What if the current, and global, wave of protests of Israel’s slaughter of the innocents in Palestine is a symptom of something deeper, a systemic malaise afflicting the West’s<
Consider the following from Gareth Fearn, a British academic whose research includes a deep focus on the politics of of austerity and the transition to cleaner energy sources, writing in the London Review of Books:
There is a refusal by liberals to accept accountability for the world they have created, through their support for wars in the Middle East, their acceptance of growing inequality and poverty, cuts to public services, glacial action on climate change and failure to create secure and meaningful jobs.
This could be a moment for significant reform, but it would require a challenge to at least some sections of capital. Changing university funding models means taking on Wall Street. Arms companies rely on US defence spending and its military interventions or proxy wars. Action on climate change means losses for fossil fuel companies, whose owners often fund the conservative right.
Liberals in the US and across Europe have decided they do not want to take on this challenge. Their latest wheeze is to de-risk investment in the hope that it will revitalise stagnating economies, while doing what they can to see off any challenge from the more progressive left. That means heavily policing and demonising protests, working with the right to undermine candidates and parties that do seek to challenge capital (and the status of liberal parties), and more generally polluting the political sphere with bullshit to blur the lines of accountability – as when the mayor of New York, Eric Adams, insinuated that the protests at Columbia were instigated by ‘external actors’, or a Princeton administrator allegedly fabricated stories about threats made to staff.
Liberalism has two core components: the protection of property rights and a notion of negative freedom grounded in human rights and political checks and balances. What we are now seeing in the US (and the UK, and elsewhere in Europe) is the defence of the former at the expense of the latter. Political leaders and university managers are undermining not only free expression but the role of the academy in holding political decisions to account. Large sections of the news media are engaged in holding the public to account rather than politicians. And, perhaps most fundamentally, the ballot box offers a choice only between the degree of authoritarianism and economic dysfunction available to voters. If this situation persists, not only in the US but across the world, then occupying a university building will seem like a picnic when compared with what may be coming down the road.
Most of the world’s innovative science originates in public universities and non-profits, but to see the results of that research, readers have to either buy expensive subscriptions to scientific journals or pay hefty single user, limited-time access charges ranging for a few dollars to as high as $70, judging from our own experience.
The charges have steadily risen as science journals undergo the corporate consolidation process that has plagued print and electronic journalistic.
Here’s the last price survey from the Library Journal reflecting typical prices for one-year academic journal subscriptions:
What makes the problem worse for college and university libraries is that the major publishers have pushed for so-called Big Deal contracts forcing institutions to buy all their publications as a bundle. While the cost for individual subscriptions is lower in a bundle, libraries wind up with dozens of publications of little or no interest to students or4 faculty.
Butt there’s a revolution at work, as the University of Virginia reported 20 December:
In the 1990s, large publishers began marketing bundles of online journals to libraries at a discount. However, since the year 2000, the cost of journals has outpaced both inflation and library budgets, with publishers justifying increases by adding titles that libraries and faculty often do not want. As a result, a growing percentage of collections expenditures have been going toward keeping a shrinking percentage of desired titles. In spring 2019 UVA University Librarian John Unsworth joined six other Deans and Directors of research libraries at Virginia public doctoral institutions in signing an open letter supporting a decision by the University of California library system not to renew its $11 million-a-year scholarly journal subscription with academic publishing behemoth Elsevier. Since then, more institutions have ended or downsized their financial commitments to big publishers.
The publishers’ refusal to remedy an unsustainable purchasing model that locks research behind a paywall puts them at odds with scholars, who strongly prefer the impact of having their work available for free to anyone online. Even the federal government has signaled its interest in ensuring immediate public access to all taxpayer-funded research.
The seven Virginia institutions agree with their peers in the UC system and elsewhere — they can no longer invest in a broken model, paying faculty to produce scholarship which they then must purchase back from publishers at exorbitant rates. When the letter was written in 2019, several large journal packages consumed about 40 percent of the seven libraries’ collections budgets, affecting their ability to build collections most useful to scholarly communities. By 2025, if nothing changes, Elsevier alone is expected to take up 22.7 percent of UVA’s collections budget.
A fascinating 27 June 2017 report in the Guardian describes the way the journal publishing game works at Elsevier, the biggest player of all:
The core of Elsevier’s operation is in scientific journals, the weekly or monthly publications in which scientists share their results. Despite the narrow audience, scientific publishing is a remarkably big business. With total global revenues of more than £19bn, it weighs in somewhere between the recording and the film industries in size, but it is far more profitable. In 2010, Elsevier’s scientific publishing arm reported profits of £724m on just over £2bn in revenue. It was a 36% margin – higher than Apple, Google, or Amazon posted that year.
But Elsevier’s business model seemed a truly puzzling thing. In order to make money, a traditional publisher – say, a magazine – first has to cover a multitude of costs: it pays writers for the articles; it employs editors to commission, shape and check the articles; and it pays to distribute the finished product to subscribers and retailers. All of this is expensive, and successful magazines typically make profits of around 12-15%.
The way to make money from a scientific article looks very similar, except that scientific publishers manage to duck most of the actual costs. Scientists create work under their own direction – funded largely by governments – and give it to publishers for free; the publisher pays scientific editors who judge whether the work is worth publishing and check its grammar, but the bulk of the editorial burden – checking the scientific validity and evaluating the experiments, a process known as peer review – is done by working scientists on a volunteer basis. The publishers then sell the product back to government-funded institutional and university libraries, to be read by scientists – who, in a collective sense, created the product in the first place.
It is as if the New Yorker or the Economist demanded that journalists write and edit each other’s work for free, and asked the government to foot the bill. Outside observers tend to fall into a sort of stunned disbelief when describing this setup. A 2004 parliamentary science and technology committee report on the industry drily observed that “in a traditional market suppliers are paid for the goods they provide”. A 2005 Deutsche Bank report referred to it as a “bizarre” “triple-pay” system, in which “the state funds most research, pays the salaries of most of those checking the quality of research, and then buys most of the published product”.
Academic publishers’ unique advantage: A captive stable of authors
Writing in the open source journal of the Royal Society, Britain’s [and the world’s] oldest national scientific academy, three noted scholars describe the conditions that basically force academics to feed the beast:
In academia, the phrase ‘publish or perish’ is more than a pithy witticism—it reflects the reality that researchers are under immense pressure to continuously produce outputs, with career advancement dependent upon them]. Academic publications are deemed a proxy for scientific productivity and ability, and with an increasing number of scientists competing for funding, the previous decades have seen an explosion in the rate of scientific publishing. Yet while output has increased dramatically, increasing publication volume does not imply that the average trustworthiness of publications has improved.
<snip>
Despite their vital importance in conveying accurate science, top-tier journals possess a limited number of publication slots and are thus overwhelmingly weighted towards publishing only novel or significant results. Despite the fact that null results and replications are important scientific contributions,the reality is that journals do not much care for these findings. Researchers are not rewarded for submitting these findings nor for correcting the scientific record, as high-profile examples attest. This pressure to produce positive results may function as a perverse incentive. Edwards & Roy argue that such incentives encourage a cascade of questionable findings and false positives. Heightened pressure on academics has created an environment where ‘Work must be rushed out to minimize the danger of being scooped’. The range of questionable behaviour itself is wide. Classic‘fraud’ (falsification, fabrication and plagiarism (FFP) [20]) may be far less important than more subtle questionable research practices, which might include selective reporting of (dependent) variables, failure to disclose experimental conditions and unreported data exclusions. So how common are such practices? A study of National Institute of Health (NIH)-funded early and mid-career scientists (n=3247) found that within the previous 3 years, 0.3% admitted to falsification of data, 6% to a failure to present conflicting evidence and a worrying 15.5% to changing of study design, methodology or results in response to funder pressure. An overview by Fanelli has shown that questionable research practices are as common as 75%, while fraud per se occurs only in 1–3% of scientists
We would also argue that the pressure to publish is the primary reason reason schools are relying on graduate students to teach classes once taught by the researchers themselves, depriving undergraduate students of the chance to learn from mentors who have offloaded their teaching responsibilities onto the backs of overworked and underpaid graduate assistants and non-tenured faculty.
And they, too, need their publications if they’re to have chance at landing a tenured position.
An academic stranglehold
Last 18 February the McGill University Tribune in Canada noted the stranglehold the top publishers hold on academic publishing:
Elsevier dominates the industry. A 2015 report from Vincent Larivière of the Université de Montréal (UdeM) showed that Elsevier controls roughly a quarter of the scientific journal market, while competitors Springer and Wiley-Blackwell own nearly another quarter between them. The stranglehold that these companies have on the industry has allowed them to charge astronomically high subscription fees to universities, which had to field a 215 per cent increase in such fees between 1986 and 2003. These fees have come to claim an ever larger portion of university library budgets; in the 2018-2019 school year, McGill paid nearly $1.9 million to Elsevier alone for a subscription to ScienceDirect.
Elsevier has been growing the way most businesses grow these days, by swallowing the competition. Here’s a 15 January 2015 report from Science on their biggest play:
The London-based publisher of Nature and Scientific American, Macmillan Science and Education, announced today that it will merge with Berlin-based Springer Science+Business Media, one of the world’s largest science, technology, and medicine publishers. Together, the duo will generate an estimated $1.75 billion in annual sales and employ some 13,000 people.
The German Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, which owns Macmillan Science and Education, will own 53% of the new company. BC Partners, a private equity firm that owns Springer+Business Media, will hold the rest. In 2013, BC Partners bought Springer in a deal worth approximately $3.8 billion.
The move is “aimed at securing the long-term growth of both businesses,” BC Partners said in a statement. Eventually, the firm aims to sell the new publishing giant, perhaps by transforming it into a publicly held company, managing partner Ewald Walgenbach told reporters. “The most likely exit will be an IPO [initial public offering],” he told Reuters. “However, that is still at least 2-3 years away.”
Elsevier and the other journal giants are militant in pursuing their control over the vastly profitable business, as the MIT Libraries explained in their examination of the Elsevier’s actions during one critical year:
In 2011, Elsevier supported the Research Works Act (RWA), a bill that would have made illegal the NIH Public Access Policy, along with any other similar government effort to make taxpayer-funded research openly accessible to the public. Following public outcry, including a boycott, Elsevier withdrew its support, just hours before the bill’s sponsors declared it dead. In their statement, Elsevier indicated they would still “continue to oppose government mandates in this area.”
Elsevier and its senior executives made 31 contributions to members of the House in 2011, of which 12 went to Representative Maloney (NY) one of the sponsors of RWA.
Also in 2011, Elsevier supported the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which threatened free speech and innovation, in part by enabling law enforcement to block access to entire internet domains for infringing material posted on a single web page. In comparison, competitors Springer, Wiley, and Taylor & Francis did not make public statements in support.
In other words, a classic example of what economists call rent-seeking.
Another graphic, this one from a research report published in the open source journal PLOS One in 2015 offers convincing proof that academic publishing is an oligopoly:
Percentage of papers published by the five major publishers, by discipline in the Natural and Medical Sciences, 1973–2013.
But the major publishers want to control even more of the knowledge flowing from taxpayer-funded institutions, as Bloomberg reported 30 June 2020:
In an article published in Science in May, Aspesi and MIT Press Director Amy Brand warned that Elsevier and other big publishers are positioning themselves to play ever bigger roles in measuring researchers’ productivity and universities’ quality, and possibly even to act as one-stop portals for the global exchange of information within scientific disciplines. “The dominance of a limited number of social networks, shopping services, and search engines shows us how internet platforms based on data and analytics can tend toward monopoly,” they wrote. Such concentration isn’t inevitable in scientific communication, they concluded, but preventing it will require “the academic community to act in coordination.”
Changes under way in Europe
But changes are in the works, according to a report published yesterday in Science, the Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science:
In 2018, a group of mostly European funders sent shock waves through the world of scientific publishing by proposing an unprecedented rule: The scientists they funded would be required to make journal articles developed with their support immediately free to read when published.
The new requirement, which takes effect starting this month, seeks to upend decades of tradition in scientific publishing, whereby scientists publish their research in journals for free and publishers make money by charging universities and other institutions for subscriptions. Advocates of the new scheme, called Plan S (the “S” stands for the intended “shock” to the status quo), hope to destroy subscription paywalls and speed scientific progress by allowing findings to be shared more freely. It’s part of a larger shift in scientific communication that began more than 20 years ago and has recently picked up steam.
Scientists have several ways to comply with Plan S, including by paying publishers a fee to make an article freely available on a journal website, or depositing the article in a free public repository where anyone can download it. The mandate is the first by an international coalition of funders, which now includes 17 agencies and six foundations, including the Wellcome Trust and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, two of the world’s largest funders of biomedical research.
The group, which calls itself Coalition S, has fallen short of its initial aspiration to catalyze a truly international movement, however. Officials in three top producers of scientific papers—China, India, and the United States—have expressed general support for open access, but have not signed on to Plan S. Its mandate for immediate open access will apply to authors who produced only about 6% of the world’s papers in 2017, according to an estimate by the Clarivate analytics firm, publisher of the Web of Science database.
Still, there’s reason to think Coalition S will make an outsize impact, says Johan Rooryck, Coalition S’s executive director and a linguist at Leiden University. In 2017, 35% of papers published in Nature and 31% of those in Science cited at least one coalition member as a funding source. “The people who get [Coalition S] funding are very prominent scientists who put out very visible papers,” Rooryck says. “We punch above our weight.” In a dramatic sign of that influence, the Nature and Cell Press families of journals—stables of high-profile publications—announced in recent weeks that they would allow authors to publish papers outside their paywall, for hefty fees.
However, as Jefferson Pooley of the London School of Economics writes, there are problems with the new model:
More fundamentally, the move to fold in author fees is an implicit endorsement of the deeply flawed APC regime—one that lowers barriers to readers only to raise them for authors. For scholars in the Global South—and in the humanities and social sciences everywhere—the APC option is laughably beyond reach. Yes, some publishers offer fee waivers, but the system is limited, shoddy, and patronizing—a charity band-aid on a broken system. Since author fees are stitched into read-and-publish deals, the approach serves to ratify—and secure in place—a scholarly publishing system underwritten by the APC. The deals also prop up, at least temporarily, the “hybrid” journal—the thousands of titles that publish tolled- and open-access articles side-by-side. Authors covered by the deals have every incentive to publish in hybrids: These are, very often, the established journals, marinated in prestige, and—unsurprisingly—the outlets that register the largest OA advantage.
Libraries and the faculty and institutions they serve are participants in the unusual business model that funds traditional scholarly publishing. Faculty produce and edit, typically without any direct financial advantage, the content that publishers then evaluate, assemble, publish and distribute. The colleges and universities that employ these faculty authors/editors then purchase, through their libraries, that packaged content back at exorbitant prices for use by those same faculty and their students. This unusual business model where the “necessary inputs” are provided free of cost to publishers who then in return sell that “input” back to the institutions that pay the salaries of the persons producing it has given rise to an unsustainable system begging for transformation.
The subscription prices charged to institutions has far outpaced the budgets of the institutions’ libraries who are responsible for paying those bills. Years of stagnant university funding and the economic downturn rendered many library budgets flat, while journal pricing continued to rise. This problem became known as the “serials crisis.” Another element of the serials crisis that has been subject to discussion and debate has been the “big deal,” which is when large commercial publishers sell their complete list of titles to libraries at less than what a la carte pricing for titles would be individually. Some postulate that the big deal has helped negate the effects of the serials crisis while others argue that it actually hurts more than it helps.
But there’s a problem with the Big Deal
A problem that could better be described as the Big Screw.
University of California, Davis Librarian and Vice Provost MacKenzie Smith explained in an article for the open access journal The Conversation:
Under the new business model of licensing access to journals online rather than distributing them in print, for-profit publishers often lock libraries into bundled subscriptions that wrap the majority of a publisher’s portfolio of journals – almost 3,000 in Elsevier’s case – into a single, multimillion dollar package. Rather than storing back issues on shelves, libraries can lose permanent access to journals when a contract expires. And members of the public can no longer read the library’s copy of a journal because the licenses are limited to members of the university. Now the public must buy online copies of academic articles for an average of US$35 to $40 a pop.
The shift to digital has been good for researchers in many ways. It is far more convenient to search for articles online, and easier to access and download a copy – provided you work for an institution with a paid subscription. Modern software makes organizing and annotating them simpler, too. With all of these benefits, no one would advocate for going back to the old days of print journals.
Online access to journals did not improve the picture overall. Despite digital copies of articles costing nothing to duplicate and the cost of producing an article online being lower than in the past, the cost to libraries of licensing access to them has continued to experience hyperinflation. No library can afford to license all the journals its faculty and students want access to, and many researchers around the world are shut out completely. Compounding the problem, consolidation in the scholarly publishing market has reduced competition significantly, causing even more price inflexibility.
The Times of London on 12 March 2020 reported on the costs of academic journals to colleges and universities in the United Kingdom:
UK negotiators have vowed to strike “cost-effective and sustainable” deals with big publishers, as figures reveal that subscriptions to academic journals and other publishing charges are likely to have cost UK universities more than £1 billion over the past decade.
Data obtained using Freedom of Information requests show that UK universities paid some £950.6 million to the world’s 10 biggest publishing houses between 2010 and 2019. For the sector as a whole, however, the overall bill is likely to have topped £1 billion as one in five universities, including several Russell Group institutions, failed to provide cost information.
More than 90 per cent of this outlay was spent with five companies: Elsevier, Wiley, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis and Sage, with Elsevier claiming £394 million over the 10-year period, roughly 41 per cent of monies received by big publishers.
Overall, the main publishers collected some £109.5 million in 2018-19 – up 44 per cent from 2010, when the bill was £76.1 million. In recent years, however, publishing costs have risen less sharply, climbing by 15 per cent since 2014-15.
And the Big Deal also leads to Big Profits and soaring stock prices
Here’s how share prices of RELX, Elsevier’s parent company, have performed compared to the FTSE [Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 Index of the top 100 most-capitalized firms on the Londson Stock Exchange], via Financial Times:
University of California stuns academic publishers
But what if libraries stood up to the publishing giants?
Here’s the 28 February 2019 announcement from the University of California’s Office of the President that sent shockwaves through the academic publishing world:
As a leader in the global movement toward open access to publicly funded research, the University of California is taking a firm stand by deciding not to renew its subscriptions with Elsevier. Despite months of contract negotiations, Elsevier was unwilling to meet UC’s key goal: securing universal open access to UC research while containing the rapidly escalating costs associated with for-profit journals.
In negotiating with Elsevier, UC aimed to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery by ensuring that research produced by UC’s 10 campuses — which accounts for nearly 10 percent of all U.S. publishing output — would be immediately available to the world, without cost to the reader. Under Elsevier’s proposed terms, the publisher would have charged UC authors large publishing fees on top of the university’s multi-million dollar subscription, resulting in much greater cost to the university and much higher profits for Elsevier.
“Knowledge should not be accessible only to those who can pay,” said Robert May, chair of UC’s faculty Academic Senate. “The quest for full open access is essential if we are to truly uphold the mission of this university.” The Academic Senate issued a statement today endorsing UC’s position.
Open access publishing, which makes research freely available to anyone, anywhere in the world, fulfills UC’s mission by transmitting knowledge more broadly and facilitating new discoveries that build on the university’s research and scholarly work. This follows UC’s faculty-driven principles on scholarly communication.
“I fully support our faculty, staff and students in breaking down paywalls that hinder the sharing of groundbreaking research,” said UC President Janet Napolitano. “This issue does not just impact UC, but also countless scholars, researchers and scientists across the globe — and we stand with them in their push for full, unfettered access.”
Elsevier is the largest scholarly publisher in the world, disseminating about 18 percent of journal articles produced by UC faculty. The transformative model that UC faculty and libraries are championing would make it easier and more affordable for UC authors to publish in an open access environment.
“Make no mistake: The prices of scientific journals now are so high that not a single university in the U.S. — not the University of California, not Harvard, no institution — can afford to subscribe to them all,” said Jeffrey MacKie-Mason, university librarian and economics professor at UC Berkeley, and co-chair of UC’s negotiation team. “Publishing our scholarship behind a paywall deprives people of the access to and benefits of publicly funded research. That is terrible for society.”
Elsevier was unwilling to meet UC’s reasonable contract terms, which would integrate subscription charges and open access publishing fees, making open access the default for any article by a UC scholar and stabilizing journal costs for the university.
“The university’s, and the world’s, move toward open access has been a long time in the making. Many institutions and countries agree that the current system is both financially unsustainable and ill-suited to the needs of today’s global research enterprise,” said Ivy Anderson, associate executive director of UC’s California Digital Library and co-chair of UC’s negotiation team. “Open access will spur faster and better research — and greater global equity of access to new knowledge.”
The University of California followed up its Elsevier decision with an agreement a year late with the open access publisher PLOS, reported by the UCLA Daily Bruin 9 March 2020:
The University of California made a two-year open-access agreement Feb. 19 with the Public Library of Science, which researchers say is part of an upending of the traditional academic publishing model.
Under the deal, the UC Library will cover the first $1,000 of the article-processing charges required for researchers to publish in PLOS journals, which typically range from $1,500 to $3,000. Researchers without sufficient funds can petition the library to cover the remainder of the cost.
Academic research has traditionally been closed access, meaning universities have to pay publishers subscription costs to give researchers access to publications in academic journals.
Conversely, articles in open-access journals are publicly available at no cost to readers. Instead of subscription charges, open-access journals levy an article-processing charge to researchers once their article passes peer review.
The UC’s deal would benefit researchers with low grant funding, such as early-career researchers and researchers in the humanities and social sciences, by allowing them to submit their work to PLOS for publication more easily.
Still more universities jump on the bandwagon
West Virginia University also jumped on the unbundling bandwagon, with immediate results, as WVU Dean of Libraries Karen Diaz reported on 3 December 2018:
For two years now, West Virginia UniversityLibraries has been working toward bringing our materials spending in line with the new budget realities that we have faced since 2016. One of the biggest challenges in our reduction in funds is managing “bundled” journals subscriptions that historically provided us with more journal title subscriptions at less cost. Unfortunately, over time the inflationary costs of these bundle subscriptions have outpaced the size of our budget.
In 2016, when we were first presented with the need to reduce our spending, bundled journal packages accounted for 30 percent of our materials budget but only provided 6.2 percent of our titles. We recognized at the time that we would have to address this significant portion of our budget to achieve the necessary savings. We did so immediately by unbundling our Wiley subscription package which provided us with about $400,000 in savings at that time. Now we are moving to unbundle the remaining packages.
Three years Later, Florida State University did the same, with a very pleasing result, as Ars Technicareported last February:
When Florida State University cancelled its “big deal” contract for all Elsevier’s 2,500 journals last March to save money, the publisher warned it would backfire and cost the library $1 million extra in pay-per-view fees.
But even to the surprise of Gale Etschmaier, dean of FSU’s library, the charges after eight months were actually less than $20,000. “Elsevier has not come back to us about ‘the big deal’,” she said, noting it had made up a quarter of her content budget before the terms were changed.
Two months later, another university followed suit as Inside Higher Edreported 13 April 2020:
The State University of New York Libraries Consortium announced on April 7 that it will not renew its bundled journal subscription deal with publisher Elsevier.
“While both parties negotiated in earnest and tried to come to acceptable terms for SUNY to maintain access to the full ScienceDirect package, in the end there was considerable disagreement around the value proposition of the ‘big deal,’” said the SUNY Libraries Consortium in a statement.
By subscribing to a core list of 248 journals, the SUNY libraries anticipate saving around $5 to $7 million per year. They currently spend around $10 million annually.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill also announced last week that it is canceling its big deal with Elsevier for budgetary reasons.
The sordid roots of the academic publishing oligopoly
Writing for Med Page Today, British cardiologist Rohin Francis offers an interesting glimpse at the curious roots of the corporate academic publishing rachet [and let’s face it, who else but organized crime racks up 40 percent annual profits?]:
People outside Britain might not have heard of Robert Maxwell, but you’ve certainly heard of his daughter, the widow of convicted sex offender, and dubiously-suicided Jeffrey Epstein. Ghislaine Maxwell is the daughter of Britain’s most notorious media tycoon, Robert Maxwell, fraudster, alleged spy, and one of the inspirations for Logan Roy’s character in “Succession.”
If you go back a few decades, the idea of making money out of scientific work was absurd. Of course, businessmen used scientific ideas throughout the Industrial Revolution and people could patent use of their ideas, but knowledge itself was shared freely particularly among scientists until Maxwell realized he could turn science into profit and created Pergamon Press. Stephen Buranyi colorfully illustrates Maxwell’s rise to power and influence in his excellent article that I’m linking below.
But essentially Maxwell wowed scientists with flash hotels, glamorous parties, and cold hard cash, then signed them up to exclusive deals with his journals. We would get dinner and fine wine, and at the end, he would present us a check, a few thousand pounds for the society. It was more money than us poor scientists had ever seen.
I didn’t realize until researching this video how enormous his influence on modern science has been. The whole system has been shaped by his model: the paid subscriptions, the journalistic way controversy and novelty are prioritized, the dominance of a handful of journals, and the way scientists dream of being published in those high-profile periodicals.
Fore more on Maxwell, see this profile in the Guardian.
“First they cut my hair, then they made me eat soap and then they beat me for speaking my language.”
— Joe Wheeler, a member of the Wichita Tribe from Oklahoma, describing his experience as a boy at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School.
When Europeans invaded the America’s their vision from the start was conquest, capturing the land, resources, and labor of the people who had lived there for thousands of years.
Native Americans were killed, captured, enslaved, or reduced to peonage.
Even Abraham Lincoln, who would give his life to end Black slavery, had little use for the nation’s aboriginal inhabitants, though he did act to end the some of the corruption caused by political hacks who controlled the distribution of resources to conquered tribes.
Retired Brig. Gen. Richard Henry Pratt, founder of the Carlisle School, spent much of his military career fighting tribes on the Great Plains, some of it as the White commander of a company of Black troops from the famed 10th Cavalry, the Buffalo Soldiers. He started the school after his retirement from the army.
It was there he coined the phrase “Kill the Indian, save the man” to describe his agenda: Turn Native Americans White by stripping them of their languages, customs, and religions to better facilitate their transformation. Hence the beating Joe Wheeler received for speaking the language of his people.
The boarding schools were run largely by Christians, with Quakers playing a dominant role. With government support, children were seized from reservations and shipped off to distant boarding schools for indoctrination, and by 1926, 83 percent of Native American children were being educated far from home and speaking only the language of their captors.
Back in my youth I got to know a Hopi artist who had grown up in a boarding school. “It was like I was no one,” he told me. “I wasn’t Indian. I wasn’t White. I was no one.”
The trauma haunted him, a scar he could never fully conceal.
The boarding schools proved even more damaging that the rifles of the Buffalo soldiers, leaving Indians stripped of their heritage and thrust into a world where White people still saw them as little more than savages.
The schools may be gone now, but deep wounds remain.
Native speakers are rare in many tribes, and it is the elders who are the true repositories of languages, cultural practices, traditional medicine and agriculture, and so much more.
Now throw in the coronavirus pandemic, which strikes particularly hard at elders and Native Americans, and tribal cultures are facing the perfect storm of cultural destruction.
Tribes across the nation are working to protect elder members who serve as honored links to customs passed from one generation to the next. The efforts to deliver protective gear, meals and vaccines are about more than saving lives. Tribal elders often possess unique knowledge of language and history that is all the more valuable because tribes commonly pass down their traditions orally. That means losing elders to the virus could wipe out irreplaceable pieces of culture.
<snip>
In Oklahoma, the Cherokee Nation has increased food distributions to elders and offered financial aid to those who were struggling to pay rent or utilities. Concern for elders is also apparent in the tribe’s COVID-19 vaccine-distribution plans. Participants and workers in the tribe’s elder program are first in line for the shots, along with hospital workers and first responders. Next are those whose first language is Cherokee and others considered “tribal treasures,” an honor given to members who keep Cherokee art, language and other culture alive through their work.
An effort among the Blackfeet in Montana is helping the tribe’s 600-plus members connect with elders who need support. Connecticut’s Mashantucket Pequot Nation is providing its citizens with masks and telemedicine, delivering meals to their doors and organizing home visits to give flu vaccines.
<snip>
Mashantucket Pequot elders shifted to a virtual format for the intergenerational gatherings where they tell traditional stories. An elders council also helps to organize Pequot language bingo nights and Schemitzun, the annual Festival of the Green Corn.
Donald Trump has proven himself no friend of the Native American, opening up their sacred sites to mining and drilling, while ignoring and then mismanaging the pandemic crisis.
And now, with a Native American picked as the incoming Secretary of Interior, the agency charged with managing the government’s treatment of Native Americans, there is at lest one bright glimmer on the horizon.
To conclude, a video from Vox, recounting the tragic legacy of Washington’s attempts to destroy Native American culture:
How the US stole thousands of Native American children
Program notes:
The long and brutal history of the US trying to “kill the Indian and save the man.”
Toward the end of the 19th century, the US took thousands of Native American children and enrolled them in off-reservation boarding schools, stripping them of their cultures and languages. Yet decades later as the US phased out the schools, following years of indigenous activism, it found a new way to assimilate Native American children: promoting their adoption into white families. Watch the episode to find out how these two distinct eras in US history have had lasting impacts on Native American families.
Most people with with children taking their school lessons over a screen rather than in a classroom, is finding life much changed, and feelings of anxiety, depression, and sleeplessness are rife.
But if the children are having trouble with “distance learning,” the parents are much more troubled, as a new study from the journal of the American Educational Research Association makes abundantly clear:
More from the AERA:
When the emerging COVID-19 pandemic caused most U.S. schools to close and transition to distance learning last spring, many parents were forced into new roles as proxy educators for their children. A study published today in Educational Researcher, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association, finds that roughly 51 percent of all parents surveyed in March and April had at least one child struggling with distance learning and were themselves experiencing significantly higher levels of stress.
The study authors found that parents with at least one student struggling with distance learning were 19 percentage points more likely than other parents to report anxiety. These parents also were 22 percentage points more likely to experience depression, and were 20 percentage points more likely to have trouble sleeping. In addition, they were 20 percentage points more likely to feel worried and 23 percentage points more likely to have little interest or pleasure in doing things. The results of the analysis remain consistent even after accounting for other school and demographic characteristics.
The study found that these levels of heightened mental distress were felt by parents across all socioeconomic categories, regardless of family income, the number of children struggling (above one), or the number of days that had passed since school closure.
For this study, authors Cassandra R. Davis (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Jevay Grooms (Howard University), Alberto Ortega (Indiana University Bloomington), Joaquin Alfredo-Angel Rubalcaba (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), and Edward Vargas (Arizona State University) analyzed data from the National Panel Study of COVID-19, a nationally representative survey of 3,338 U.S. households collected in March and April. The multi-wave survey was conducted by the authors in collaboration with researchers across multiple U.S. universities.
“Students’ academic success ultimately relies on their parents’ emotional health during this fragile time, which sets the learning environment for their children,” said Ortega, an assistant professor at Indiana University Bloomington. “Without proper support, both parents and students will likely suffer.”
Prior research has shown that stressful learning environments tend to stifle students’ academic achievement.
The authors don’t support reopening schools until public health officers say it’s safe “Instead, schools and policymakers may want to create plans for providing mental health resources and virtual spaces to parents, in addition to helping them with questions about the schoolwork itself,” Ortega said. “And it is crucial for parents to be open about their needs and to communicate with their schools when they need additional help.”
And its not just the coronavirus, as we’ve noted repeatedly.
Upcoming evictions, canceled unemployment payments, childcare, local and regional government services, schools, and more are on the brink of economic catastrophe.
The University of California, Berkeley, asked some of its leading scholars about the crisis confronting the Golden State, and here’s what they had to say:
California fears human, economic crisis as Washington relief talks continue
High-stakes negotiations underway in Washington, D.C., over a new round of pandemic relief funding could help California to achieve a relatively quick recovery — or, if they fail, contribute to an economic slump that lasts for years, UC Berkeley scholars say.
In a series of interviews, experts said a new COVID-19 relief package could provide critical aid to vulnerable groups as the pandemic renews its devastating surge. Millions of unemployed workers are slated to lose their benefits on the day after Christmas, and hundreds of thousands of renters could face eviction in the new year. Hard-hit small businesses, child care centers, local governments and universities also face historic financial threats.
Last March, Congress passed and President Donald Trump signed a $2.2 trillion measure — the CARES Act — to provide support to individuals, businesses and institutions hurt in the early months of the pandemic. A new round of federal aid could benefit tens of millions of Californians, the Berkeley experts said, if Republicans and Democrats can bridge deep differences to come up with a plan in the days ahead.
As earlier pandemic relief runs out, “we know poverty is increasing,” said Sylvia Allegretto, an economist at the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) at UC Berkeley. “We know that hunger and the incidence of hunger are increasing, especially for children and people of color. We know that homelessness by the millions will increase if we do not have another moratorium on renter evictions.”
“Right now the economy is barely holding on,” added economist Jesse Rothstein, faculty director of the California Policy Lab at Berkeley. “If we don’t pass something more, we basically take away the legs that support a teetering economy. There’s a real risk that the economy will collapse into something like a traditional recession and … bankrupt millions of people.”
A bipartisan group of moderates in Congress has proposed a $748 billion aid bill, with a separate $160 billion measure that includes financial aid to state and local governments devastated by extra expenses and lost revenues resulting from the pandemic. That’s less than half the size of the CARES Act, and with the virus accelerating and U.S. deaths surpassing 300,000, it was unclear Wednesday whether congressional leaders are still using it as a basis for their negotiations.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy met until after midnight on Tuesday and indicated that they were making progress on a deal of roughly $900 billion. Sources involved in the coronavirus relief package told Politico that it would include a second round of direct payments, but would likely leave out state and local funding and a controversial liability shield to protect businesses from COVID-related lawsuits by workers and customers.
Allegretto, Rothstein and other Berkeley scholars said the congressional measure falls far short of the robust investments required to counter the pandemic’s economic shock. But, they said, funding in areas such as unemployment insurance, child care and renter protections could ripple throughout the economy, bringing important human benefits and helping to protect economic stability in California and nationwide.
A million workers could lose unemployment insurance within days
The measure being developed by the bipartisan congressional group — the Emergency COVID Relief Act of 2020 — would extend the two federal programs for 16 weeks.
That could bring nearly $10 billion in unemployment benefits to Californians, enough to preserve or generate almost 45,000 jobs by April, the analysis found. The measure also proposes a supplemental federal payment of $300 per week in unemployment benefits. That’s down from $600 per week provided under the CARES Act, but still enough to drive $30 billion in economic activity in California before the end of April 2021.
Whether the federal government should supplement state unemployment payments or provide one-time checks to most Americans, as in the first round of pandemic relief, is the focus of intense debate.
“Unemployment benefits are targeted to the people who really need it: the people who lost their jobs,” said Rothstein. “It’s nice for everyone to get a check, but it’s not essential.”
Rothstein also noted a hidden threat: Even if a new measure is passed soon, pandemic unemployment payments will likely be interrupted because states will need time to adjust administrative systems for the program.
Evictions, childcare, and more, after the jump. . .
With the COVID pandemic rapidly spreading, in-home schooling has become the norm in many states, counties, and cities.
But the cost of connection can be high, factoring in the cost of computers, internet access, and cell phones, hitting hardest at the poor, many of who have been downsized or furloughed as their employers scale back or close.
The Pew Research Center surveyed Americans about about concerns, and the results show stark class divides:
As schools around the country shut down due to the spread of the coronavirus, many parents were worried that the lack of a computer or high-speed internet connection at home would hinder their children’s ability to keep up with schoolwork. About six-in-ten lower-income parents with children whose K-12 schools closed in the spring (59%) said in an April survey it was at least somewhat likely that their child would face at least one digital obstacle while doing their schoolwork at home during the coronavirus outbreak. Three-in-ten parents who have middle incomes also thought it was at least somewhat likely this would be an issue, while 13% of those with a higher income said the same.
Across all parents whose child’s school was closed, roughly three-in-ten parents (29%) said it was very or somewhat likely their child would have to do their schoolwork on a cellphone. About one-in-five parents said it was at least somewhat likely their child would have to use public Wi-Fi to finish their schoolwork because they lacked a reliable home internet connection (22%) or would not be able to complete their schoolwork because they did not have access to a computer at home (21%) during the outbreak.
From an Alignable poll published 25 November, before the latest pandemic surge:
Based on this week’s Alignable Q4 Revenue Poll of 9,201 small business owners, 48% could shut down permanently before year’s end.
In fact, this number jumped from 42% just two months ago, demonstrating how several factors have converged to devastate small businesses: COVID resurgences, forced government reclosures, elevated customer fears, and a surge in online shopping at Amazon and other national ecommerce giants.
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This week’s poll also found that 50% of consumer retailers could close for good and that figure is up from 45% only two months ago. However, these concerns extend beyond Main St. establishments.
In fact, 47% of small B2B firms are also struggling to keep the lights on and might not make it to next year. And that figure was just 38% when small business owners were asked about their Q4 projections in late September.
What it means
While most economists point to a surging stock in their endless affirmations of a post boom, its likely that all the gains will wind up at the very stop,just as they during the pandemic.
Consider all those employees lost during the closings as their employers lost customers to Amazon, movie theaters lost out to streaming, and countless other business succumbed for other reasons.
We further suspect that the post-pandemic economy will see more loss of old-fashioned employment — the jobs that come with vacations, health insurance, and other benefits — leaving still more of the workforce in permanent precarity.
And even if the Democrats do pick up those two Senate seats, many incumbent Democrats are deeply conservative, making any significant reforms difficult at best.
The closings and job lossless will leave thousands of cities an states strapped for revenue as they face falling sales and property taxes with few, if any, places to turn for help.That will be followed by still more selling or leasing of public services [including policing and schools] to private contractors as well, along with the loss of still more civil jobs, with their traditional decent pay, good benefits, and pensions.
The only winners are people like Bezos and Zuckerberg, along with the less-familiar barons of banksterland and asset-stripping hedge fund hedgemons.
Communities are left devastated, wages and hours fall for the remaining jobs, and corporate superstores thrive, shopping machines where any meaningful conversation with workers is lost [unlike the community member-owned shops that were common in our youth, where personal relationships were often encouraged and friendships blossomed].
I became friends with most of the bookstores I shopped, fellow bibliophiles who quickly discerned my interests and knew what I’d like far more accurately than any of the online sites I shop. Corporate bookstore “associates” are taught to be courteous, but the atmosphere is formal, as are their recommendations.
Empathy and misdirection
I fully empathize with the sense of grief and anger felt by Trump’s alienated small-town base. But Trump’s anger at the swamp was the embodied art of corporate greed, finding the right seductive pitch to sell the rubes, dazzling with sleights of dexterity while simultaneously picking their pockets by a classic misdirection.
Trump’s lasting influence comes through the deconstruction of regulatory restraints on anything standing between corporations and profits.
COVID was just an easily politicized bonus, capturing public attention and turning commonsense public health measures into acts of tyranny. Meanwhile, regulations die, judges get picked, appointments mushroom.
It’s what Republican economists call creative destruction, creating a devastated landscape open to the mechanisms of extractive wealth. . .
The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention allegedly ordered the destruction of an email written by a top Trump administration health official who was seeking changes in a scientific report on the coronavirus’s risk to children, the head of a congressional oversight subcommittee charged Thursday.
In a letter to CDC Director Robert R. Redfield and his superior, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, Rep. James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.), expressed “my serious concern about what may be deliberate efforts by the Trump Administration to conceal and destroy evidence that senior political appointees interfered with career officials’ response to the coronavirus crisis at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”
The report was not altered or withdrawn. But Clyburn cited an interview three days ago with the editor of the CDC’s most authoritative publication, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Charlotte Kent, editor in chief of that report, told investigators that while on vacation in August, she received instructions to delete the email written by Paul Alexander, a senior adviser to Azar.
When Kent went to locate the email, it had already been deleted, she said, according to a transcript of the interview provided by Clyburn. When she inquired about who had ordered its deletion, she was told that the instructions had come down from Redfield through the chain of command.
The email from Dr. Paul Alexander, a former scientific adviser within HHS, demanded that CDC insert new language in a previously published scientific report on coronavirus risks to children or “pull it down and stop all reports immediately,” according to the letter. Federal employees must generally preserve documents under the Federal Records Act.
Dr. Kent stated that she didn’t speak directly to Dr. Redfield about this instruction, but was informed that it came from him, explaining, “that’s what I understood, that it came from Dr. Redfield,” according to the letter. She said she looked for the email after she had been told to delete it, but that it was already deleted. She said she didn’t know who had deleted it.
The subcommittee also said that Kent told them that the CDC delayed the release of a report on a coronavirus outbreak at a Georgia summer camp until after Redfield’s testimony before Congress on July 31, during which he urged schools to reopen.
Clyburn accused the administration of “stonewalling” his investigation into political interference in the coronavirus response, and threatened to issue subpoenas if officials do not provide requested documents by Dec. 15.
Here’s another study on the impact of the coronavirus on America’s youth to follow up on our previous post.
Different countries approach the COVID pandemic in different ways.
As the author of this study notes, ““In Britain the schools have been open but the pubs have been closed. In the United States the schools are closed and the bars are open. That says a lot about whom our politicians value.”
But, his study notes, the cost of school closings may bear a terrible price as well:
Missed instruction during 2020 could be associated with an estimated 5.53 million years of life lost. This loss in life expectancy was likely to be greater than would have been observed if leaving primary schools open had led to an expansion of the first wave of the pandemic.
It’s an awful choice, and an indication of just how complex the pandemic has become.
From UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health:
Schooling Disrupted by the Pandemic in the United States Likely to Have Life-Long Impact, Study Says
A team that includes UCLA Fielding School of Public Health researchers has found American children whose educations have been disrupted by the pandemic, even as little as 2-4 months, may face shortened life spans.
“During the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States has extracted an enormous sacrifice from its youngest citizens to protect the health of its oldest,” said Frederick Zimmerman, UCLA Fielding School of Public health professor of health policy and management. “During a pandemic, this may well be an ethically defensible tradeoff, but only if resources are invested to reverse the potential damage to health and education inflicted on a population with low visibility and high vulnerability.”
The research, “Estimation of US Children’s Educational Attainment and Years of Life Lost Associated With Primary School Closures During the Coronavirus Disease 2019 Pandemic,” is published in the November edition of the JAMA Network Open, a peer-reviewed journal published by the American Medical Association, under the aegis of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). The team, made up of Zimmerman and researchers from the University of Washington, includes co-author Dr. Dimitri A. Christakis, with the Seattle Children’s Research Institute.
“Although the risks of keeping schools open drove decisions made in the early phases of the pandemic, the probable harm to children associated with school closure were less explicitly discussed,” Christakis said. “The public debate has pitted ‘school closures’ against ‘lives saved,’ or the education of children against the health of the community. Presenting the tradeoffs in this way obscures the very real health consequences of interrupted education.”
Researchers created an analytical model that estimated the association between school closures and reduced educational attainment and the association between reduced educational attainment and life expectancy using publicly available data sources, including data for 2020 from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. Social Security Administration, and the U.S. Census Bureau. Direct COVID-19 mortality and potential increases in mortality that might have resulted if school opening led to increased transmission of COVID-19 were also estimated.
A total of 24.2 million children aged 5 to 11 years attended American public schools that were closed during the 2020 pandemic, losing roughly 54 days of instruction. Previous estimates suggest that this loss of schooling will shorten total educational attainment, by an average of about four months for boys, and almost three months for girls, researchers said.
“Other social scientists have already shown that students who are deprived of educational opportunities live shorter lives,” Zimmerman said. “And they’ve worked hard to isolate the causal effects of reduced years of schooling on life expectancy by statistically controlling for other factors. So we have a pretty good idea of how shortening a child’s educational career shortens his or her life overall.”
Extrapolating further, the missed instruction may be associated with an estimated 5.53 million potential years of life lost (YLL). The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported a total of 88,241 US deaths from COVID-19 through the end of May 2020, with an estimated 1.5 million YLL as a result.
Had schools remained open, 1.47 million additional YLL could have been expected as a result, based on results of studies associating school closure with decreased pandemic spread. Comparing the full distributions of estimated YLL under both “schools open” and “schools closed” conditions, the analysis observed a 98.1% probability that school opening would have been associated with a lower total YLL than school closure.
Zimmerman cautioned that the models – based on studies of the effects of school closures in Argentina, Belgium, and Pakistan – are just that, of course, and crisis managers in a pandemic are always going to be cautious about exposing children to a potentially deadly infection.
“If the choice is just between keeping schools open or closing them in the face of this unprecedented upsurge in COVID19 cases, I would favor closing them,” he said. “But that isn’t the only choice.”
Other possible courses of action could include heavy investment in protective equipment for schools, as other countries have done to keep schools open. This would mean personal protective equipment like masks, but also buying plexiglass dividers and hand sanitizing stations for classrooms, spacing children out in classrooms, adding better air filtration equipment for structures and heating equipment for outdoor learning. These efforts, along with regular testing of all children and staff and contact-tracing for anyone infected, could have allowed schools to remain safely open, at least in a limited capacity.
“In Britain the schools have been open but the pubs have been closed,” Zimmerman said. “In the United States the schools are closed and the bars are open. That says a lot about whom our politicians value.”
From the study, a graphic look at where the impact is likely to strike:
Center dots indicate medians; thin lines, 91% probability intervals; thick lines, 50% probability intervals; and shaded areas, probability density of the estimated years of life lost under each condition.
Young people are faring poorly in the coronavirus pandemic, with depression rising across the country, and suicidal thoughts growing by a factor of ten from their pre-pandemic levels.
The reasons are summed up in a new report from Northwestern University, which charts some of the reasons why America’s young are suffering in the midst of the pandemic:
Depression Among Young Adults Soars During Pandemic
A new survey of over 8,900 young adults, aged 18–24, across the U.S. finds that they showed higher levels of depression amid the pandemic, no matter their gender, racial or ethnic group, or geographic location. Yet during the campaign, neither candidate fully detailed how he would address the growing crisis.
The next administration will face more than the COVID-19 infection in its battle against the pandemic: It will also have to face an unprecedented national mental health emergency.
“In terms of long-term consequences of COVID-19, the mental health of young people may be one of the most important,” IPR political James Druckman said. “It is thus quite concerning that it has received so little government attention.”
Druckman co-leads the ongoing research into the impact of COVID-19 conducted by a university consortium between Northwestern, Harvard, Northeastern, and Rutgers, which surveyed young Americans four times between May and October 2020.
Nearly half (47%) of those surveyed described having at least moderate symptoms of depression. More urgently, over a third (37%) reported occasional thoughts that they might be better off dead, or had thoughts of harming themselves—a tenfold increase in the rate prior to the pandemic.
Young adults have been especially hard hit by the pandemic’s effects, including school and college closings, having to work from home, pay cuts, job losses, and evictions.
Just over half of the 18–24-year olds reported that their school or college closed, 41% were working from home, 27% received a pay cut, and 26% lost a job.
Young people who were evicted or faced eviction because they couldn’t pay their rent or mortgage showed the biggest jumps in symptoms of depression. Those who lost jobs or suffered a pay cut had the next highest spike in symptoms.
Betsy De Vos, a plutocrat who co-owns a company suspected of questionable business practices, has been slapped down for questionable practices in her day job, serving as Donald Trump’s Secretary of education.
Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos just got to the official end of the line with her efforts to divert $16 million in public school COVID-relief funding to private schools.
U.S. District Judge for the Northern District of California James Donato signed a permanent injunction–made public Monday–that will formally end litigation begun last summer against the Department of Education (DOE). In July, Judge Donato, aBarack Obama appointee, quoted the late Justice Antonin Scalia when he called DeVos’s justification of the DOE’s pro-private school policy “interpretive jiggery-pokery in the extreme.”
The Congressional CARES Act earmarked approximately $16 billion to help elementary and secondary schools maintain their operations and provide effective education during the pandemic. Funds were to be distributed to both public and private schools; the amount allocated to private schools was, as has been the case historically, based on number of low-income students served by the private schools. The DOE under DeVos, though, issued a rule that would instead apportion funding based on total student enrollment. As a result, far more CARES funding would have found its way into private schools.
Michigan, California, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, the District of Columbia as well as public school districts in New York City, Chicago, Cleveland and San Francisco sued to block the DOE’s rule. In July, the court ruled against the DOE in a preliminary injunction; now, the lawsuit has come to its final end.
From Gallup, a sign of the descent toward fascism:
Inherent to fascism and other forms of totalitarianism is single-party control of the national legislature, something Gallup reports is now favored at 53 percent of Republicans. Overall, 41 percent of Americans support the notion, up from a record low of 25 percent in 2013.
So what exactly is fascism?
Italian philosopher/semiotician/historian//novelist Umberto Eco, who grew up under Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime, outlined what he defined as the major tenets of fascism in a notable 22 June 1995 essay for the New York Review of Books.
While many folks have argued that Trump is a closet fascist, the 14 characteristics of fascism described by Eco provide an informed critical basis for making diagnosis.
The 14 tenets of fascism
His first tenet is the cult of tradition, embodied in, for example, Trump’s 17 September speech in which he attacked the 1619 Project, which adapts for use in public school curricula a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times series which reexamines American history in the context of slavery and the subsequent struggles of Black Americans for equality under the law:
Our mission is to defend the legacy of America’s founding, the virtue of America’s heroes and the nobility of the American character. We must clear away the twisted web of lies in our schools and classrooms and teach our children the magnificent truth about our country.
His second tenet, the rejection of modernism, is the corollary of the first.
Third is the cult of action for action’s sake, or, as Eco writes, “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes.” Nothing could be more descriptive of Trump [just check his Twitter feed should you have any doubts].
The fourth trait is uber-Trumpean: “Disagreement is treason.”
As is the fifth: “Fascism grows up and seeks for consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders.” As in all those “murderers and rapists” Trump sees invading our southern border, and in the poor and people of color he warns followers are invading suburbia.
The sixth attribute should be familiar, “the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
As for the seventh trait, just watch the tweets and headlines: “At the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.” That said, the most dangerous enemies are the traitors within, selling out the Homeland to the enemies without,
Next, while all members of the nation [as nation is defined by the leader – white folks (Volk) in the case of Trump, who boasts of his pride in his “good German blood”] are blessed, Party members are the true elite, as when he made this declaration to white Minnesota supporters, a remark that reeks of eugenics:
“This state was pioneered by men and women who braved the wilderness and the winters to build a better life for themselves and for their families. They were tough, and they were strong. You have good genes, you know that, right?” [Applause]
“You have good genes. You know that, right? You have good genes. A lot of it’s about the genes, isn’t it? Don’t you believe? The racehorse theory. You think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.”
And in May, on a trip to Ford Motor plant, Trump chose to praise the company’s founder, Henry Ford, the only foreigner who picture was displayed in Hitler’s private office in Munich [along with Ford’s virulent treatise, The International Jew], a man, Trump said, who had “good bloodlines, good bloodlines.”
Ford, the first American publisher of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious fabrication of Czar Nicholas II’s secret police, was also the only American Hitler ever honored with the Grand Cross of the German Eagle the highest honor attainable by a non-German native.
Ford also kept his factories churning out military goods for Germany right up until Pearl Harbor.
Oh. And in 1931, Hitler told this to a reporter from the Detroit News: “I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration.”
The ninth trait is the conviction that opponents are both powerful, wealthy, and interconnected, but vulnerable if the righteous act in solidarity and with conviction.
The tenth quality, voiced daily by Trump, is contempt for the weak.
Eleventh is the cult of heroism, with every follower dedicated to fighting for the cause, even to the death.
And twelfth is the cult of machismo, with its corollaries of “disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits.”
Number thirteen is what we would call immersion in the mass, and the surrender of individual will to the whims of the leader, the only one capable of expressing their will. Hence, too, the utter disdain for multi-party legislatures and the creation of the one-party state with a ruuber stamp legislature.
Finally, fascism inculcates Newspeak, George Orwell’a term from 1984 to describe the unique linguistic coinages created to thwart critical thought.
So is Trump a fascist? Draw your own conclusions. . .
A new study of the impact of religion on the minds of growing children reveals a disturbing finding: When religion dominates, kids fare poorly in science and mathematics.
The study offers a hint of things to come in the United States, where the government is now controlled by a party eager to hand off education to church schools while simultaneously declaring an allegiance to improving the nation’s economic competitiveness.
With the Department of Education headed by a confirmed Christianist who made her billions off private schools, the outlook is bleak for our children.
The more religious people are, the lower children in that country perform in science and mathematics, according to new research at Leeds Beckett University.
The research [$35.95 to access] , published today in the academic journal Intelligence, reveals that more religious countries had lower educational performance in science and mathematics. The study also shows that levels of national development and time spent on religious education played a role in students’ attainment.
The research, led by Gijsbert Stoet, Professor of Psychology at Leeds Beckett, alongside David Geary, Curators’ Professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences at the University of Missouri, is relevant for the government’s announcement in the budget that it will be investing £320 million into new free schools, including faith-based schools.
Professor Stoet explained: “Science and mathematics education are key for modern societies. Our research suggests that education might benefit from a stronger secular approach. In that context, the current UK policy of investing more money in faith-based should be reconsidered.
“The success of schools and education in general directly translates in more productive societies and higher standards of living. Given the strong negative link between religiosity and educational performance, governments might be able to raise educational standards and so standards of living by keeping religion out of schools and out of educational policy making.”
The researchers combined data from the Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA), OECD’s Education at a Glance, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), the World Values Survey, the European Social Survey, and the United Nationals Human Development Report.
Analysis of the data sets allowed conclusions to be drawn about international levels of religiosity, schooling and educational performance, and levels of human development (measures in regard to health, education, and income).
Levels of religiosity were determined using representative questionnaires carried out around the world in the World Values Survey and the European Social Survey among the adult population. Levels of school performance in mathematics and science literacy were based on scores from children aged between 14 to 15 years old.
Considering the relationship between religiosity and educational performance, the findings suggest that by engaging with religion, this may lead to a displacement of non-religious activities. Although relatively few countries have data on the time spent on religious education, it appears that the time spent on religion has a negative correlation with educational performance in mathematics and science.
With the Trump Administration rapidly dismembering the Environmental Protection Agency, a new report reveals just why protecting the environmental saves lives, especially young ones.
More than 1 in 4 deaths of children under 5 years of age are attributable to unhealthy environments. Every year, environmental risks – such as indoor and outdoor air pollution, second-hand smoke, unsafe water, lack of sanitation, and inadequate hygiene – take the lives of 1.7 million children under 5 years, say two new WHO reports.
The first report, Inheriting a Sustainable World: Atlas on Children’s Health and the Environment [open access] reveals that a large portion of the most common causes of death among children aged 1 month to 5 years – diarrhoea, malaria and pneumonia – are preventable by interventions known to reduce environmental risks, such as access to safe water and clean cooking fuels.
“A polluted environment is a deadly one – particularly for young children,” says Dr Margaret Chan, WHO Director-General. “Their developing organs and immune systems, and smaller bodies and airways, make them especially vulnerable to dirty air and water.”
Harmful exposures can start in the mother’s womb and increase the risk of premature birth. Additionally, when infants and pre-schoolers are exposed to indoor and outdoor air pollution and second-hand smoke they have an increased risk of pneumonia in childhood, and a lifelong increased risk of chronic respiratory diseases, such as asthma. Exposure to air pollution may also increase their lifelong risk of heart disease, stroke and cancer.
Top 5 causes of death in children under 5 years linked to the environment
A companion report, Don’t pollute my future! The impact of the environment on children’s health, provides a comprehensive overview of the environment’s impact on children’s health, illustrating the scale of the challenge. Every year:
570 000 children under 5 years die from respiratory infections, such as pneumonia, attributable to indoor and outdoor air pollution, and second-hand smoke.
361 000 children under 5 years die due to diarrhoea, as a result of poor access to clean water, sanitation, and hygiene.
270 000 children die during their first month of life from conditions, including prematurity, which could be prevented through access to clean water, sanitation, and hygiene in health facilities as well as reducing air pollution.
200 000 deaths of children under 5 years from malaria could be prevented through environmental actions, such as reducing breeding sites of mosquitoes or covering drinking-water storage.
200 000 children under 5 years die from unintentional injuries attributable to the environment, such as poisoning, falls, and drowning.
Ongoing and emerging environmental threats to children’s health
“A polluted environment results in a heavy toll on the health of our children,” says Dr Maria Neira, WHO Director, Department of Public Health, Environmental and Social Determinants of Health. “Investing in the removal of environmental risks to health, such as improving water quality or using cleaner fuels, will result in massive health benefits.”
For example, emerging environmental hazards, such as electronic and electrical waste (such as old mobile phones) that is improperly recycled, expose children to toxins which can lead to reduced intelligence, attention deficits, lung damage, and cancer. The generation of electronic and electrical waste is forecasted to increase by 19% between 2014 and 2018, to 50 million metric tonnes by 2018.
A wonderful documentary from Jayisha Patel of Australia’s SBS Dateline, a look at Fareeha, a remarkable young Indian women skilled in a very untraditional martial art struggling to make her way to the national championships.
It’s a story about a person from Hyderabad whose dream is to become a police officer so that she can protect young girls in a nation riven by religious and sexual violence.
Her struggle reveals tensions universal in modern life, created when cultural norms created in an era of slow travel and limited technology were evolved at a time when organized religion dominated all aspects of civic and familial life.
While the West dubs the struggle triggered by America’s armed imperialism Islamist, what has happened in the U.S. and Europe might be called a Christianist insurgence. While authoritarianism in the Mideast and North Africa is fueled by an authoritarian interpretation of the Koran and sayings attributed to the Prophet, while the authoritarianism of the West is inspired by an authoritarian interpretation of the Bible, relaying heavily on particularist selection of passages from practices proscribed by Torah and a vision of the imminent future taken from Revelation.
The cultural norms struggles against are not so different than the gender-based laws many Republicans dream of enacting.
And when you look at how the Christianists really want to control women and their roles, is it really that different from what the Islamists want?
In that context, enjoy a remarkable, true story about a triumphal struggle.
What happens when cultural tradition clashes with a young person’s dream? Dateline meets a Muslim girl whose passion for martial arts is raising difficult questions for her family.
From Eurostat, a look at how many European second school students are studying languages other than their own [click on the image to enlarge]:
More from the report:
French: second most popular after English
Learning a foreign language at school is very common in the European Union (EU), with more than 17 million lower secondary school pupils (or 98.6% of all pupils at this education level) studying at least one foreign language in 2015. Among them, more than 10 million (58.8%) were studying two foreign languages or more.
English was by far the most popular language at lower secondary level, studied by nearly 17 million pupils (97.3%). French (5 million or 33.8%) came second, followed by German (3 million or 23.1%) and Spanish (2 million or 13.6%).
These data are issued by Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union. Currently there are 24 official languages recognised within the EU. In addition there are regional languages, minority languages, and languages spoken by migrant populations. It should also be noted that several EU Member States have more than one official language.
Luxembourg, Finland and Italy on top for learning several foreign languages
In 2015, all or nearly all lower secondary school pupils learnt at least two foreign languages in Luxembourg (100%), Finland (98.4%), Italy (95.8%), Estonia (95.4%) and Romania (95.2%). In contrast, fewer than 10% of pupils were studying two or more languages in Hungary (6.0%) and Austria (8.8%).
English, French and German: top 3 foreign languages studied in the EU
English is by far the main foreign language studied during lower secondary education in the vast majority of Member States. In particular, all pupils attend English classes in Denmark, Malta and Sweden.
French is one of the two main foreign languages studied by all pupils in Luxembourg and is also the top foreign language studied in Ireland (by 60.4% of pupils) and Belgium (52.8%). In addition, French is the second most popular foreign language studied at lower secondary level in nine Member States, with the highest shares of learners recorded in Cyprus (89.2%), Romania (83.6%), Portugal (66.6%), Italy (65.4%) and the Netherlands (55.6%).
Besides being studied by all pupils in Luxembourg, German ranks second in eight Member States, with the highest shares being registered in Denmark (73.6%), Poland (69.2%) and Slovakia (53.6%). Learning Spanish is notably popular in Sweden (43.7%) and France (39.0%), while Russian, the only commonly studied non-EU language, came second in the three Baltic States – Lithuania (66.2%), Estonia (63.6%) and Latvia (59.7%) – as well as in Bulgaria (16.9%).
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic. . .
Things are much more provincial here in the U.S., as the Pew Research Center noted in a 2015 report:
[T]he U.S. does not have a nationwide foreign-language mandate at any level of education. Many states allow individual school districts to set language requirements for high school graduation, and primary schools have very low rates of even offering foreign-language course work. Some foreign-language learning standards can be met by taking non-language classes. For example, California requires one course in either the arts or a foreign language (including American Sign Language) for all high school students. Oklahomans can opt to take two years of the same foreign language or “of computer technology approved for college admission requirements.” Conversely, New Jersey students must earn “at least five credits in world languages” or demonstrate proficiency in a language other than English before they can graduate high school.
Perhaps because of these varying standards, few Americans who claim to speak a non-English language say that they acquired those skills in school. Only 25% of American adults self-report speaking a language other than English, according to the 2006 General Social Survey. Of those who know a second language, 43% said they can speak that language “very well.” Within this subset of multilinguals who are well-versed in a non-English language, 89% acquired these skills in the childhood home, compared with 7% citing school as their main setting for language acquisition.
It reminds us of an old joke we heard back in college some 44 years ago:
Q: What do you call someone who speaks three languages?
A. Trilingual.
Q. What do you call someone who speaks two languages?
A. Bilingual.
Q. What do you call a person who speak one language, and that badly?
Two charts from the report [open access] featuring [top] the monthly number of shooting events categorized based on number of fatalities [green 0–1, orange 2–5 and red >5] and [below], national unemployment rate peaks [black line] and how they qualitatively align with periods of elevated rates of school shootings [blue bars].
While there are other facts at work in individual cases, ranging from psychopathology and poor home relationships to immediate provocations, could high jobless rates play a key role in America’s school shootings?
A rigorous Northwestern University study of a quarter-century of data has found that economic insecurity is related to the rate of gun violence at K-12 and postsecondary schools in the United States. When it becomes more difficult for people coming out of school to find jobs, the rate of gun violence at schools increases.
The interdisciplinary study by data scientists Adam R. Pah and Luís Amaral and sociologist John L. Hagan reveals a persistent connection over time between unemployment and the occurrence of school shootings in the country as a whole, across various regions of the country and within affected cities, including Chicago and New York City.
“The link between education and work is central to our expectations about economic opportunity and upward mobility in America,” said Hagan, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Sociology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. “Our study indicates that increases in gun violence in our schools can result from disappointment and despair during periods of increased unemployment, when getting an education does not necessarily lead to finding work.”
Frequent school shootings have been a major concern in American society for decades, but the causes have defied understanding. The Northwestern researchers used data from 1990 to 2013 on both gun violence in U.S. schools and economic metrics, including unemployment, to get some answers.
“Our findings highlight the importance of economic opportunity for the next generation and suggest there are proactive actions we could take as a society to help decrease the frequency of gun violence,” said Pah, clinical assistant professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School of Management.
Other key findings include:
While Chicago is singled out in the study as one of the six cities with the most incidents from 1990 to 2013, Chicago schools are not any more dangerous than schools in other large cities.
Gun violence at schools has not become more deadly over time.
Most shootings are targeted, with the shooter intending to harm a specific person.
Gang-related violence and lone mass shooters comprise only small fractions of the gun violence that occurs at U.S. schools. Gang-related violence constitutes 6.6% of all incidents.
The results suggest that during periods of heightened unemployment, increased gun violence may be a growing risk in American college and university settings.
The research team also found the rate of gun violence at schools has changed over time. The most recent period studied (2007-2013) has a higher frequency of incidents than the preceding one (1994-2007), contradicting previous work in this area. This is a unique contribution made possible because of the researchers’ backgrounds in data science and modeling.
A California high school substitute teacher was banned from the Clovis Unified School District after wearing a Black Lives Matter pin to class last month, local media reported Saturday.
“They said it was a violation of their policy of being neutral regarding political issues, but I don’t consider it a political statement. It is a moral statement,” David Roberts told local newspaper the Fresno Bee. “I was very surprised because I didn’t think it was a violation of anything.”
After working as a substitute teacher for the district for more than 15 years, Robert has now been banned from working in any of the district’s schools according to an incident report issued last month and seen by the newspaper.
The report claims that Roberts was wearing a “political” button which offended some of the students while also accusing the substitute teacher of not following the lesson plan, which he denied.
“A pin that reads ‘Black Lives Matter’ is not a political button. It is a peaceful request to end this violence,” Roberts said asserting that his firing from the district was solely related to the button.
After Donald Trump’s election emboldened white supremacists and inspired a wave of anti-Semitic hate incidents across the country, the Senate on Thursday took action by passing a bill aimed at limiting the free-speech rights of college students who express support for Palestinians.
By unanimous consent, the Senate quietly passed the so-called Anti-Semitism Awareness Act, only two days after it was introduced by Sens. Bob Casey, D-Pa., and Tim Scott, R-S.C.
A draft of the bill obtained by The Intercept encourages the Department of Education to use the State Department’s broad, widely criticized definition of anti-Semitism when investigating schools. That definition, from a 2010 memo, includes as examples of anti-Semitism “delegitimizing” Israel, “demonizing” Israel, “applying double standards” to Israel, and “focusing on Israel only for peace or human rights investigations.”
Critics have pointed out that those are political — not racist — positions, shared by a significant number of Jews, and qualify as protected speech under the First Amendment of the Constitution.
According to the draft, the bill does not adopt the definition as a formal legal standard, it only directs the State Department to “take into consideration” the definition when investigating schools for anti-Semitic discrimination under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
Now why do we say that the law is the creation of an Israeli propagandist?
Sharanksy,’s formulation is a brilliant semantic coup, employing words of such vagueness that they can be applied to virtually any critic of Israeli policies.
We know that, because they have been applied to us, repeatedly, first when reporting on the actions of a campaign launched against the Berkeley Daily Planet, a paper that came under fire from a motley crew of militant Ziocons angry because the paper published letters critical of Israeli government policies toward its Palestinian population.
Hillary Clinton lead the way
Attesting to the brilliance of Sharansky’s word-spinning is the fact that it was adopted as the adoption of that very definition of antisemitism by the State Department under Hillary Clinton.
Surely it’s legitimate to criticize the actions of a government which clearly applies double standards by seizing land and homes of non-Jewish citizens while not taking the same actions toward the property of its Jewish citizens.
Similarly, one could question’s Israel’s legitimacy, given that the state was created as the result of an accord between by the British and French governments without the consent of those who lived their, the majority of them not Jewish.
In the first days after the 2016 presidential election, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance project administered an online survey to K–12 educators from across the country. Over 10,000 teachers, counselors, administrators and others who work in schools have responded. The survey data indicate that the results of the election are having a profoundly negative impact on schools and students. Ninety percent of educators report that school climate has been negatively affected, and most of them believe it will have a long-lasting impact. A full 80 percent describe heightened anxiety and concern on the part of students worried about the impact of the election on themselves and their families.
Also on the upswing: verbal harassment, the use of slurs and derogatory language, and disturbing incidents involving swastikas, Nazi salutes and Confederate flags.
Teaching Tolerance conducted a previous survey in March, when we asked teachers how the primary campaign season was affecting our nation’s students. The 2,000 educators who responded reported that the primary season was producing anxiety among vulnerable students and emboldening others to new expressions of politicized bullying. Teachers overwhelming named the source of both the anxiety and the behavior as Donald Trump, then a leading contender for the Republican nomination.
Since Trump was elected, media have been awash in reports of hate incidents around the nation, including at schools. Some detractors have characterized the reports as isolated, exaggerated or even as hoaxes. This survey, which was distributed by several organizations (see About the Survey for a complete list), via email and social media, offers the richest source of information about the immediate impact of the election on our country. The findings show that teachers, principals and district leaders will have an oversized job this year as they work to heal the rifts within school communities.
The survey asked respondents a mix of easily quantifiable questions and also offered them a chance to describe what was happening in open-ended questions. There are over 25,000 responses, in the form of comments and stories, to the open-ended questions. It will take time to fully analyze and report on those comments. This report provides a high-level summary of the findings.
Here are the highlights:
Nine out of 10 educators who responded have seen a negative impact on students’ mood and behavior following the election; most of them worry about the continuing impact for the remainder of the school year.
Eight in 10 report heightened anxiety on the part of marginalized students, including immigrants, Muslims, African Americans and LGBT students.
Four in 10 have heard derogatory language directed at students of color, Muslims, immigrants and people based on gender or sexual orientation.
Half said that students were targeting each other based on which candidate they’d supported.
Although two-thirds report that administrators have been “responsive,” four out of 10 don’t think their schools have action plans to respond to incidents of hate and bias.
Over 2,500 educators described specific incidents of bigotry and harassment that can be directly traced to election rhetoric. These incidents include graffiti (including swastikas), assaults on students and teachers, property damage, fights and threats of violence.
Because of the heightened emotion, half are hesitant to discuss the election in class. Some principals have told teachers to refrain from discussing or addressing the election in any way.
![Two charts from the report [open access] featuring [top] the monthly number of shooting events categorized based on number of fatalities [green 0–1, orange 2–5 and red >5] and [below], national unemployment rate peaks [black line] and how they qualitatively align with periods of elevated rates of school shootings [blue bars].](https://richardbrenneman.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/blog-shootings-e1485915005547.jpg)
eats shoots 'n leaves 
