal convictions? Or was it that he had simply become aware of his power to enthrall whites?”

During Obama’s presidency, the percentage of white and black Americans reporting positive race relations plummeted. When Black Lives Matter became a national movement in 2014 after the police shooting of Michael Brown, Attorney General Eric Holder traveled to Ferguson, Missouri, to investigate—both as a government official and, he said, “as a black man.” While the investigation concluded that the shooting was justified, it also reportedly uncovered evidence of systemic police racism: blacks were stopped by police at a greater rate in Ferguson than their percentage of the population would suggest.

To get a deeper sense of what really happened, Eli Steele, Shelby’s filmmaker son, enlisted his father to help produce the 2020 documentary What Killed Michael Brown? What they found in Ferguson was an ordinary suburb of St. Louis that stood out previously only for its relatively high levels of diversity; after the Brown incident, it was made to serve a larger narrative of black victimization and white racism. Yet multiple credible (black) witnesses report that Brown repeatedly attacked police officer Darren Wilson before the officer shot him. The charge of systemic racism in traffic stops was also off base: the areas surrounding Ferguson are mostly black, and drivers would regularly come to the city to shop, skewing the race percentages used by Holder’s investigation.

The reaction to Brown’s death illustrated what Steele calls “poetic truth.” In the same way that poetic license allows a writer to bend the rules of language for effect, poetic truth enables someone to bend facts to suggest a larger truth about society. It is a poetic truth, for example, that a racist police officer killed Michael Brown because America hates blacks. A broad acceptance of poetic truth can even make the real truth taboo: Amazon initially banned the film.

The distance between narrative and fact in Ferguson mirrored a pattern that Steele had identified nearly 30 years earlier in Seven Days in Bensonhurst, which described how Yusef Hawkins’s death at the hands of a gang of white teenagers in Brooklyn was leveraged by Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson for political power, while the deeper issues went unaddressed. So when Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd in Minneapolis last summer, Steele was uniquely positioned to identify the system of meaning through which the event would be interpreted. The poetic truth of systemic police racism hid the actual truth: that violent crime in black communities is a much bigger problem than police violence.

A still from the 2020 documentary "What Killed Michael Brown?," in which Steele and his filmmaker son Eli challenge the mainstream narrative of black victimization; the film was temporarily banned on Amazon. (COURTESY OF MAN OF STEELE PRODUCTIONS)

Critics often charge that Steele and others like him don’t care about racism. But one of the unintended consequences of expanding the meaning of racism to include any statistical disparity between whites and blacks, Steele maintains, is that it leaves no incentive to deal with racist behavior on an individual level. If racism is everywhere, it is also nowhere. It’s worth noting that Steele filed the first housing discrimination lawsuit in Salt Lake City back in the 1970s and won. He has even advocated jail time for individual acts of racism—for example, provable racial discrimination, for which no other plausible explanation exists—in American institutions. Meantime, modern antiracist scholars like Ibram X. Kendi seem to have no idea what racism even is.

Indeed, of all the charges laid against Steele, inauthenticity is the most off base. He would be just as comfortable holding court on African and African-American literature at a historically black college as he would be taking in the scene at a blues bar or jazz club. As far back as 1976, he published a paper for a black-studies journal on the parallels between his literary hero Ralph Ellison’s classic Invisible Man and the existentialist structure of the blues. What makes Steele’s approach different from that of some other black intellectuals is that, much like Ellison, he wants the uniqueness of black American culture to reflect the human condition and the American story. “No group in this country has struggled harder to earn its humanity despite its race than blacks. To now insist so fiercely on racial recognition is to sell our birthright for a pot of porridge.” As the United States moves beyond the old divisions of white and black into a new multiethnic majority, Steele’s vision of a new American humanism is a hopeful one. But to make it a reality, the mask of race must come off.

source https://usagag.com/2021/11/17/american-humanist/

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China's Economic Miracle: What Caused It?

Never before in history has such a large number of individuals climbed from abject poverty to the middle class in such a short period of time. China's evolution demonstrates that increased economic growth benefits the great majority of people, even if it is accompanied by rising inequality. Inequality has grown in China, but no one wants to return to Mao's era, when the Chinese were more equal but, above all, poorer. With the exception of the United States, China today has more billionaires than any other country in the world; Beijing now has more billionaires than New York. This demonstrates the anticapitalist "zero-sum thinking" fallacy, which asserts that the affluent are only wealthy because they have stolen something from the poor. Hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens are significantly better off now, not because of the large number of millionaires and billionaires, but because Deng Xiaoping embraced the phrase "Let some get rich first" following Mao's death. In his 2020 book Ideas for China’s Future, the Chinese economist Weiying Zhang writes that Deng Xiaoping is referred to as the “architect” of reform in China. “However, Deng Xiaoping understood that economic and social reforms are different from constructing buildings. They cannot be built according to predesigned blueprints. Instead a ‘cross the river by feeling the stones’ approach must be taken.” Zhang claims that Deng implemented reform by trial and error. Nothing important – neither pricing reforms, labor market reforms, tax reforms, or foreign trade reforms – was simply decreed. Deng was continually experimenting with novel ideas in certain regions or industries (e.g., special economic zones). If his changes were successful on a lesser scale, they were scaled up; if they were not, they were abandoned. Much of China's success was due to "bottom-up" efforts that were supported as an alternative to central leadership decisions. "Deng Xiaoping knew what he didn't know!" says Zhang of Deng's decisive abilities. Deng was correct in prioritizing economic growth, as the following facts demonstrate: The areas in China that have seen the biggest poverty reduction in recent decades are also the provinces that have seen the fastest economic growth. Zhang, unquestionably the most knowledgeable economist in China, denies the assumption that China's amazing achievement is due to the government's large participation. This misunderstanding is common in the West, but it is becoming more common in China, where some officials and academics feel that the country's success is due to a specific Chinese model. “The advocates of the China model are wrong because they mistake ‘in spite of’ for ‘because of.’ China has grown fast not because of, but in spite of the unlimited government and the large inefficient state sector.” In fact, “marketization” and “privatization” are the driving forces behind China’s tremendous economic growth. Zhang analyzed data from different regions across China and concluded that “the more the market-oriented reform a province had implemented, the higher economic growth it had achieved, and laggards in marketization reform are also laggards in economic growth.” The areas where market-oriented reforms had been implemented most consistently, i.e. Guangdong, Zhejiang, Fujian and Jiangsu, were also those that had delivered the greatest economic growth. Here, and this is a key insight, “the best measure of reform progress is the changes in marketization scores in the concerned periods, rather than the absolute scores for a particular year.” The growth rate is greatest where private companies play the decisive role. Zhang’s data prove it: “The provinces whose economies are more ‘privatized’ are likely to grow faster. It is non-state sectors, rather than the state sector, that have driven the high growth.” The reform process in China over the past decades has never been uniform, never just in one direction. There were phases in which market forces quickly became stronger, but there were also phases in which the role of the state was reasserted. Even if over the longer term the main tendency was “state-out-and-private-in” (guo tui min jin), there were also periods and regions in which there was a backward trend, i.e., “state-in-and-private-out” (guo jin min tui). Zhang examines the different growth rates in the “state-out-and-private-in” regions and the “state-in-and-private-out” regions. Again, the results are clear: economic output grew significantly faster in the “state-out-and-private-in” regions. As Zhang explains, this proves “that China’s rapid growth of the past four decades has been driven by the power of the market and the non-state sectors, rather than the power of the government and the state-sector as claimed by the China model theorists.” The level of innovation is critical to the Chinese economy's future development. An examination of industry R&D intensity, patents granted per capita, and the percentage of new product sales in total industrial revenue reveals that all of these essential metrics for innovation are positively correlated with the degree of marketization. When I met Weiying Zhang in Beijing he stressed the major danger of misunderstanding the reasons for China’s growth, not only for China, but also for the West. If people in the West mistakenly conclude that China’s economic success is founded on some unique “third way” between capitalism and socialism, also known as “state capitalism,” Zhang worries that they will draw the wrong conclusions for their own relations with China. In Ideas for China’s Future, Zhang uses a very apt metaphor: “Imagine seeing a person without an arm running very fast. If you conclude that his speed comes from missing an arm, then you naturally will call on others to saw off an arm. That would be a disaster … Economists must not confuse ‘in spite of’ with ‘because of.’” Advocates of a strong state in Europe and the United States want everyone to believe that China’s economic success confirms that economic growth is inextricably linked with a strong state. The analyses of Weiying Zhang prove that exactly the opposite is true. Are the Chinese themselves forgetting the roots of their success? Over the past four decades, there has been a constant struggle between two economic ideologies – the socialist against the capitalist. Sometimes the free market’s supporters have gained the upper hand, at other times it has been the supporters of the state. This struggle continues, and its outcome will determine China’s future. The way China deals with its recent real estate crisis will provide an indication of whether China – like Europe and the United States – follows the path of state interventionism or is courageous enough to implement market-based alternatives. Developments in recent years tend to indicate that in China (as everywhere else in the world today) faith in the state is stronger than faith in market forces. In the short term this may alleviate the latest dramatic crises, but in the long term it will create even greater problems.

China has risen rapidly despite, not because of, its enormous inefficient public sector and unrestricted government.

This article was originally published by the Institute of Economic Affairs.

source https://usagag.com/2021/11/17/chinas-economic-miracle-what-caused-it/

#USA GAG #USA Opinion

While the rioter who testified against Rittenhouse is referred to as a 'hero,' his criminal record reveals a violent past

To them, he was a hero who tried to confront a "crazy white supremacist with an assault weapon," and when Grosskreutz and his missing arm testified against the boy who shot him, major media outlets sympathized and Twitter went wild.

But Grosskreutz is no hero. In fact, he harasses women and abuses elderly women, particularly his own grandma.

As the GAG reported, Grosskreutz is something of a career criminal with a history of violence and convictions stretching back to over a decade:

These include domestic abuse, prowling, trespass, two DUIs, felony burglary and two charges of carrying a firearm while intoxicated – one of which took place when he was banned as a felon from carrying a firearm.

He also has a history of showing disdain for the law by lying to, and failing to co-operate with, police.

But the Rittenhouse jury heard none of this.

Because just six days before he took the stand, Grosskreutz was before a judge himself at a hearing at which a pending DUI charge – a second offense that saw him three times over the legal limit – was dismissed on a technicality.

Grosskreutz’s attorney successfully filed a Motion to Suppress Evidence on the basis that the traffic stop from which it had been obtained had been unlawful.

So, prior to the trial, the jury was completely uninformed of Grosskreutz's criminal background, which included being illegally armed and a proclivity for physical violence. These instances of assault are particularly interesting because the victims are mostly women. Grosskreutz destroyed his ex-bedroom girlfriend's window about 4 a.m. in 2013 after pestering her on the phone. Worse, after an altercation in 2010, Grosskreutz was arrested for slapping his grandmother "across the face with an open hand," as well as hurling a lamp and destroying a wall.

Grosskreutz likes to beat his grandma. pic.twitter.com/7fJQJH8i77

— Kaitain 🇺🇸 (@Kaitain_US) November 16, 2021

During the trial, Grosskreutz was the prosecution’s star witness after having been shot in the arm by Rittenhouse during the events in Kenosha, Wisconsin where Rittenhouse killed two other men. However, Grosskreutz bombed their case when he admitted to charging at Rittenhouse holding a firearm with intent to harm him. He also admitted that Rittenhouse did not discharge his firearm until Grosskreutz pointed his gun at him, which may very well make this a pretty clear case of self-defense.

The question is, will this information matter to the left or anyone against Rittenhouse?

Probably not.

As Townhall's Julio Rosas wrote yesterday, demonstrators want Rittenhouse imprisoned for murder, and they don't seem to mind that one of the persons Rittenhouse shot was a convicted child rapist. They even referred to those who were shot by the teen as "heroes," and conversations about a minor's sexual assault as "hate talk." But the rest of us should understand what Rittenhouse was up against and who we're up against when it comes to violent criminals who want to burn cities down in the name of "social justice."

source https://usagag.com/2021/11/17/while-the-rioter-who-testified-against-rittenhouse-is-referred-to-as-a-hero-his-criminal-record-reveals-a-violent-past/

#USA GAG #USA Opinion

A European Court upholds Google's $2.8 billion fine for... advertising?

After Google challenged a $2.8 billion punishment from an antitrust dispute in 2017, the EU's second highest court ruled against the business last week. "The decision comes after the European Commission concluded in 2017 that Google prioritized its own comparison shopping services and penalized the corporation 2.42 billion euros ($2.8 billion) for violating antitrust laws," according to the press release, CNBC reports.

In a press release, the General Court noted that “by favoring its own comparison shopping service on its general results pages through more favorable display and positioning, while relegating the results from competing comparison services in those pages by means of ranking algorithms, Google departed from competition on the merits.”

Google Shopping is a feature that allows users to compare items and prices from various online stores. Despite the fact that other services were still included on Google's results page, Google was pushing its own service with a higher ranking. Regulators, on the other hand, found this intolerable. Google, they said, was misusing its "monopoly" status to the disadvantage of customers.

A Solution in Search of a Problem

Though there are several concerns with this argument, probably the most important one is that Google is not a monopoly. True, it has a large market share, but competitors like as Bing and Duckduckgo are equally freely accessible, and nothing prevents them from stealing Google's clients by providing better services.

Another significant flaw in this judgement is that it fails to understand the gap between the platform's service and the adverts that run on it. The purpose of Google's service is to disseminate information. It generates money through advertisements. True, advertisements are intended to convey information, but this does not imply that Google is obligated to advertise on behalf of its competitors.

Consider what this judgement might imply in different scenarios to demonstrate the folly of compelling a platform to market their competitors as much as themselves. Facebook would be barred from advertising Marketplace on their platform unless they did the same for Kijiji. A monopolistic Honda dealership couldn't sell Hondas unless they also sold Toyotas in similar numbers. And, for the love of God, don't let them position the Hondas in better spots on the lot than the Toyotas.

So, why does Google give this method a pass when it's self-evidently absurd in almost every other context? One of the problems with antitrust lawsuits is that they are often arbitrary. Prosecutors have this weapon called antitrust in their hands, and it's their duty to come up with ad hoc justifications to use it. They scoff at the thought of applying their rules with any degree of regularity. Why are certain mergers halted while others are not? Why are certain businesses able to market their products on their own platforms while others are unable to do so? There are no good answers, because none of this is based on any objective criteria. In practice, it almost feels like the point is just to punish big companies for being big.

Of course, they say this is about helping consumers. But if this is really about consumer well being, why such an extortionate fine? And why does the money go to the government and not the users or competitors who were ostensibly harmed?

Antitrust is Anti-competitive

In theory, the benefit of this approach is that consumers will be better off because they will have more information about the choices that are available to them. But while it’s possible that some consumers will derive some benefit from this, there are many costs to be considered as well.

First, having more options isn’t necessarily better. As Barry Schwartz explains in his book The Paradox of Choice, being inundated with options can turn us away from choosing at all. And even if we decide to pursue one of the options in front of us, we are often less satisfied with the choice we made because we feel like we could have done better.

The capacity of a company to invest, develop, and adapt to consumer demand is also hampered by antitrust laws. To begin with, the resources spent on the lawsuit may have been better spent assisting customers. More importantly, when businesses are restricted from expanding, merging, or even promoting their own products on their own platforms, it poses a significant hurdle to boosting consumer welfare.

Firms want to help consumers. That’s how they make profits. But they can only do so to the extent that they are free to run their business as they see fit. If their hands are tied by antitrust regulations, their ability to innovate and adapt, that is, to compete, is significantly curtailed.

As Thomas DiLorenzo notes, “it is well known to antitrust scholars that one effect of antitrust is to induce companies to be less successful than they could be out of fear of attracting the attention of antitrust regulators. It was the official policy of General Motors for many years to never let its market share top 45 percent for this very reason.”

The idea is that laws governing what corporations are permitted to do eventually stifle competition. As a result, many good ideas are stymied, not because of their economic flaws, but because they would be politically impossible to implement. Of course, there may be instances where businesses are excessively large and should be broken up. However, customers, not politicians, must make this decision.

source https://usagag.com/2021/11/16/a-european-court-upholds-googles-2.8-billion-fine-for...-advertising/

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Explained: The True Costs of Biden's Infrastructure Bill

The White House's $1 trillion Infrastructure Bill was just passed by Congress. On Monday, President Joe Biden is likely to sign the bill into law. The administration and House Democrats were curiously certain in the run-up to the vote that the plan would cost no money. That's true, a $1 trillion infrastructure bill is completely free. This argument is backed up by a careful investigation of the idea of forgone options. Following the negative reaction to the claim that the infrastructure bill would be free, messaging appears to have shifted to a less problematic posture. That is, the infrastructure bill will not increase the deficit by a dime.

Although this assertion has more truth than the previous one, a comprehensive study reveals that it is still untrue. Why? To comprehend, we must evaluate the foregone choices once more.

Alternatives to “Infrastructure”

It's easy to assume that when the government invests money on something like a bridge, it's a smart investment. When the project is finished, tax income will have been turned into a bridge that residents will be able to enjoy for many years. Politicians seeking re-election frequently campaign on tangible achievements such as these. A bridge, on the other hand, is not necessarily a blessing. To determine if a new bridge is useful to society, we must first consider what was sacrificed in order to obtain the bridge. Could the bridge funds have been better spent on a park or a school? Would either of those have been better? What would taxpayers have done with their money if it hadn't been for the government?If the next best use of tax money is more valuable to society than the bridge, it was a waste of precious resources to build the bridge. Opportunity cost is the term economists use to describe the notion of the most valuable alternative use of resources. If all other factors remain constant, a lower deficit looks to be better to a greater deficit for taxpayers. Indeed, it appears that the language around the infrastructure plan assumes that no money would be added to the deficit. This is an implicit acknowledgement that, for many people, a smaller deficit is preferable (again, all else held constant). This admission is taken at face value.

So, when $1 trillion is spent on an infrastructure bill, what’s the opportunity cost? Well, given that people prefer lower deficits, one alternative way to use $1 trillion dollars is to pay down the deficit.

So, instead of paying for infrastructure, imagine a future where this trillion dollars are utilized to reduce the debt. The deficit would be one trillion dollars smaller than it is now if this were to materialize. This is the flaw in the argument that the infrastructure plan will not increase the deficit. While the deficit will not grow in absolute terms if the infrastructure bill is enacted (provided adequate income is collected), the deficit will grow relative to a world in which the revenues are used to reduce the deficit.

It's worth noting that this is the best-case scenario for the infrastructure bill right now. If Congress can only supply one of two goods: 1) building infrastructure or 2) reducing the deficit, the highest value alternative use of money for infrastructure is, by definition, reducing the deficit. The best case scenario for building infrastructure is a slightly greater deficit. If there are other things that might be done with the $1 trillion in wealth, it's likely that Congress is passing up a better opportunity.

What is the societal benefit of taxpayers maintaining their $1 trillion and investing money in tens of thousands of enterprises and purchasing things from tens of thousands of others? The worth of this choice is beyond our abilities to assess, yet it's plausible, if not likely, that it's better than paying down the debt. If this is the case, the infrastructure cost will be substantially higher.

The Bottom Line

Even the greatest skeptic of letting individuals to keep their own money would admit that the government could have spent their money on a variety of other things instead of the infrastructure bill. As the opportunity cost, choose your preferred charity. I'm not suggesting that a certain use of $1 trillion dollars is the greatest option. Instead, it's more critical to emphasize that a trillion dollars spent on infrastructure might have been used to reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars. And, if there is any choice more valuable than that, the new infrastructure bill's greatest flaw isn't even a significantly greater deficit.

No such thing as free infrastructure exists.

source https://usagag.com/2021/11/16/explained-the-true-costs-of-bidens-infrastructure-bill/

#USA GAG #USA Opinion

Don't be surprised if the government claims custody of your children if you let it

The victory of Glenn Youngkin for governor of Virginia delivered a clear message to government officials: treat parents with more respect. Parents are responsible for their children's welfare and education, and they have the right to be enraged when they are not. Parents, on the other hand, should evaluate how we got here and how they share at least some of the guilt. Public schools have encroached on some essential family obligations for decades, from feeding children to providing health care and assisting with schoolwork. Is it any surprise that school administrators regard themselves as the ultimate authority on your kids?Consider how many children are being dropped off at schools before classes even begin, as early as 6:30 a.m. The children are supervised and provided a light breakfast. This program, referred to as "before care," allows parents to arrive at work early, which may be vital for parents who work early shifts. Parents who desire an early start to the day and a hassle- and kid-free morning utilize it as well. Many parents appear to be content to let schools feed their children. The school lunch program, which was created to assist low-income families, now feeds any child, regardless of their financial situation. In fact, according to the School Lunch Association, 7.7 million students paid full price for a school lunch in 2019, meaning the child’s family did not qualify for a reduced or free school lunch.

The complete cost of a school meal varies, although it usually falls between $2.48 and $2.74 for elementary school and $2.74 for high school. Even with increased prices, it's enough to feed a youngster a basic dinner. Despite the fact that many parents could easily accomplish this themselves, some choose to have their children fed by the school since it is more convenient.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture also funds weekend, holiday, and summer meal programs. This is on top of the generous food assistance that’s already provided to needy families through various programs. During the COVID shutdown of schools, even wealthy moms partook of these free food giveaways, since the USDA waived all requirements to show enrollment in the school meal program.

Are you working late? It's not a problem! Most schools now provide "after care" programs, similar to "before care," so that parents may work late. Students that participate are usually fed and aided with their assignments. While not having to complete homework with your child may seem appealing, it also deprives parents of understanding what is being taught and how their child is progressing in school.

Students are even able to seek medical treatment without their parents’ consent. In Alexandria, Virginia, the high school’s “Teen Wellness Center” will alert parents if a child is seen for a cold, acne, or a few other minor illnesses. Parents, on the other hand, are not notified whether their kid is there for a pregnancy test, a sexually transmitted illness (including HIV) diagnosis and treatment, a birth control prescription, "behavior modification therapy," mental health counseling, or substance addiction counseling. These services are all provided free of charge, therefore there is no need for a student to notify their parents.

Those who argue for keeping children's medical treatment hidden from their parents sometimes raise worries about abuse as a result of a parent learning about their child's sexual behavior or the repercussions of such conduct. School administrators, on the other hand, appear unconcerned about the potential downsides of allowing a kid to negotiate these painful and potentially life-altering health situations without parental guidance. When it comes to punishment, parents are rarely invited to the table. While schools used to be willing to contact parents, share information, and work as partners in setting kids on a better path, today, restorative justice programs cut out parents (and law enforcement), and reduce discipline to a performative joke.

If parents want to be valued by educators, they must cease delegating parenting responsibilities to others. Parents' case that they are the primary carers for their children has been damaged by entrusting these responsibilities to teachers and school administrators. I'm delighted parents are fighting for their rights, but they shouldn't have given up so much control over their children's upbringing to begin with.

source https://usagag.com/2021/11/16/dont-be-surprised-if-the-government-claims-custody-of-your-children-if-you-let-it/

#USA GAG #USA Opinion

Thomas Binger, the prosecutor in charge of the Rittenhouse district, has previously tried and failed to charge armed self-defense

From his opening statement to closing argument, Assistant District Attorney Thomas Binger has not just made missteps, as the legacy media loves to call them, he has literally stepped in the muck, then kept wading in up to his knees.

Nick Arama and Jim Thompson, two of my coworkers, are real lawyers who don't merely play them on TV. They, along with our other writers who covered the trial of Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse, have provided us with excellent analysis of how terribly Binger has messed up an already poor case that should never have gone to trial.

From Jim Thompson’s analysis:

Assistant District Attorney Thomas Binger’s opening statement sounded more like a closing argument and I think, could be turned on its head by the defense. Binger claimed that Rittenhouse wasn’t pursued by Rosenbaum — rather, Rittenhouse was the pursuer. That’s a significant claim. In an opening statement, you’re supposed to address what the evidence will show. If Rittenhouse was the pursuer that would justify filing murder charges. But, he wasn’t a pursuer. None of the video supports that – in fact, just the opposite.

Binger looked bent on presenting the case for the defense not just with his manner, but also with his questions to witnesses, according to Thompson and Arama.

From Nick Arama’s analysis:

Binger was trying to get the Daily Caller’s Richie McGinniss to say that Rosenbaum was already falling to the ground when he was shot. Keep in mind — McGinniss is supposed to be the prosecution’s witness. McGinniss said that wasn’t his testimony, maintaining that Rosenbaum was “lunging” at Rittenhouse.

This is how weak their case is — their own witnesses are providing golden evidence that helps the defense. Binger should have stopped with that embarrassment. But he didn’t. He then did the one thing that lawyers are taught never to do — never ask a question to which you don’t know the answer.

Prosecutor: You have no idea what Rosenbaum was thinking or doing.@RichieMcGinnis: "He said fuck you and then reached for [Kyle Rittenhouse's] weapon." This exchange will be taught in law school for decades. The prosecutor set himself up to get destroyed. pic.twitter.com/qh1iqE3brw

— David Hookstead (@dhookstead) November 4, 2021

The Daily Mail UK reported that the case was deliberately thrown into Binger’s lap because Kenosha County District Attorney Mike Graveley knew it was a weak case and he didn’t want the stain on his rock star record.

The choice of prosecutor for Kyle Rittenhouse‘s murder case could be a precise pointer as to how little confidence the County District Attorney had in securing a conviction.

Mike Graveley, the Kenosha County DA would normally have taken the case himself, but instead handed it down to assistant DA Thomas Binger, whose presentation of the case in Wisconsin has been marked with missteps and clashes with Judge Bruce Schroeder.

‘Binger was set up for failure,’ one Kenosha legal insider told Dailymail.com. ‘Graveley is the superstar and he knew this one was sure to tarnish it.’

Despite the stink emanating from his designer pants and shoes as he wades through crap of his own making, Binger seems intent on making the most of his 15 Minutes, swinging for the fences at every foul.

Binger seems to have no problem in shading the truth to the jury. On more than one instance, he was quite content to piss off Judge Bruce Schroeder, as Fox News reported:

Assistant District Attorney Thomas Binger asked a number of out-of-bounds questions or made unethical implications during his cross-examination.

Rittenhouse’s attorney also accused Binger of commenting on his client’s right to remain silent about the case, to which Binger responded that the defendant was tailoring his testimony to details already introduced in court.

That also angered Schroeder, who called it a “grave constitutional violation” to talk about the defendant’s silence and warning him that he “better stop.”

“That’s basically, it’s been basic law in this country for 40 years, 50 years,” Schroeder said. “I have no idea why you would do something like that.”

The Daily Mail UK further reported on another incident where Binger brought up information that Judge Schroeder had already deemed inadmissible:

Schroeder during the trial reprimanded Binger for bringing up information that had previously been barred from the court about Rittenhouse’s history with an AR-15 rifle. An incident was caught on video two weeks prior to the shootings in which Rittenhouse talked about shooting men he believed were shoplifting at a pharmacy.

Schroeder had already ruled video inadmissible.

‘You’re an experienced trial attorney and you’re telling me when the judge says, ‘I’m excluding this’ you decide to bring it in because you think you’ve found a way around it,’ Schroeder asked. ‘Come on!’

Binger replied: ‘You can yell at me if you want. I was acting in good faith.’

Judge Schroeder responded: ‘I don’t believe you. When you say you were acting in good faith, I don’t believe you. There better not be another incident.’

It is still a matter of speculation whether Binger was trying to force a mistrial, or if he simply wanted to go on a “chaotic quest” to challenge the right to armed self-defense, as Rittenhouse’s attorney Mark Richards contended in the pre-trial hearings.

“The government can go off on their chaotic quest but the evidence is clear,” Richards said.

The Kyle Rittenhouse trial is not the first time Binger has pursued such accusations, which have failed to hold up under investigation, leaving the state, well... without hip waders. Wisconsin attempted to prosecute a commercial truck driver with carrying a concealed handgun without a permit in 2017.

From an August 30, 2017, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article:

A case that might have clarified whether you can drive while armed in Wisconsin was dismissed Monday, the day it was scheduled for trial.

The issue is whether you can drive with a loaded handgun within reach, even without having a concealed carry permit.

Guy A. Smith, a 52-year-old commercial truck driver from Merrill, believes, as does a gun rights organization, that you can. That’s why he said he made no effort to hide his revolver when inspectors entered his big rig at a weigh station in Pleasant Prairie in June 2016.

Inspectors saw it on the floor of his cab via an overhead camera, then approached Smith and cited him for carrying a concealed weapon, a misdemeanor, and seized his gun.

Smith was represented by John Monroe, a Georgia-based attorney who has successfully defended many gun rights advocates, including those charged with openly carrying guns before Wisconsin’s passage of Act 35, which first allowed for concealed carry with a license.

The organization Wisconsin Carry Inc. was paying for Smith’s defense because it thought it might eliminate some law enforcement confusion about the statutes.

“The charge should never have been filed because in 2011 the Legislature changed the law to allow handguns in cars to be unencased and loaded,” Monroe said in an email Monday. “Carrying a concealed weapon is no longer a crime applicable to handguns in vehicles.

In this case, the state dropped the charges before it went to trial.

“We are pleased the state came to its senses before wasting the taxpayers’ money on a trial,” Monroe said, “even if the state did not afford us the courtesy of telling us it would dismiss the case before we prepared for a trial and traveled to Kenosha.”

The assistant district attorney at November’s hearing, Thomas Binger, suggested Smith could easily have gotten a concealed carry permit.

After that hearing, Smith said he didn’t get one because he didn’t need to.

“I’m just a trucker trying to stay alive,” he said. “I want my gun back, and I don’t want a record, and I’m not paying a fine. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

Binger was in court Tuesday and could not immediately be reached for comment.

Binger appears to prefer crafting case law to fit his gun-control whims rather than case law based on real precedent. He also appears to believe that squandering state and taxpayer time and money is a sound legal strategy rather than a grave mistake. Binger is no stranger to the legal world. He graduated from Michigan Law School 25 years ago and has worked in the state's prosecution offices for over 12 years. From 1999 until 2005, Binger worked for the Milwaukee County District Attorney's office, rising through the ranks to become an associate district attorney.

Strangely, he left the Milwaukee County DA in 2005 to become the director of litigation at DeMark, Kolbe & Brodek Law. He stayed at this firm until 2014, then went back to “public service” when he joined the Kenosha County District Attorney’s office.

According to another Daily Mail UK article, in 2016, Binger ran as a Democrat for District Attorney of Racine County, but lost the race.

After watching his performance on this trial, I ponder how he even rose to assistant district attorney. However, when you’re a Democrat, failing up seems to be part of the program.

I’ve met countless prosecutors like Thomas Binger over the last 15 years. They are the most dangerous actors in our criminal justice system. Small, pathetic losers who couldn’t make a dime in private practice but by virtue of their office, are afforded a massive degree of power.

— Eric Matheny 🎙 (@EricMMatheny) November 12, 2021

Binger may have hoped that this case would polish his credentials for a higher position and maybe greater and better things. If that's his career plan, he's as delusional as he is inept. Poor judgment and mishandling a significant trial are errors that should result in your removal from office, not your promotion. When the jury judgment is announced, a lot will be revealed.

source https://usagag.com/2021/11/16/thomas-binger-the-prosecutor-in-charge-of-the-rittenhouse-district-has-previously-tried-and-failed-to-charge-armed-self-defense/

#USA GAG #USA Opinion

The Brandon-Harris Admin Now Has a New Name

Not well, if we are to believe recent stories about the division between the two camps.

When even CNN is writing about it, you know there’s an issue. Are they abandoning Kamala or simply taking Biden’s side in the throw down?

Worn out by what they see as entrenched dysfunction and lack of focus, key West Wing aides have largely thrown up their hands at Vice President Kamala Harris and her staff — deciding there simply isn’t time to deal with them right now, especially at a moment when President Joe Biden faces quickly multiplying legislative and political concerns.

The exasperation runs both ways. Interviews with nearly three dozen former and current Harris aides, administration officials, Democratic operatives, donors and outside advisers — who spoke extensively to CNN — reveal a complex reality inside the White House. Many in the vice president’s circle fume that she’s not being adequately prepared or positioned, and instead is being sidelined. The vice president herself has told several confidants she feels constrained in what she’s able to do politically. And those around her remain wary of even hinting at future political ambitions, with Biden’s team highly attuned to signs of disloyalty, particularly from the vice president.

Meanwhile, she was pretty much ignored by the French on her visit to Paris. This was the take on the trip from Politico.eu:

pic.twitter.com/h9YJtuTmJz

— Dr. Nickarama (@nickaramaOG) November 16, 2021

Isn't it one of the things that's missing? They ridiculed the French. So, if the plan was to utilize her to aid with relationships or to introduce her on the world stage, it doesn't appear to have worked.

Harris was one of the VIP guests at the opening ceremony of the Paris Peace Forum, Macron’s yearly marquee event on global multilateralism.

But her speech fell a bit flat, with Harris offering little by way of concrete solutions or new game-changing proposals to fight inequalities.

Instead, the U.S. vice president called on world leaders to “refuse to accept the status quo” and fight the “dramatic rise” in inequalities.

They must first notice you in order for you to be launched. That would be a critical component of everything.

But this is a big part of the reported division — that Harris doesn’t think that she’s getting treated appropriately or featured favorably for things she wants.

That's why what occurred today during Joe Biden's signing of the infrastructure bill was so amusing and, in pure Biden-Harris manner, so perplexing. Harris was present, hoping to profit from the bill's "success." When it was her turn to speak, though, the music played "Hail to the Chief," which seemed unusual given that Joe Biden was seated immediately behind her. But you can see her grinning with joy at the prospect of the song being written for her.

Announcer: “Please welcome Heather Kurtenbach” Kamala Harris: “In a moment.” pic.twitter.com/oLo2R4NArY

— Charlie Spiering (@charliespiering) November 15, 2021

Then the announcer asked everyone to “Please welcome Heather Kurtenbach” as Harris awkwardly stood at the podium to make her remarks. Kurtenbach was the lady standing behind Harris. You could see Harris’ face change and tighten, then came the fake smile and she said, “In a moment,” obviously disturbed. She then cackled a bit and Joe Biden laughed.

Then, you would think, normally, it would be Harris who would be introducing Joe Biden for his comments on the bill. Instead, they had Kurtenbach, the political director of Iron Workers Local 86 in Washington state.

How did this all come to be? After the rumors of disagreement, Harris was presumably penciled in to make statements at the last minute to pacify her. They didn't, however, rearrange the order of events with the announcer. Is this indicative of the Biden-Harris administration's incoherence? Or was it a direct mocking of Harris by Biden's team? We can only state that the Brandon-Kurtenbach Administration is currently in charge.

source https://usagag.com/2021/11/16/the-brandon-harris-admin-now-has-a-new-name/

#USA GAG #USA Opinion

Cornucopianism: A Defense

The famous misconception of Dr. Pangloss, a character in Voltaire's satirical novel Candide, is that we live in the best of all conceivable worlds. If you have a pessimistic slant, you might consider “Panglossian” an apt descriptor for those of us who endlessly chant about progress. To avoid Panglossianism, any good herald of progress keeps two thoughts in their head at once: the world has plenty of problems, but it is also getting better.

We die, but later than we used to. A smaller and smaller share of the world’s population is illiterate, undernourished, or extremely poor. People in almost every country are less likely to die from tuberculosis, diarrhea, and other maladies that ravaged humanity for millennia. Even war deaths and homicides seem to be on a long-term decline (with a handful of countries like El Salvador, Honduras, and Venezuela bucking that trend).

The word "possibilist," coined by the late Hans Rosling, is a better descriptor for individuals who acknowledge that we live in an imperfect but improving world. "Someone who neither hopes without reason, nor worries without reason, someone who continuously fights the overdramatic worldview," wrote Rosling. Even still, skeptics are irritated by such confidence.

One recent accusation of Panglossianism comes from two eminent evolutionary biologists, Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein. In the newly released A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century, they attack “Cornucopianism,” the economistic assumption that resources aren't finite and that limitless growth is feasible. They contend that "the great bulk of Earth's resources are limited." "Everything is finite, from rubber to wood to oil, copper to lithium to sapphires."

This idea is unfortunately common. In Human Race: 10 Centuries of Change on Earth, a book that I reviewed this summer, the prolific British historian Ian Mortimer argues that it is a certainty that oil will run out. Because we’re exploiting the black gold so ruthlessly, he writes, “it will run out at some point in this current millennium, there is no doubt about that; it is just a matter of when.” (Emphasis added). Both these notions are wrong – or at least seriously overstated.

Mortimer’s oil

According to the latest BP Statistical Review of World Energy, the world’s proven reserves of oil totaled 1,732.4 billion barrels last year. During 2019, the most recent pre-pandemic year, the world consumed about 31 billion barrels, meaning that we have just shy of 56 years of proven oil stocks left – a little less if oil consumption were to keep rising with its historical trend. By that logic, Mortimer is being conservative; oil will run out this century.

That's not the case. We utilized 25.2 billion barrels of oil in 2000, out of 1300.9 billion barrels of known reserves (52 years of supply left). Even though we now use around 25% more oil than we did in 2000, we still have 56 years of supply left. Humanity has used a lot of oil in the previous two decades, yet oil has gotten increasingly plentiful. How is that possible?

While the total amount of oil in the ground doesn’t change very much from one year to another, three more important things do:

How much oil we know about.

How much of that oil we can technically extract.

How much of that oil it is economical to extract.

These three factors alter throughout time, and this makes a significant impact. We discover oil in regions where we had no idea it existed, and new technologies make previously inaccessible deposits accessible. Furthermore, when oil becomes more scarce, its price rises, motivating decreased use and higher supply. The "cornucopian" conclusion follows as long as prices are free to represent economic reality: oil will not run out before it becomes outdated.

A late-nineteenth-century whaler could have made the same argument as Mortimer. Whales are finite resources. They reproduce slowly. Given humanity’s greed, want for light, and ever-faster whaling ships, Moby Dick doesn’t stand a chance. His kind will perish sometime next millennium.

Except, of course, reality played out very differently. Today, almost all species of baleen whales on the IUCN’s Red List are several rungs above Critically Endangered (most are on the LC – Least Concern – rung), and all but two species of Right Whales are increasing. Humpbacks, those majestic creatures that astonish tourists in every ocean, may have surpassed their pre-industrial numbers, according to research reported on in Time Magazine.

What happened was that new inventions outcompeted whale oil for fuel and lighting, and consumer demands – and wealth – changed, so much so that almost every country has banned the hunting of whales.

The Cornucopia of raw materials

Copper, silver, tin, and wood are finite raw resources. As a result, pessimists worry that they will eventually run out. However, this conclusion is incorrect. Physically, raw materials are limited, but economic resources are limitless. This is due to the fact that economic value is not inherent in the physical thing. Value, on the other hand, is subjective, existing only in the imaginations of customers and in the outcomes they pick. In other words, a given quantity of material may yield an endless amount of value.

Andrew McAfee from MIT showed that we can get more from less. The number of atoms may be fixed, but those atoms can be combined and recombined in an infinite variety of ways, allowing us to satisfy our needs and desires in ways that are better, faster, cheaper, and less wasteful. Furthermore, there is no limit to how much we can specialize or restructure our labor, production, and consumption.

Materials can also be re-used. Almost all the copper that humanity has ever extracted from the Earth (some three trillion tons or so) is still with us – in the buildings that shelter us, the wiring that moves our electricity, the equipment that entertains us, and the servers that power and store our digital lives.

We have hundreds of years of uranium reserves left and even more of coal. The known deposits of bauxite, the ore from which we extract aluminum, will last for hundreds of years at current use. Or perhaps even longer than that. When raw materials become too “scarce” and, therefore, too expensive, we will switch to using something else to power our civilization. While there is some final quantity of oil and other raw materials in the ground, market prices and technological improvements will ensure that we will never use them all. They will last forever.

Heying and Weinstein’s “Cornucopianism” charge may be countered by another word, a more empirically sound and researched one: Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley call it “Superabundance” – “a condition where abundance is increasing at a faster rate than the population is growing.” They show that 50 common raw materials have become less scarce over the last forty years when we adjust for inflation and increases in income.

Contrary to concerns of scarcity, it appears that more people and economic expansion enhance mankind rather than harm it. Despite the fact that the world now has a lot more people fighting for the same resources, we have more raw materials than we had twenty or forty years ago. This is a feature, not a glitch or an oversight.

When we properly consider the power of market prices to ration resources, our ability to uncover substitutes, and the history of technological change, a very counterintuitive conclusion emerges: non-renewable resources, like oil or copper, never run out.

That may not be the best of all possible worlds, but it’s a lot better than most people think.

source https://usagag.com/2021/11/16/cornucopianism-a-defense/

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Professor Proposes 'Reregulation' to Assist White People in Ending Racist Violence

I’ll never forget seeing the movie Young Guns — I was white with excitement as Billy the Kid’s Regulators mounted their horses.

And now, much of the nation needs to reenact it: All Caucasians, saddle up.

So asserts a southern professor.

Reportedly, regulation — reregulation, actually — is the answer to pale peoples’ pervasive violence.

You sallow-skinned Americans are all Young Guns, and we need you to holster your racist revolvers.

In a recent episode of the Whiteskinned-ed podcast, University of Arkansas Professor Lisa Corrigan waxed on whiteness.

Evidently, peach persons are presently only parts of themselves.

But look what whites can do if only they attain completion:

“When white people are whole, they don’t go out lynching people. When they feel whole — instead of rage — they are not out, you know, shooting up schools.”

Sounds dreamy.

Currently, we’re nestled in a nightmare.

Host Stephen Hintz hypothesized:

“I think that’s part of what whiteness takes from us, is a piece of our humanity.”

As laid out by Lisa — who, like Stephen, is white — “[W]hite supremacy is this massive system that’s infiltrated all of the parts of our social existence.”

Moreover, “White people feel inadequate all the time because they do not feel cultural competency.”

And if you non-BIPOCs weren’t aware, you’re amoral:

“[I]t’s…not the responsibility of people of color, to go and, like, fix the white people who are dysregulated and, you know, are alienated and have no ethics, and have no philosophy, and have no moral center.”

University of Arkansas professor and CRT advocate thinks white people’s “dysregulation” (poor ability to manage emotional responses) is what leads to violence. She states white people need to “reregulate” themselves. “Anti-racism”/Critical Race Theory concepts are racist. pic.twitter.com/xDHMGa5RN2

— Mythinformed MKE (@MythinformedMKE) November 14, 2021

Luckily, Lisa’s “interrupting the flow of white supremacy.”

As an author, she’s covered black liberation. And she’s here to enlighten Opie Taylor-types:

“[T]he pushback that I’ve gotten is almost exclusively from white people. … It really has not been black people or people of color who are like, ‘Please don’t talk about all this amazing stuff in our history.’ They, of course, have been like, ‘Please tell white people.'”

Some of you are resistant, but she’s chock-full of charity:

“[White people] want to avoid. … So I try to be very generous with white people, even when I’m sort of running them down for their participation in social violence, to say, like, ‘You don’t know what you’re doing, please let me help you understand. You know, it’s like…I’m helping out.”

But wait — there’s more milky malevolence:

“Sex/gender is a vector of race. So, you know, sex panics come about because of race panic. And so all of this, like, anti-trans bathroom, trans-athlete stuff is fundamentally just anti-blackness.”

Dr. Lisa’s written on “riots as a language.” And when George Floyd’s death sparked chaos, people turned to her for answers — was it the same as the sixties?

She schooled ’em:

“Listen…in 1968, there were not white people with signs about black activism at their homes. They did not put signs in their house that said ‘I support the civil rights movement.’ … So…this is…different…where white people…feel like there’s political coverage to investigate the history of whiteness and white supremacy. They want more cultural competency, but they come from communities that have shunned that — their churches, their families, their workplaces. So there’s opportunity now, to talk about it…so that has been good, I think.”

It seems to me that people putting signs in their yards achieves the distinct triumph of absolute nothingness, as is the custom of our current culture of empty acts.

Back in the sixties, by contrast, whites and blacks fought for integration in ways that changed the system.

But perhaps I’m in need of further reading.

Speaking of, Lisa’s latest book is Black Feelings: Race and Affect in the Long Sixties.

“The book…talks about how white people intentionally misread black thought as black feeling. So when black people make claims about self-determination, white people say, ‘They’re angry.’ … [T]hey also read that anger as hatred of white people, right? As a way of managing their own anxiety about their complicity in social violence.”

She’s a walking win for her aberrated race. Even so, if a nonwhite had penned her publication, prejudice would’ve prevailed:

“I’m a white person who writes books about black power and civil rights. And on the one hand, yeah, that’s progressive for white people. And on the other hand, I’m going to get reward for writing those books, when a person of color could write a similar book and they would never get rewarded the same way, right? So there is no ‘outside’ of white supremacy. … Everybody is complicit in it.”

Fortunately, she’s woking up the white world.

Yet, she doesn’t see herself as excessively evangelical:

“I don’t feel very ‘missionary’ about it except, like, white people need to have better cultural competency.”

So how do we keep you faint-looking folks from wielding wickedness?

Unmelanated mooks, rejoice — the doctor’s provided a prescription.

As aforementioned, those of fairer skin need to emotionally “reregulate themselves.”

Per the professor, we must “think about the ‘dysregulation’ of white people as what produces [this] violence.”

In the meantime, though, the outlook is glum:

“[T]he way that America is browning, you know, if we don’t get a hold on all of this — you know, white nationalist, Christian nationalist, white supremacy — that the U.S. in the next 20 years will become an apartheid nation…”

What’s our recipe for avoidance?

Lisa’d “be happy with safe and secure voting rights.”

Fingers crossed.

For white readers who need a reminder of what to do, not only is there a regulating movie, there’s also a song.

Reregulators, mount up:

source https://usagag.com/2021/11/15/professor-proposes-reregulation-to-assist-white-people-in-ending-racist-violence/

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Potentially Life-Saving COVID Treatments are being held up by the FDA

We may already have medications that can treat COVID-19 and significantly lower the risk of mortality. It’s just currently illegal to prescribe or sell them, thanks to the Food and Drug Administration.

The treatments in question include a new pill to treat COVID-19 developed by Pfizer. In clinical studies, the tablet reduced the probability of an infected patient dying or being hospitalized by 89 percent, according to the business. According to the Washington Post, “The effect of the Pfizer drug was found to be so strong midway through the study that an independent committee monitoring the clinical trial recommended it be stopped early.”

Another company, Merck, has developed a pill it says reduces the chances of serious illness and death by 50 percent and requested FDA approval last month. It is still waiting on approval, although it was approved on November 5 in the United Kingdom.

As far as the Pfizer treatment is concerned, the request for FDA emergency approval has already been submitted. We’re literally just waiting on them to get their act together and meet (virtually!) to discuss it, and apparently the FDA won’t be doing so until after Thanksgiving. This means that the Pfizer treatments won’t start getting administered until December at the earliest.

To be clear, I'm not a doctor, and I can't vouch for the efficacy of these therapies based on the firms' experiments. But I can state with clarity that, with 750,000 Americans dying from or infected with COVID-19, and hundreds more dying every week, sick individuals should be able to get these therapies legally if they choose to.

As the Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney pointed out, “In the past 30 days, more than 37,000 people died of COVID in the United States, according to the CDC. Over the next 35 days, [the Pfizer treatment] could prevent tens of thousands of avoidable deaths. But instead, the FDA won’t immediately let Pfizer sell a drug it knows to be lifesaving.”

The FDA is killing thousands of people by delaying Pfizer’s and Merck’s COVID treatments https://t.co/QPTZWXLfyu

— Tim Carney (@TPCarney) November 10, 2021

“This isn’t the behavior of a government set on maximizing public health,” Carney concluded. “This is a bureaucracy religiously devoted to its own tedious rules to the point of defeating its own purpose for existence.”

It certainly is. This latest FDA blunder serves as a sobering reminder of how entrenched, strong government agencies jeopardize development and hurt society. That's a lesson that will stick with you long after the epidemic is over.

source https://usagag.com/2021/11/12/potentially-life-saving-covid-treatments-are-being-held-up-by-the-fda/

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On COVID-19 Natural Immunity, the CDC Gives Away the Whole Game

In a startling statement, the CDC stated in a letter that it has never heard of someone who is naturally resistant to COVID-19 transmitting the virus.

The CDC admits that it has no documentation of an unvaccinated Covid recovered person spreading Covid. pic.twitter.com/sYyvMJjhoE

— Eli Klein (@TheEliKlein) November 11, 2021

It's easy to slip into the trap of interpreting this to imply something it doesn't strictly mean, and I'm sure the "fact-checkers" are salivating just reading this article's beginning. But I'm going to disappoint them, since this letter isn't proof that people who have natural immunity don't spread the disease. COVID-19. In fact, given the dynamics of how the virus spreads, it’s likely that those with natural immunity spread the virus just like those who are vaccinated do, though, there is reason to believe that natural immunity is stronger and more durable.

Regardless, the objective isn't to debate the finer issues of COVID-19 distribution. Rather, the issue here is a lack of data. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which is part of a federal government that has consistently minimized and disregarded natural immunity on a policy level, has now revealed that they aren't even preserving the data needed to assess its efficacy. Why would they do anything like that?

It all seems quite deliberate to me at this point. They can wind up with an answer they don't want if they collect the data needed to track the efficacy of natural immunity. Specifically, there is no scientific justification for forcing vaccines on those who have already had COVID-19 and recovered. We can't have that, can we? That would also blow up the entire "vaccine passport" concept.

To be honest, the CDC's continued proclamations about universal vaccine requirements and how the virus spreads without even tracking the essential data to determine the success of natural immunity feels like a dereliction of duty. Because so many people have already been infected with the coronavirus, gathering such information and analyzing what it implies for the pandemic should have been a high priority. Instead, it has mostly gone unnoticed.

That reeks of politics interfering, and instead of establishing policy based on hard evidence, the world's purportedly most advanced viral research organization doesn't even know how infectious the naturally immune are. But, you know, put your faith in the "experts" or whatever.

source https://usagag.com/2021/11/12/on-covid-19-natural-immunity-the-cdc-gives-away-the-whole-game/

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White Supremacy on Trial: From Rittenhouse in Kenosha to Killers of Ahmaud Arbery, Will They Go Free?

Rittenhouse will not be tried again if a mistrial is granted, however the judge did not decide on the motion right away and suggested jury deliberations might resume on Monday. Rittenhouse, now 18, was 17 when he fatally shot two men and injured another with a semiautomatic rifle during racial justice rallies in Kenosha, Wisconsin, last year.

Rittenhouse is facing six accusations, including homicide, and has pleaded not guilty to all of them. While being questioned, Rittenhouse broke down in tears, confessing to employing lethal force but denying the intent to murder his victims, and Judge Bruce Schroeder appeared to side with the defense at many times during Rittenhouse's evidence. Meanwhile, the judge's cellphone rang while the court was in session, and the ringtone was for Lee Greenwood's song "God Bless the United States of America," which is the opening music of Donald Trump's rallies.

We spoke with Elie Mystal, justice journalist for The Nation, and antiracist activist Bree Newsome Bass about the Rittenhouse trial, as well as the murder trial for the three men accused of killing Black jogger Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia. Judge Schroeder, according to Mystal, "had pre-judged the trial in favor of Rittenhouse," which "was clear before the trial." Regardless of the outcome of the cases, Newsome Bass claims that "the judicial system itself is an insult to the idea of justice." "What does justice even mean in a system that was built to rob Black people of their humanity and has never actually held white people accountable for murdering Black people for the majority of its history?" she asks.

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Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

Kyle Rittenhouse’s defense team continued to make its case in court Wednesday, calling Rittenhouse himself to testify. Now 18 years old, Rittenhouse was 17 when he went to Kenosha, Wisconsin, during last summer’s racial justice protests with his AR-15-style rifle. He faces homicide and weapons charges for fatally shooting two people and wounding a third during protests over the police shooting of Jacob Blake in 2020. He has pleaded not guilty.

At one point, Kyle Rittenhouse broke down in tears while on the stand. He admitted to using deadly force but claimed self-defense and denied intending to kill his victims during cross-examination from prosecutor Thomas Binger.

THOMAS BINGER: I don’t understand. You said you were going to bring the gun to protect yourself. So you thought you were going to be in danger, right?

KYLE RITTENHOUSE: I didn’t think I would be put into a situation where I would have to defend myself.

AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, trial Judge Bruce Schroeder continued to make headlines after he repeatedly sided with the defense, while excoriating prosecutors. At one point, while the prosecutor questioned Rittenhouse, Judge Schroeder chastised Binger for asking about testimony he said was out of bounds.

MARK RICHARDS: Your Honor, Mr. Binger is either forgetting court’s rulings or attempting to provoke a mistrial in this matter. He knows he can’t go into this, and he’s asking the questions. I ask the court to strongly admonish him. And the next time it happens, I’ll be asking for a mistrial with prejudice. He’s an experienced attorney, and he knows better.

JUDGE BRUCE SCHROEDER: Mr. Binger?

THOMAS BINGER: Personally, Your Honor, this was the subject of a motion. I’m well aware of that. And the court left the door open. This —

JUDGE BRUCE SCHROEDER: For me! Not for you!

AMY GOODMAN: When the prosecution tried to show video evidence of Rittenhouse fatally shooting his first victim, the judge appeared to support the defense’s attempt to stop him using him a pinch and zoom function, claiming it could insert additional pixels.

JUDGE BRUCE SCHROEDER: This is high risk. And, to me, if — to me, if you insert more data into an area of space — well, you’re, what, wagging your head no.

THOMAS BINGER: There’s no proof in —

JUDGE BRUCE SCHROEDER: Tell me where I’m wrong.

THOMAS BINGER: There’s no proof in this record that we’re doing that, Your Honor.

JUDGE BRUCE SCHROEDER: I didn’t say there was proof of it. I said you have the burden of proof. You’re the proponent of the exhibit, and you need to tell me that it’s reliable.

THOMAS BINGER: The exhibit is already in evidence, Your Honor.

JUDGE BRUCE SCHROEDER: That I know.

AMY GOODMAN: The judge would not allow the pinch and zoom function of the iPad unless an expert testified that pixels weren’t being added. Meanwhile, the judge’s cellphone went off while the court was in session and played a ringtone for the song “God Bless the U.S.A.” by Lee Greenwood, which is the opening song played at Donald Trump’s rallies.

COREY CHIRAFISI: And if the court makes a finding that the actions that I had talked about — [phone ringing] — were done in bad faith.

AMY GOODMAN: Rittenhouse’s defense team has now asked for a mistrial with prejudice in the case, and if one is granted, Rittenhouse cannot be retried. But the judge did not immediately rule on the request and said jury deliberations could begin on Monday.

One other key point that came up this week during the trial, a pathologist testified that Kyle Rittenhouse’s victim Joseph Rosenbaum was shot four times by someone who was within four feet of him. He also testified Rosenbaum was first wounded in the groin and then in the hand and thigh as he faced Rittenhouse, and then was shot in the head and in the back.

For more, we’re joined by two guests. In Raleigh, North Carolina, Bree Newsome Bass is with us. She’s an artist and antiracist activist. In 2015, after the massacre of eight African American parishioners and their pastor by the white supremacist at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, Bree scaled the 30-foot flagpole at the South Carolina state Capitol and removed the Confederate flag. Yesterday she was tweeting the trial nonstop. And with us in New York, Elie Mystal is with The Nation. He’s its justice correspondent, author of the magazine’s monthly column “Objection!” He wrote about this case in a piece headlined “I Hope Everyone Is Prepared for Kyle Rittenhouse to Go Free.”

You wrote that before the trial, Elie. Talk about why you think this is going to be the case.

ELIE MYSTAL: Yeah, Amy, I don’t have a crystal ball, all right? What I know is the law, and what I know is what white people are willing to do to defend white supremacy. If you look at this judge, if you look at his pretrial motions, if you look at his pretrial decisions in this case — remember, Rittenhouse has been in and around the jail since he shot those people in Wisconsin last summer. So, if you look at all the decisions that Bruce Schroeder has made, they have been heavily balanced and weighted towards Rittenhouse, towards his defense. I see very few neutral decisions in his history. What we have is a judge who, from my perspective, has pre-judged the trial in favor of Rittenhouse and has decided — again, even at the pretrial stage — to use every bit of his power to put his thumb on the scale towards Rittenhouse’s side. And that was obvious before the trial started.

I think now that the trial is going on, it’s a little even more obvious to people how hostile he is to the prosecution, how much he’s taking Rittenhouse’s side and how he is slanting the whole case. He’s basically not allowing the prosecution to put on its case against Rittenhouse. It’s almost like he wants the prosecution to put on a different case against Rittenhouse, and already has determined the man is — that the boy is not guilty. So, that’s why I said — that’s why I was able to say two weeks ago the boy was going to walk. And nothing that’s happened in the trial so far has changed my opinion on that.

AMY GOODMAN: And the issue of not being able to refer to the men who were killed and the other one who was repeatedly shot as “victims,” though they could be referred to as “looters” or “arsonists,” if the defense proved that?

ELIE MYSTAL: Yeah, so, here’s the thing, Amy. Any one of his decisions, you could defend, right? Any one of his decisions, if you take it in isolation, makes sense. But this is actually one of the things that racists do, right? It’s one of the fights that we always have trying to explain what racism is to people, because if you look at individual decisions, individual decisions, you can say, like, “Oh, well, that wasn’t racially biased,” or “That decision wasn’t racially biased,” but when you put them in — when you look at them all together, when you look at the totality of his decisions — right?

So, it’s not just saying that these people can’t be called victims. Look, legally speaking, they were victims of homicide. That’s just a fact. But fine, you want to say they can’t be called victims because of the nature of the self-defense? All right, you can kind of defend that decision. But then he says they can be called looters, rioters and arsonists, which is ridiculous. The surviving victim hasn’t been charged with looting, rioting or arson. So, calling him a victim is just factually inaccurate — so, calling him a rioter is just factually inaccurate. So, you see what I’m saying?

When you put the one and one together, you end up with two. When you put one plus one plus one plus one plus one together, you end up with five. And that’s what Schroeder is. He has made a series of decisions. Each one perhaps may be individually defensible, but, in totality, lead to the impression of a biased, racist judge, with his Trump rally cellphone, that is trying to get Rittenhouse a walk.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me bring Bree Newsome Bass into this conversation. Bree, you were tweeting up a storm yesterday. On Wednesday, you tweeted, “Nothing says 'safety & security' in the USA like a teenage white boy roaming around with an assault rifle. Can’t imagine why folks in the street might react to that.” Talk about this broader context of why Rittenhouse was in Kenosha, where he doesn’t live — he lives in another state, in Illinois — and carrying this AR-15 at the age of 17.

BREE NEWSOME BASS: Yeah, well, this kind of goes back to Elie’s point — right? — of who gets to assert victimhood, who gets to assert self-defense. So, we know that, I mean, even apart from the long history of collaboration between police forces, white supremacist organizations and white militias, we have a very recent history of this, as well. We’ve had situations where police kill someone, there is protesting, and then, in addition to the police presence in the street, which is a problem, we have white militia groups showing up, white supremacist organizations showing up. We saw that in Ferguson, we saw that in Minneapolis, and we saw that in Kenosha. And I think one of the things that is being kind of glossed over here is the fact that that is exactly the element that Kyle Rittenhouse belongs to. I know that it can’t be introduced as evidence in the court, but we all know that he was at a bar during this time that he was on release from jail, with Proud Boys buying him drinks as an underaged person, right? So, that is the larger reality.

The other thing that I think is important is that the history of judges who are sympathetic to white supremacists has a very long history, as well. One of the moments that really struck me yesterday was when the prosecutor was questioning Rittenhouse on his knowledge of ammunition and brought up the issue of hollow-point bullets, and the judge actually interrupted and testified. I mean, he — you know, Elie can maybe correct it for me if I’m incorrect — I’m not a legal expert — but it certainly seemed to me like the judge was testifying in Rittenhouse’s place and tried to make it seem like the prosecutor was incorrect in the way that he was discussing ammunition. The judge seemed to be trying to downplay the extra lethality of hollow-point bullets. So, that is the larger context.

And I also think that we can’t separate — even though the jury has to do so, we, as the public, we, as the larger society, cannot separate what is happening in Wisconsin from what is happening in Georgia with the Ahmaud Arbery case, what is happening in Charlottesville, where residents of Virginia are suing the Nazis and white supremacists who descended on their city in 2017, and doing so through a civil court because they feel like the larger legal system has not really done enough to address what happened there, as well. This is also happening as people storm school board meetings trying to strip Black texts and Black history from the school curriculum. This is happening as there’s the attack on voting rights. All of this is a context that is informing what’s happening in that courtroom.

AMY GOODMAN: Paul Waldman writes in The Washington Post in an op-ed, “Conservatives quickly raised much of the $2 million for Rittenhouse’s bail. After he was released, Rittenhouse went to a bar wearing a T-shirt that said 'Free as F—-,' where he posed for pictures flashing a white power sign and was 'serenaded' with the anthem of the Proud Boys, the violent radical right-wing group.” Bree, this isn’t being raised in the trial.

BREE NEWSOME BASS: Exactly. And, I mean, again, I think — I’m not a legal expert, I will acknowledge that, but I completely agree, from my observation, that the judge is entirely biased. I don’t see how that is not relevant, because if the issue is his state of mind at the time that he is shooting at these people, then I feel like all of these things point to his state of mind. I think that if the jury is aware of that, that’s certainly going to place him, you know, breaking down on the stand — I don’t know if there were actually tears, but I think that places that in a separate context, because I think, you know, wearing a T-shirt like that, drinking at a bar with white supremacists doesn’t really reflect somebody who is remorseful or maybe even feeling trauma from these events. I think all of that is relevant.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk about not only the Rittenhouse trial but the trial of the three white men who are accused of murdering Ahmaud Arbery — father and son. The father in the case was a former police officer and investigator, this happening in Georgia. Elie Mystal, if you can talk about both trials?

ELIE MYSTAL: Yeah. So, that trial is going a little bit better, in part because the judge isn’t so clearly biased towards the white murderers in that case. Now, I don’t think the judge has done everything he could to advance the cause of justice in that case.

In the Arbery situation, there is a jury that is — you know, a jury, so 12 active members, four alternates. That’s 16 people. Only one of those jurors is Black. Now, that’s weird because in Brunswick, Georgia, where the trial is taking place, that county is 26% Black. The defense attorneys, while excluding — using their peremptory challenges to exclude Black jurors and exclude Black jurors, said that that jury — that what he needed to defend his clients, the people who lynched Ahmaud Arbery, was that his jury needed more bubbas. Bubbas. And he defined “bubbas” as white men over 40 with no college education.

The judge said that he saw evidence of intentional racial discrimination in the jury selection, but denied the plaintiff’s motion to — the prosecution’s motion to reseat the jury, which was in his power to do, because he said that he was bound to accept the disingenuous answers offered by the defense. He was not bound to do that. He could have — that’s why we had the challenge. He could have, in his discretion, resat the jury. But no, no, no, the judge decided that the 15-to-1 jury in a 26% Black county, that that was OK, and let the trial go forward.

AMY GOODMAN: Your final take, Bree Newsome Bass, on the Ahmaud Arbery case? You have the father in the case admitting that he saw Ahmaud Arbery, he did not see him commit a crime, and that he was like a, I think he called it, a trapped rat.

BREE NEWSOME BASS: Again, I think that the overall question here is: Who is entitled to justice? What does justice even mean in a system that was established to strip Black people of their humanity and for the greater part of its history has never really held white people accountable for murdering Black people? Who is entitled to self-defense? I mean, again, was Ahmaud entitled to self-defense? Was he entitled to freedom of movement?

And the fact that we have cases of people being killed on camera or in broad daylight and we’re not sure if justice can be carried out because the race of the defendant, because of the dynamics in the legal system, speaks to the larger issue that I think a lot of times people don’t want to touch on, because whether the outcome — whether both people are convicted in these cases, Rittenhouse or the McMichaels and Bryan in Georgia, we have not addressed this larger issue of justice. And I think that’s the point that myself, that the larger abolitionist movement is constantly raising, that the legal system itself is the affront to the notion of justice, from the policing to the judge to the jury process to the way that the prison system is carried out.

AMY GOODMAN: And also, Elie Mystal, in the Ahmaud Arbery case — and, we have to say, in both cases, you only have one person of color, in both the Georgia case, the Ahmaud Arbery case — he is not on trial, he is the one who was murdered — and in the case of Kyle Rittenhouse, one person of color on the jury, and the revelation in Georgia that while the father and son said they were making a so-called citizen’s arrest, the police at the scene at the time said they never mentioned anything like that.

ELIE MYSTAL: Yeah. Look, well, first, partially because citizen’s arrests aren’t a thing. Like, that’s somebody who’s watched too many movies. There’s no such — that’s a kidnapping, is what that was called. And so, yeah, when the police actually showed up, they didn’t say, like, “Well, we were trying to kidnap the boy, and he ran.” Like, because that would — right? But the police let them go, let’s not forget, in both of these cases. In both of these cases, the murderers stood over the dead bodies, and the police were like, “Yeah, go home. Good job.”

As Bree is saying, the rot goes deep. It’s not just these two murderers. It’s not just these two lynchers. It’s not just these two judges. It’s not just these few defense attorneys. It is the entire system that is rotted to its core. And when you try to get people to lock in on that, when you try to get people to dial in and think about real systemic changes to this system to bring justice to more people in the country, they say, “Oh my god! But Toni Morrison’s Beloved is, like, in the school. Like, oh my god, I don’t want to vote for that.” That’s where we’re at.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think will happen if there are not guilty verdicts?

ELIE MYSTAL: People will be angry for a while, and Black people will protest, and white people will tell us we’re protesting the wrong way and hurting our own cause. Sorry, I mean, like that, it’s frustrating. What will happen is that there will be protests. There will be anger. We will be told that we’re doing it wrong. Nobody will come — no laws will change. Nothing will change. Nothing will happen. And then, later down the line, somebody — after Democrats get curb-stomped in a midterm election, someone will say, like, “Well, it was just those Black Lives Matter protests. That’s really what got us.” And the cycle will continue.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, let’s remember that in the case of Kyle Rittenhouse, he was there and killed the anti-police brutality protesters who were protesting the police shooting of Jacob Blake. In this final response, Elie, if you can talk about what has happened to the police officer who shot Jacob Blake in the back seven times?

ELIE MYSTAL: Absolutely nothing has happened to the police officer. He wasn’t disciplined by his department. He wasn’t charged by the state of Wisconsin. So, the same prosecutors that are — I don’t want to say “fumbling,” but the same prosecutors that are having a little bit of difficulty convicting Kyle Rittenhouse didn’t even try to convict the police officer.

Then, it was — then, the case was reviewed by the Department of Justice, under Merrick Garland — not Bill Barr, not Jeff Sessions, not John Ashcroft; Merrick Garland, Joe Biden’s pick to be attorney general — and Merrick Garland decided that no charges should be pressed, there was nothing — no civil rights charges should be pressed against the officer who shot Jacob Blake in the back. So, that man just got away with it. That man is just free — he’s back on the force, with his gun, just free to shoot other people in the back that he finds.

AMY GOODMAN: And Jacob Blake is paralyzed. Elie Mystal, I want to thank you for being with us, writes for The Nation. We’ll link to your piece — your pieces. We’ll link to the one, “I Hope Everyone Is Prepared for Kyle Rittenhouse to Go Free.” And Bree Newsome Bass, artist and antiracist activist.

Coming up, we go to the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow to speak with British journalist George Monbiot and British climate scientist Kevin Anderson. Stay with us.

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source https://usagag.com/2021/11/12/white-supremacy-on-trial-from-rittenhouse-in-kenosha-to-killers-of-ahmaud-arbery-will-they-go-free/

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Biden's whole argument for multi-trillion-dollar 'Build Back Better' spending plans is demolished by an Ivy League analysis

President Biden is still fighting in Congress to have some form of his multibillion-dollar "Build Back Better" spending plan passed. The proposal includes billions of dollars spent on everything from electric vehicle tax credits and green energy subsidies to taxpayer-funded daycare for all, housing subsidies, and more in its different forms. According to the Biden administration, the newest version would include $1.85 trillion in new spending. The president has made grandiose promises about what we would get in return for such a monumental expenditure. (After all, that price tag is more than FDR's New Deal's inflation-adjusted cost!)

“[This is] a framework that will create millions of jobs, grow the economy, invest in our nation and our people, turn the climate crisis into an opportunity, and put us on a path not only to compete, but to win the economic competition for the 21st century against China and every other major country in the world,” Biden said in a recent speech. “It’s fiscally responsible. It’s fully paid for.”

“For much too long, the working people of this nation and the middle class of this country have been dealt out of the American deal, and it’s time to deal them back in,” he continued. “If we make these investments, there will be no stopping the American people or America. We will own the future.”

Simply put, Biden argues that his plan to spend trillions will create jobs, grow the economy, and increase wages—all without adding to the $28.9 trillion (and counting) national debt. Yet a new Ivy League economic analysis undercuts every single one of these claims.

Analysts at the Wharton School of Business reviewed President Biden’s latest $1.85 trillion framework proposal and ran the numbers to project its likely economic impacts, under two distinct scenarios. One is the rather unrealistic scenario where it actually only costs $1.85 trillion. Yet because the proposal is structured with many budget gimmicks and short-term spending authorizations that would likely be reauthorized if implemented, its real cost could be as much as $4.25 trillion. Wharton also modeled the likely impact of this scenario.

In the first instance, assuming the president's initiatives are only as expensive as he claims, the analysis reveals that his pledges fall short on practically every front. The tax hikes mentioned would not cover the full program, and in the long run, they would result in a 2% rise in government debt. (It may seem insignificant, but it amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars in government funds!) While Wharton predicts a minor gain in earnings, it also predicts a contraction in the overall economy, as well as a decrease in company investment and hours worked.

How's it for reviving America? And those bleak findings are based on Biden's optimistic assumptions. The investment's return is much worse under the more realistic case, where expenditure allowances are correctly accounted for and the true cost is north of $4 trillion. Over the next 30 years, the government's debt would rise by 25%, amounting to trillions of dollars in new spending that would not be paid for. In comparison to the baseline, the economy would decrease by roughly 3% throughout this time period, with earnings falling by 1.5 percent and hours worked falling by 1.3 percent.

It's simple to understand how government expenditures may result in such poor outcomes. Big government spending proponents, such as Joe Biden, focus primarily on the ostensible advantages of their policies. Every dollar spent, however, must originate from someplace else in the economy, whether directly or indirectly. The resources that the government invests in one area are, by definition, resources that the private sector would have invested elsewhere.

Tax increases to partially pay the expenditure dissuade people from working and tax money that might otherwise be invested. The debt used to partially pay the spending "crowds out" resources that may be used for private investment. It's also not just a wash. Government redistribution often results in net economic losses because it takes resources that would have been distributed based on market signals and instead allocates them based on politics.

As Ludwig von Mises famously put it, “The government and its chiefs do not have the powers of the mythical Santa Claus. They cannot spend except by taking out of the pockets of some people for the benefit of others.”

The Wharton approach is able to consistently anticipate the negative effects of Biden's ideas by keeping the realities of trade-offs in mind. For the president's ambitions, this analysis is nothing short of disastrous. Biden wants to seize and spend trillions of dollars from the American people, promising us the world in exchange. However, both Ivy League experts and fundamental economic concepts reveal how hollow those assurances are.

source https://usagag.com/2021/11/11/bidens-whole-argument-for-multi-trillion-dollar-build-back-better-spending-plans-is-demolished-by-an-ivy-league-analysis/

#USA GAG #USA Opinion

It's no wonder that Biden is no longer popular

President Biden's approval rating continues to plummet, and with good cause. He was elected by setting a new record for the most votes cast for a presidential candidate. He was lauded as a "return to rationality" and a "unifier." He pledged to put a stop to the epidemic, implement a "humane" border policy, and keep the White House's contacts with the people open and honest. He's now polling poorly in all of his core policy areas. His most recent overall approval rating is only 38%. His popularity among Americans is gradually dropping, particularly among the independents who elected him, but he's also losing support inside his more chaotic party.

None of this comes as a surprise. Mr. Biden is benefiting from false promises and terrible policy. As more Americans realize that Mr. Biden will maintain practically none of his campaign pledges, the issues and voters that helped him win the president have become a big disadvantage for him and everyone on the Democratic ticket. Even with a president who is doing a good job and is popular among Americans, the midterm elections have generally been unfavorable to the ruling party.

It's no surprise that top Democrats are scrambling to find other party lines to maintain their jobs. Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona are also moderates who oppose Mr. Biden's ideas for huge spending and extreme initiatives like abolishing the filibuster and stacking the Supreme Court.

Outside of Congress, a few more high-profile Democratic dissidents have emerged and are beginning to speak out on topics that Mr. Biden refuses to address. For example, Democratic New York mayor-elect Eric Adams conducted a no-nonsense campaign focused on issues that matter to New York residents, such as reversing recent spikes in violent crime in the city. Adams, a veteran police officer, spoke passionately about justice concerns, and it paid handsomely in his recent mayoral election victory. Attention should be paid by Mr. Biden and his crew.

Other notable Democrats are abandoning the party. Andrew Yang, who ran in the same Democratic primary as Joe Biden, gained massive national attention. He was youthful, upbeat, fashionable, and always online. He's now abandoning the Democrats in favor of forming a third party. Mr. Biden's party appears to be on the verge of collapsing.

Mr. Biden has alienated not only his party but the voters who put him in the White House. He ran as a unifier and was elected to be one. Now, only one in three Americans think he will bring the nation together — a 14-point decline since March. In the recent Virginia elections, a stark 64% of Virginians said that the country is headed in the wrong direction. Of those, 73% voted for Glenn Youngkin.

Mr. Biden pledged that America would return to the world scene as a collaborator and a force for good, but he enraged France with a weapons deal, prompting the French ambassador to temporarily withdraw. He has regularly stunned the United States' closest friends with unannounced policy shifts. And the pullout from Afghanistan will very certainly characterize his presidency: it was a catastrophic intelligence failure, an administrative disaster, and a humanitarian disaster. He also stated that he will pursue a humanitarian border approach. Instead, stories of sickness and congestion in overburdened immigrant detention centers have surfaced. Thousands of Haitian refugees were housed in an open-air detention camp. He's given no clear indication of how to curb the flow or even deal with those who have already arrived. As a result, only 35% of Americans approve his border policy, a new and recent low for his administration.

He pledged to be open and honest. His press secretary, on the other hand, engages in word games with reporters on his behalf. He refuses to answer questions and mocks journalists who press him for information.

He pledged that the pandemic lockdowns would be lifted, and that the economy would revive. Instead, the United States received inflation and extensive supply chain breakdown.

Americans vote for policies, not slogans, and they pay attention. They see the border problem, supply chain breakdowns, and inflation. They are aware of false promises and divisive political maneuvering. They'll remember Kabul and the allies we abandoned there.

Mr. Biden's political decline is well-documented. You will receive negative feedback if your governance is poor.

source https://usagag.com/2021/11/11/its-no-wonder-that-biden-is-no-longer-popular/

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An example of protectionist failure is the aging US Great Lakes fleet

Last week a U.S. shipyard on the Great Lakes did something sadly unusual: it launched a new commercial ship. The Mark W. Barker, a self-unloading freighter that still needs some work, is set to be delivered next spring. It will be the first new ship added to the US-flagged Great Lakes fleet since 1983 when that happens.

Put another way, the last time the Great Lakes fleet saw a new ship was the same year Michael Jackson unveiled the moonwalk and the first cell phone was released for commercial use.

In stark contrast, Canada's Great Lakes fleet has been rapidly expanding with new ships. In the last ten years, Canada Steamship Lines (CSL) has received six new freighters, while Algoma Central Corporation has received eleven. And more ships are on the way.

Algoma Central says that it expects the new ships to be 45 percent more energy efficient than the vessels they are replacing, owing to a combination of new engines, increased cargo capacity, and an advanced hull form. CSL similarly predicts various efficiency gains from its new vessels.

So why aren’t American shipping companies following suit? The answer in large part lies in differing policies towards imported ships. Ships engaged in domestic trade in the United States must comply with the Jones Act, which among other restrictions forbids the use of ships built abroad. Canada, meanwhile, allows foreign‐built ships to be purchased duty‐free for domestic use following its repeal of a 25 percent tariff in 2010.

As a result, the U.S. Maritime Administration admitted in a 2013 report that Canadians can now buy their ships at prices “substantially below what they would cost to build in North American shipyards.” One Great Lakes shipping expert points out that Canadians can buy three foreign‐built ships for the same price it would take to construct one at home.

The tariff’s repeal appears to have played a decisive role in Canada’s fleet modernization. “The bottom line was the import duty was lifted,” said an official with the Canadian Shipowners Association in 2015. “That generated considerable investment by our membership.”

Imagine the impact of the Jones Act's U.S.-built requirement, which practically has the same effect as a tariff of several hundred percent on new ships if a 25% duty is a barrier to new ships.

Unfortunately, little imagination is required. While the Canadian Great Lakes fleet becomes increasingly modernized the U.S. fleet—chained to a vastly uncompetitive domestic shipbuilding industry—features ships that were mostly built in the 1970s and decades prior. Incredibly, one vessel in the Great Lakes fleet, the St. Mary’s Challenger, was built in 1906 as a freighter and still served that purpose all the way until 2013 when it was converted to use as an unpowered barge.

Due to the freshwater climate of the Great Lakes, which, unlike saltwater, does not quickly rust steel, this dependence on antique vessels is only possible. It does, however, thin out with time and require replacing. Engines and other parts must also be updated, both to keep up with wear and tear and to take use of newer technology. As the example of Canada's navy demonstrates, buying a new ship makes economical sense at some time.

But American ship operators are highly reluctant to do so given the high capital costs involved, and instead make do with measures such as “repowering” the old ships with new engines. But that’s still far from cheap, with engine upgrades pegged in 2009 at $22 million. In comparison, Canadian firm Algoma Central has purchased entirely new ships for $50 million.

It's impossible to tell what national interest the United States' current approach is designed to serve. It is clear that it is not fostering a more effective water transportation network on the Great Lakes, which has negative effects for companies that rely on these laker ships as part of their supply chain, including area steel manufacturers. It's also not helping the domestic shipping sector, since the necessity for new ships to be built in the United States has driven up the cost of new ships dramatically (although vessel operators no doubt appreciate that such high prices protect their position by deterring new competitors from entering the market).

It’s not even clear it is serving the interests of U.S. shipbuilders in the region. As one study points out, U.S. government policy “…has not resulted in a healthy merchant shipbuilding base especially in the [Great Lakes Marine Transportation System].” Indeed, many of the ships found in the U.S. Great Lakes fleet were constructed in shipyards that no longer exist. The shipyard currently building the Mark W. Barker, Fincantieri Bay Shipbuilding, is a modest operation with a typical output of 2–3 tugboats and barges per year.

Ships and other boats that cost much more than those built elsewhere simply do not have a wide market. On the Great Lakes, we are witnessing a fascinating natural experiment in protectionism vs. free trade. Canada's adoption of the latter has resulted in fresh investment and upgraded boats, whereas the US has an old fleet and minimal commercial shipbuilding. The best option is obvious. By repealing the Jones Act's restriction that ships be manufactured in the United States, Washington should follow Ottawa's lead and enable unrestricted commerce in ships. Or, better still, completely repeal the statute.

source https://usagag.com/2021/11/11/an-example-of-protectionist-failure-is-the-aging-us-great-lakes-fleet/

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