Dear Commons Community,

Nathan Glazer died yesterday at the age of 95.  Glazer was a dominant sociologist and intellectual for most of his adult life. In addition to numerous articles, his books included, “The Lonely Crowd,” with David Riesman and Reuel Denney in 1950, and “Beyond the Melting Pot,” with Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1963. In the 1960s and 1970s, Beyond the Melting Pot was required reading in many courses. Glazer was born and raised in East Harlem and as a child, his family moved uptown to the East Bronx.  He was a graduate of our own City College.  His views on many issues kept evolving throughout his life.  Early on, he was a liberal and a neoconservative and close colleagues of  Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell.   His views changed later on especially with the publication of “We Are All Multiculturalists Now” in 1997.  His obituary as published in the New York Times is below.

Tony

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Nathan Glazer, Urban Sociologist and Outspoken Intellectual, Dies at 95!

By Barry Gewen

Jan. 19, 2019

Nathan Glazer, one of the country’s foremost urban sociologists, who became most closely identified with the circle of disillusioned liberals known as the neoconservatives, died on Saturday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 95.

His daughter, Sarah Glazer Khedouri, confirmed his death.

Over more than a half-century, Mr. Glazer threw himself into the middle of heated debates over such contentious issues as race, ethnicity, immigration and education, contributing to a range of professional journals and popular magazines, and writing or editing more than a dozen books. He once said that he held positions often no different from those of many others’, but that he was the one who would go to meetings and speak up.

Early in his career, he was a co-author of two seminal works on American society, “The Lonely Crowd,” with David Riesman and Reuel Denney in 1950, and “Beyond the Melting Pot,” with Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1963. Later volumes included “We Are All Multiculturalists Now” in 1997 and “From a Cause to a Style: Modernist Architecture’s Encounter with the American City” in 2007.

He was also an editor at the magazines Commentary and The Public Interest, and Doubleday Anchor Books. He served on presidential task forces on urban affairs and education, and held teaching positions at Bennington College, Smith College and the University of California, Berkeley. At his death, he was a professor emeritus of sociology and education at Harvard University.

A child of Jewish immigrants from Warsaw, Nathan Glazer was born on Feb. 25, 1923, in New York City and spent his early years in East Harlem. His father, Louis, was a garment worker, and his mother, Tilly, was a homemaker. Nathan was the youngest of seven children, and when he was 10, the family, which was crammed into a four-room apartment, moved to the wider spaces of the East Bronx.

Mr. Glazer’s interest in urban affairs stemmed directly from personal experience, and his upbringing had an impact on his later ideas. His East Harlem tenement block, dominated by the iron structures of elevated trains, had no trees or green strips. It was, Mr. Glazer once said, a “bad place to live.”

Only a few blocks away was Central Park, where a boy could lose himself in the meadows and woodlands, enjoying a respite from the city’s noise and grime. For Mr. Glazer, the park was a “wonder” of childhood, and in years to come, when some urban planners challenged Frederick Law Olmsted’s vision of a pastoral retreat within a crowded city, he spoke out in Olmsted’s defense.

Mr. Glazer arrived at City College in 1940, near the end of the Great Depression and at a time when the all-male, predominantly Jewish student body was largely divided into antagonistic leftist factions — Stalinist, Trotskyist, Socialist. Having inherited a Socialist, anti-Communist perspective from his trade-unionist father, Mr. Glazer lined up against the Stalinists, joined a radical Zionist organization and edited its newspaper.

After graduation, in 1944, he got a job at The Contemporary Jewish Record, soon to become Commentary. Mr. Glazer, who had come out of a “very narrow world,” as he put it, described his life in the late 1940s and early ′50s as leaving “the womb.”

In the presidential election of 1948, he voted for the Socialist Norman Thomas, not the Democrat Harry S. Truman.

Two groups of thinkers that have had a lasting impact on American culture had a lasting impact on Mr. Glazer as well. The first was the New York Intellectuals, the collection of writers, gathered around Partisan Review and later The New York Review of Books, who combined leftist politics with modernist aesthetics. The Partisan Review writers Dwight Macdonald and Hannah Arendt were early influences; another contributor to the magazine, the art critic Clement Greenberg, helped get him his first job.

While he was at Commentary, Mr. Glazer’s circle widened. Writers like James Baldwin and Irving Howe would drop by the office, and at Greenwich Village parties he met prominent intellectuals like Lionel Trilling and the Partisan Review editors Philip Rahv and William Phillips. These were people, Mr. Glazer said, who seemed to be “working at the forefront of knowledge,” with their understanding of Marx, Freud and Modernist developments in the arts.

“There was an awful lot of talk,” Mr. Glazer said, but he had always felt that he was something of an outsider, a “junior member” at these get-togethers, “more like a hanger-on” than a full participant.

Mr. Glazer’s turn to neoconservatism followed an almost paradigmatic path. Throughout the 1950s, and even after he went to work for the Kennedy administration’s Housing and Home Finance Agency in 1962-63, he continued to consider himself a radical. But if, as his longtime friend Irving Kristol put it, a neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality, then Mr. Glazer got hit over the head.

He had taken a teaching post at Berkeley in 1963, just as the student rebellions of the 1960s were erupting. Opposed to the growing American military involvement in Vietnam and supportive of social policies designed to help the poor, he initially sympathized with the student protesters. But as they grew more extreme — “nihilistic” was Mr. Glazer’s word — he turned away from them and his own leftist past as well. He moved toward what he saw as a hard-won pragmatism but what others saw as a reactive conservatism.

Mr. Glazer, second from right, at a symposium in Boston on diversity in the academy in 1998. During the 1990s he decided that he had been wrong about the course of integration, as set out in his book “Affirmative Discrimination,” and concluded that some kind of multiculturalism was necessary for public education.

In 1965, Mr. Glazer became one of the original contributors to The Public Interest, founded by Mr. Kristol and another friend, Daniel Bell. The magazine was a policy journal grounded in the concreteness of empirical evidence and asked hard questions about Great Society programs.

It became the most intellectually formidable of the neoconservative publications in the last decades of the 20th century, and one that Mr. Glazer edited with Mr. Kristol from 1973 until its demise in 2005.

Mr. Glazer’s first marriage, to Ruth Slotkin, ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Sulochana (Raghavan) Glazer; three daughters from his first marriage, Sarah Glazer Khedouri, Elizabeth Glazer and Sophie Glazer; seven grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

During the battles of the 1970s over busing and affirmative action, Mr. Glazer published “Affirmative Discrimination” (1975), a landmark statement for neoconservatives and others opposed to government-enforced racial balancing. Mr. Glazer was prominently featured in one of the earliest studies of the group, Peter Steinfels’s “The Neoconservatives: The Men Who Are Changing America’s Politics” in 1979.

Mr. Glazer was never an entirely reliable neoconservative. He wasn’t comfortable with the label, and on foreign policy he continued to describe himself as “somewhat left.” If he opposed policies like affirmative action, it was not, as with more traditional conservatives, out of antipathy to government itself, but out of a skepticism about what public programs could accomplish.

One of his books was entitled “The Limits of Social Policy,” published in 1988.

“On most areas of public policy,” he said, “I consider myself pragmatic, rather than a man of the left or a man of the right.”

As a social scientist, Mr. Glazer valued hard facts over good intentions. At the same time, he was modest about what the facts could show. A reader of his work was always coming upon phrases like “I am not sure” and “We do not have the knowledge” and “I do not know.”

This meant that the nonideological Mr. Glazer could change his mind. In his writings on architecture and city planning, for example, he went from early enthusiasm for modernism to a “growing disenchantment.”

“In the end,” he said, “the defense of a radical modernism became the work of an elite that the ordinary person could not understand.”

During the 1990s Mr. Glazer decided that he had been wrong about the course of integration as set out in “Affirmative Discrimination” — that he had been complacent about racial progress in America.

And once he had concluded that some kind of multiculturalism was necessary for public education, he bowed to what he saw as the inevitable: “Even the most balanced and professional effort to define a curriculum for students in American schools today will place a heavy emphasis on multiplicity and diversity, race and ethnicity.”

In Mr. Glazer’s case, it seemed, a multiculturalist was a neoconservative who had been mugged by reality.

Former allies were not pleased. One historian of neoconservatism, writing in 2005, spoke of Mr. Glazer’s “defection” from the movement.

Yet there was an underlying consistency to Mr. Glazer’s political and policy shifts. He had become a pessimist about the effectiveness of government programs and therefore a critic of much social policy. “I know what I’m against,” he said.

But he said this more with sorrow than satisfaction. For if his skepticism compelled him to leave most of his radical past behind, he never fully abandoned his youthful concerns about social justice.

Late in life he described himself as a “meliorist,” and in a statement that can stand as his political testament, he declared: “I think you must keep on trying, even if you haven’t had great success. I think everything helps a little.”

Dear Commons Community,

The Women’s March is set to happen today in cities all across America. Unfortunately this year’s march has become a “messy” affair.  In her New York Times column this morning, Michelle Goldberg offers a “depressing study” of the march as it teeters on the brink of “implosion.” Here are her comments.

“This year’s Women’s March, set to happen on Saturday in cities across the country, has become extraordinarily messy. In 2017, the marches that took place in Washington and nationwide — the largest protests in American history — were radiant symbols of hope and resistance at a bleak, terrifying historical juncture. Two years later, the Women’s March organization has become a depressing study in how left-wing movements so often implode in the digital age.

Serious allegations of anti-Semitism have dogged some of the Women’s March’s leaders for over a year, but they’ve lately reached a crisis point. In December, Tablet Magazine published a 10,000-word article about anti-Jewish bigotry (as well as alleged financial mismanagement) among the Women’s March’s leadership. Many Jewish women have publicly agonized about joining this year’s demonstration.

Leaders of Women’s March Inc. — as the nonprofit organization is officially called — tried to make amends. It added three Jewish women to a steering committee. Two of the four national co-chairwomen of the Women’s March, Tamika Mallory and Linda Sarsour, met with a group of 13 rabbis, after which nine of them encouraged Jews to join this year’s demonstration. A third co-chairwoman, Carmen Perez, wrote a repentant column for the Jewish publication The Forward titled, “Jewish Women Should Join Us at the Women’s March, Despite Our Mistakes.”

But on Monday, this apology tour hit a snag when Mallory appeared on the daytime talk show “The View” and refused to denounce the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, whom she once called “the GOAT,” or Greatest Of All Time. Last February, Mallory attended a Farrakhan rally where he railed against “satanic” Jews. During his speech, he gave a shout-out to Mallory and the Women’s March, and afterward, she posted positively about the event on social media. On “The View,” rather than disavowing Farrakhan, Mallory said only, “I don’t agree with many of Minister Farrakhan’s statements.”

Following that interview, the Democratic National Committee, which had been listed as a partner of the 2019 march, appeared to pull out. Several groups that have sponsored the march in the past, including Naral and the Southern Poverty Law Center, are also gone from its public list of backers. Local marches around the country have emphasized their independence from the national group. New York City will have two competing rallies.

Writers I admire have argued that there are good reasons that some black activists hesitate to disavow Farrakhan. Last March, the journalist Adam Serwer wrote in The Atlantic of the successful violence-prevention work that the Nation of Islam has done in impoverished black communities. Mallory told him how Nation of Islam women supported her when her son’s father was murdered in 2001. Serwer described a sense in some black communities that the Nation “is present for black people in America’s most deprived and segregated enclaves when the state itself is not present, to say nothing of those who demand its condemnation.”

Yet even if you’re willing to accept rationalizations for associating with an anti-Semite, the point of organizing is to build political power, and in that respect the leaders of the Women’s March have fallen short. They were put at the helm of a popular mass movement, and under their leadership it has alienated many supporters and become significantly more marginal.

The idea for a women’s march on Washington was born in viral Facebook posts that Bob Bland, one of the current co-chairwomen, and Teresa Shook, a retired lawyer in Hawaii, put up after the 2016 election. On social media, tens of thousands of women committed to travel to Washington before any logistical arrangements had been made. Some of the women making initial preparations realized it would be a disaster if the march seemed to be entirely by and for white women. So, at the suggestion of a celebrity-connected activist named Michael Skolnik, Mallory and Perez, both affiliated with Skolnik’s nonprofit, the Gathering for Justice, were recruited to help lead it. They, in turn, brought in Sarsour.

Mallory, Bland, Sarsour and Perez were part of a group that labored heroically to put the first Women’s March together in just 10 weeks. But there’s no reason to think that the millions of people who took to the streets that day saw any of them as their representatives, or would agree with the radical positions they’d go on to take.

The Women’s March ultimately faced a problem endemic to protest movements that organize spontaneously on the internet, going back to Occupy Wall Street. As Zeynep Tufekci argued in her 2017 book “Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest,” mass protest once required deep, sustained organizing, with all the compromise and human connection that entailed. Digital organizing makes much of that work obsolete. As a result, people are often left trying to create a movement after a high-profile action, rather than before it, without clear common goals or leaders who have broadly accepted legitimacy.

So while the Women’s March leaders failed in very particular ways, it’s not clear that anyone could have succeeded in their place. Two years ago they helped create something magnificent. The exhilarating energy of the 2017 march went on to fuel countless local Resistance groups that worked because they were organized face-to-face and had definable, practical aims. It’s painful to see the Women’s March fall apart now, but maybe it was always destined to be a moment instead of a movement.”

It is painful indeed! 

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

It was only a matter of time before the children in the playground would start yelling and getting back at one another. On Wednesday, Nancy Pelosi told Donald Trump that he could not come to her House to deliver the State of the Union Address. Yesterday, Trump told Pelosi she could not travel on his jet for a congressional visit to Brussels and Afghanistan. The New York Times (see below) sorts out their behavior. 

While they play games, hundreds of thousands of federal workers are laid off.

For shame!

Tony

By Michelle Cottle

Jan. 17, 2019

It seems that the speaker of the House has gotten under the famously thin skin of the president.On Wednesday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi raised eyebrows on both sides of the aisle by effectively disinviting President Trump from delivering his State of the Union address to Congress this month.

In a letter citing concerns about the security implications of the continuing government shutdown, Ms. Pelosi suggested, “sadly,” that it might be best if she and the president could “determine another suitable date after government has reopened for this address or for you to consider delivering your State of the Union address in writing.”

The communiqué was at once excruciatingly polite and brutally dismissive, driving home how the power dynamic has shifted on Capitol Hill. As congressional Republicans sputtered about how grossly political the speaker was being, Mr. Trump was reminded not only of the limitations of his own power, but also of how his House enablers have been stripped of theirs.
Surprised and clearly irked, Mr. Trump fired back Thursday with a petulant, taunting letter postponing a congressional delegation that Ms. Pelosi had been scheduled to lead to Brussels and Afghanistan — or at least canceling military support for it — for the duration of the shutdown. “Obviously, if you would like to make your journey by flying commercial, that would certainly be your prerogative,” snarked the president.
It was a transparent bit of retaliation for Ms. Pelosi’s taking his big television moment away from him — not to mention a blatant attempt to drag the speaker down into the sort of cheap playground tussle at which the president excels.
But if anyone has the chops to manage Mr. Trump’s brattiness, it is Ms. Pelosi.
Mr. Trump may in some ways be a unique political animal, but Ms. Pelosi is not unfamiliar with his type, having risen to political prominence in a field full of arrogant, entitled, patronizing men.

Along the way, she has been repeatedly underestimated. In 1985, having reached the top of the California Democratic Party, she campaigned, unsuccessfully, to head the national party. As Ms. Pelosi tells it, one union organizer dismissed her as “an airhead.” Other players told her that Democrats wouldn’t risk elevating a woman to such a high-profile post on the heels of Walter Mondale’s 1984 presidential loss with Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate. Ms. Pelosi never forgot those slights.

Upon arriving in Congress in 1987, she had to carve out a space in what was then still an old white boys’ club. She succeeded through a combination of sweat, savvy and sheer will. She learned how Congress works, both as an institution and as a collection of egos. As she showed in quashing a challenge to her leadership after the midterm elections, she knows how to find people’s pressure points.

She also knows how to handle pressure. As House minority leader, she helped derail President George W. Bush’s efforts to privatize Social Security by ignoring the conventional wisdom that Democrats needed to offer an alternative plan. Resisting criticism from both the White House and her own conference, Ms. Pelosi focused on taking down Mr. Bush’s plan.

This time around, Ms. Pelosi is aiming not merely to rein in the out-of-control president but, in the process, to deflate his cherished image as a Master of the Universe. She has mocked Mr. Trump’s obsession with what she terms his “manhood” and gone all in with the grandmother-wrangling-an-unruly-child shtick. What he paints as strong leadership and standing his ground, she dismisses as a temper tantrum. Rather than outrage or disbelief, Ms. Pelosi’s most common response to Mr. Trump amounts to one long, exasperated eye roll.

The speaker’s move is not without risk. Public sentiment can be fickle, and if the voters starts to feel like Democrats are trying to score cheap political points against the president, they could turn on Ms. Pelosi.

But, here again, few politicians are as well equipped to weather a political storm. Ms. Pelosi has been a polarizing figure for longer than most members have been in Congress. For years, Republicans have been using her as a boogeyman, painting pretty much every Democratic candidate nationwide as a tool of her and her radical San Francisco agenda. As a result, her public appeal is much like that of the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, slightly above a root canal. But while Pelosi-bashing has its charms — Republican voters do love hating on the speaker — as the midterms showed, it also has its limits.

For her part, Ms. Pelosi is not overly concerned with personal popularity. Like Mr. McConnell, she has a job to do, and if getting it done requires taking some heat, so be it.

Word around Washington is that Mr. Trump admires the speaker, considers her more reasonable than many in her conference — possibly even likes her. This is said to be why he doesn’t smack her as gleefully as he does other prominent Democrats and why he hasn’t settled on a sophomoric nickname for her like Cryin’ Chuck or Crooked Hillary. This restraint is unlikely to hold, as Ms. Pelosi picks away at Mr. Trump. The big question is whether she can avoid getting pulled down into the muck right along with him.

President of Liberty University, Jerry Falwell, Jr. and Donald Trump

Dear Commons Community,

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and at least one administrator from Liberty University had a relationship involving “ginning up” poll numbers in exchange for cash. Specifically, Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen paid Liberty University’s chief information officer, John Gauger, to manipulate online polls in an effort to raise Trump’s profile before his successful presidential campaign.  The story shows a deeper relationship than previously reported between the president and employees of the university, a private Christian institution located in Virginia and led by Jerry L. Falwell Jr., a prominent Trump ally.  Below is a recap of the story as it appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Why is it that everything Trump touches becomes some kind of shady deal?

Tony

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Liberty U. Senior Official Accepted Bag of Money for Helping Trump in Online Polls, Report Says!

By Lindsay Ellis JANUARY 17, 2019

President Trump’s former top lawyer paid Liberty University’s chief information officer to manipulate online polls in an effort to raise Trump’s profile before his successful presidential campaign, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. The news shows a deeper relationship than previously reported between the president and employees of the university, a private Christian institution located in Virginia and led by Jerry L. Falwell Jr., a prominent Trump ally.

The Liberty technology administrator, John Gauger, also created a Twitter account, @WomenForCohen, to promote the president’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, according to the Journal. “Strong, pit bull, sex symbol, no nonsense, business oriented, and ready to make a difference,” the account’s description read on Thursday.

In one post reviewed by The Chronicle, the @WomenForCohen account shared a photo of Cohen, Falwell, and his wife. “Love to see good #Christian people on board the #TrumpTrain #Liberty #Trump2016,” the account wrote. The Journal reported that a female friend of Gauger operated the @WomenForCohen account.

Gauger told the Journal he had been paid by Cohen with a blue Walmart bag filled with $12,000 to $13,000 in cash, as well as a boxing glove once used by a Brazilian athlete. Cohen disputed that characterization, telling the Journal that Gauger had been paid by check, not cash.
Those previously unreported connections are the latest in a longstanding series of ties between Trump and Liberty. Trump has delivered multiple speeches at Liberty in recent years, including at a 2017 commencement. An administrator and Liberty students also produced a film about a former firefighter who said he had heard God say that Trump would be the next president.

Falwell has been a prominent supporter of Trump and, early in the president’s administration, said he would advise the White House on higher-education issues. In August, Falwell attended a state dinner at the White House as a faith leader, sitting with his wife at the head table with the president and first lady, the university said. He previously told The Chronicle that he had met with Trump in the Oval Office and that he had been considered as a possible secretary of education.

Gauger, one of 23 people listed as members of Liberty’s senior-leadership team, did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Thursday, but he told the Journal that Cohen had said he would find Gauger work on Trump’s campaign that did not materialize.
Falwell told The Chronicle he had not directed Gauger to work for Trump. He said he knew Gauger had worked for Trump but did not know the nature of the work.

Liberty allows employees in certain departments to do outside work as long as it does not interfere with their university duties, Falwell said. That policy helps with employee retention.

Generally, he said, the university does not know the nature of the outside work.

In a statement Liberty said Gauger is one of “many” employees “who have made great contributions in their official roles and also enjoyed success as independent entrepreneurs, allowing them to enhance their capabilities and generate more revenue for their families while allowing the university to retain them on our team.”

‘Blind Loyalty’

Cohen, in a tweet, said Trump knew of his attempt to rig the polls. He did not respond to Gauger’s claim to the Journal that he had underpaid the administrator by more than $37,000. “I truly regret my blind loyalty to a man who doesn’t deserve it,” he wrote, referring to Trump.
Cohen pleaded guilty last August to violating campaign-finance law. The Journal reported that none of those charges related to his work with Gauger.

Gauger’s work to promote Trump through online polls took place in January 2014 and February 2015, according to the Journal. One was a CNBC poll about “the country’s top business leaders,” and Gauger reportedly wrote a computer script to gin up votes for Trump. But Trump did not break into the top 100 candidates, according to the newspaper.

Shortly before Trump entered the 2016 presidential campaign, Cohen reportedly asked Gauger to write a similar program for use in a Drudge Report poll of possible Republican candidates. Trump netted 24,000 votes, coming in fifth place, according to the Journal.

Gauger and Cohen began communicating shortly after Trump spoke on Liberty’s campus, in 2012 at Falwell’s invitation, the Journal reported. Cohen attended the event as well, according to the newspaper.

That speech was probably delivered at a fall-2012 convocation, a required regular gathering of students. Falwell introduced Trump at the event, calling him “one of the most influential political leaders in the United States” and joking about building a “Trump Tower” to replace campus dorms.

After the event, Trump posted to Twitter. “Jerry Falwell Jr. stated speech was best in university’s history,” he wrote. “My great honor.”

Dear Commons Community,

Karen Pence, the wife of Mike Pence, has accepted a part-time job teaching at a school that explicitly discriminates against LGBTQ people.The Immanuel Christian School in Virginia requires people applying for work to state that they are a “born again” Christian. As reported by LGBTQ Nation:

“At the end of the application, they must initial next to a list of “standards of behavior.”

One of them is “moral purity,” which, here, only refers to sexual purity.

“I understand that the term ‘marriage’ has only one meaning; the uniting of one man and one woman in a single, exclusive covenant union as delineated in Scripture,” the application says.

“Moral misconduct which violates the bona fide occupational qualifications for employees includes, but is not limited to, such behaviors as the following: heterosexual activity outside of marriage (e.g., premarital sex, cohabitation, extramarital sex), homosexual or lesbian sexual activity, polygamy, transgender identity, any other violation of the unique roles of male and female, sexual harassment, use or viewing of pornographic material or websites, and sexual abuse or improprieties toward minors as defined by Scripture and federal or state law.”

Fortunately for Pence, the application does not mention divorce at all, since she is currently in her second marriage.

The document also requires applicants to list their “Christian Experience” along with their education and professional experiences.

They have to answer several short answer questions, like “Explain when and how you came to accept Jesus Christ as your Savior and describe your relationship with Christ today” and “Explain your view of the creation/evolution debate.”

In the Parent Agreement, parents must refrain from “participating in, supporting, or condoning sexual immorality, homosexual activity or bi-sexual activity, promoting such practices, or being unable to support the moral principles of the school.”

According to George Washington Law School professor Robert Tuttle, the school is legally allowed to engage in such discrimination.

A spokesperson for Pence said, “It’s absurd that her decision to teach art to children at a Christian school, and the school’s religious beliefs, are under attack.”

“The Pences never seem to miss an opportunity to show their public service only extends to some,” Human Rights Campaign’s  JoDee Winterhof said.”

God save us from people like the Pences who use religion to hide their bigotry!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times is reporting this morning that Microsoft is pledging $500 million to help address the shortage of affordable housing in the Seattle area. A recent government report in December found that Seattle needs 156,000 more affordable housing units, and will need 88,000 more by 2040 if the region’s growth continues.The Seattle area, home to both Microsoft and Amazon, is a potent symbol of the affordable housing crisis that has followed the explosive growth of tech hubs.  As reported:

“Microsoft’s money represents the most ambitious effort by a tech company to directly address the inequality that has spread in areas where the industry is concentrated, particularly on the West Coast. It will fund construction for homes affordable not only to the company’s own non-tech workers, but also for teachers, firefighters and other middle- and low-income residents.

Microsoft’s move comes less than a year after Amazon successfully pushed to block a new tax in Seattle that would have made large businesses pay a per-employee tax to fund homeless services and the construction of affordable housing. The company said the tax created a disincentive to create jobs. Microsoft, which is based in nearby Redmond, Wash., and has few employees who work in the city, did not take a position on the tax.

The debate about the rapid growth of the tech industry and the inequality that often follows has spilled across the country, particularly as Amazon, with billions of taxpayer subsidies, announced plans to build major campuses in Long Island City, Queens, and Arlington, Va., that would employ a total of at least 50,000 people. In New York, elected officials and residents have raised concerns that Amazon has not made commitments to support affordable housing.”

Good move on Microsoft’s part!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The man in the news yesterday was William Barr during his Senate confirmation hearings for Attorney General.

Mr. Barr previously served as attorney general came under President George Bush.  During his testimony, Mr. Barr displayed a grasp of policy and demonstrated his experience as a Washington hand and member of the Republican legal establishment. He is expected to be confirmed, both because Republicans control the Senate and because Democrats are deeply suspicious of Matthew G. Whitaker, the acting attorney general whom Mr. Trump installed after ousting Mr. Sessions in November.

I watched the hearings for about an hour and sensed Barr was honest and credible.  Among his responses:

“I am in a position in life where I can provide the leadership necessary to protect the independence and reputation of the department,” Mr. Barr, 68, told the Senate Judiciary Committee, adding that he would not hesitate to resign if Mr. Trump pushed him to act improperly.

“I will not be bullied into doing anything I think is wrong — by anybody, whether it be editorial boards or Congress or the president,” Mr. Barr said. “I’m going to do what I think is right.”

He also pledged that he would refuse any order from Mr. Trump either to fire Mr. Mueller without good cause in violation of regulations or to rescind those rules first.

“It is in the best interest of everyone — the president, Congress and, most importantly, the American people — that this matter be resolved by allowing the special counsel to complete his work,” Mr. Barr said.

Mr. Barr repeatedly said he would let Mr. Mueller, whom he described as a friend of his for decades, finish his work and dismissed Mr. Trump’s attacks on the inquiry.  “I don’t believe Mr. Mueller would be involved in a witch hunt,” Mr. Barr said.

Under questioning about whether he had sought to push out the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, who is widely expected to leave if Mr. Barr is confirmed, the nominee said he had not — and, indeed, had asked Mr. Rosenstein to stay on longer for a transition period.

The only aspect of his testimony that was problematic involved making public Special Counsel Mueller’s final report.   Barr  said that under his interpretation of the special counsel regulations, he didn’t believe that Mueller’s final report was required to be made public. Barr said he believed Mueller’s report would be “confidential,” but that as attorney general he would issue a public summary of its findings.

Barr also said he believed that the attorney general had some “flexibility and discretion” about what he could disclose to the public after the Mueller investigation concluded.

A section of the regulations for special counsels says that, at the end of a probe, the counsel’s office “shall provide the Attorney General with a confidential report explaining the prosecution or declination decisions reached by” investigators. The regulations also state that the attorney general “may determine that public release of these reports would be in the public interest, to the extent that release would comply with applicable legal restrictions.”

Barr said his “objective and goal” would be to push for as much transparency as he could. 

“All I can say at this stage… is that I’m going to try to get the information out there, consistent with these regulations,” he said.

Barr said he’d likely make public any conclusions by the Mueller investigation, adding that it was hard “to conceive of a conclusion that would run afoul of the regs as currently written.”

My conclusion is that he will be easily confirmed with support from both Republicans and Democrats.

Tony

Dear Commons Community

The media is awash about allegations that Donald Tump’s worked for Russia.  CNN’s Anderson Cooper was flabbergasted last night after  Trump became the first American president to “deny he provided aid and comfort to a dangerous adversary.” Cooper was referring to Trump’s declaration earlier in the day in which he denied having ever worked for the Russian government. 

Last week, an article by the New York Times indicated that the FBI had opened an investigation in 2017 into whether the president had been secretly working as an agent of the Kremlin. 

This was followed by another report from The Washington Post that said Trump had repeatedly sought to conceal details of his personal interactions with Putin. 

“It’s hard to be at a loss for words at this point,” Cooper said. “But there’s certainly plenty to say about all the contacts with Russians, all the lies about those contacts, the criminal charges and convictions and connection with the lying.”

Its get more bizarre!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Over the past week several Democrats have announced that they will be seeking their party’s nomination for president in the 2020 election.  While it is still early, the media are gearing to cover the primaries and subsequent election like never before.  On Sunday, the New York Times had a column written by Frank Bruni, asking whether the media will be Trump’s accomplice in his election bid.  Essentially he asks whether the media will jump at Trump’s every bombast, opponent insult and  twitter fit or will they focus on the issues and the needs of our country.  Here is Bruni’s introduction to the column:

“Pocahontas” won’t be lonely for long.

As other Democrats join Elizabeth Warren in the contest for the party’s presidential nomination, President Trump will assign them their own nicknames, different from hers but just as derisive. There’s no doubt.

But how much heed will we in the media pay to this stupidity? Will we sprint to Beto O’Rourke, Cory Booker or Mike Bloomberg for a reaction to what Trump just called one of them and then rush back to him for his response to that response? Or will we note Trump’s latest nonsense only briefly and pivot to matters more consequential?

That’s a specific question but also an overarching one — about the degree to which we’ll let him set the terms of the 2020 presidential campaign, about our appetite for antics versus substance, and about whether we’ll repeat the mistakes that we made in 2016 and continued to make during the first stages of his presidency. There were plenty.

Trump tortures us. Deliberately, yes, but I’m referring to the ways in which he keeps yanking our gaze his way. I mean the tough choices that he, more than his predecessors in the White House, forces us to make. His demand for television airtime on Tuesday night was a perfect example: We had to weigh a request in line with precedent against a president out of line when it comes to truth. We had to wrestle with — and figure out when and how to resist — his talent for using us as vessels for propaganda.

We will wrestle with that repeatedly between now and November 2020, especially in the context of what may well be the most emotional and intense presidential race of our lifetimes. With the dawn of 2019 and the acceleration of potential Democratic candidates’ preparations for presidential bids, we have a chance to do things differently than we did the last time around — to redeem ourselves.

Our success or failure will affect our stature at a time of rickety public trust in us. It will raise or lower the temperature of civic discourse, which is perilously hot. Above all, it will have an impact on who takes the oath of office in January 2021. Democracies don’t just get the leaders they deserve. They get the leaders who make it through whatever obstacle course — and thrive in whatever atmosphere — their media has created.”

“The shadow of what we did last time looms over this next time,” the former CBS newsman Dan Rather, who has covered more than half a century of presidential elections, told me. And what we did last time was emphasize the sound and the fury, because Trump provided both in lavish measure.

“When you cover this as spectacle,” Rather said, “what’s lost is context, perspective and depth. And when you cover this as spectacle, he is the star.” Spectacle is his métier. He’s indisputably spectacular. And even if it’s a ghastly spectacle and presented that way, it still lets him control the narrative. As the writer Steve Almond observed in a recently published essay, “He appears powerful to his followers, which is central to his strongman mystique.”

Bruni raises an important question.  Let’s hope the media takes heed!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Barring a last-minute resolution, Los Angeles teachers are set to strike this morning. The move, which follows 20 months of failed negotiations, will involve more than 30,000 teachers at 900 schools, and affecting more than 500,000 students.  As reported by NBC News Los Angeles.

“The strike comes after a “red state teacher revolt” that rolled through places like Arizona, Kansas and West Virginia last spring. But this time, the teachers are fighting against Democratic leaders in a deeply blue state with union-friendly policies.

On the union side, United Teachers Los Angeles is fighting for pay raises, smaller class sizes and additional support staff. On the opposing side is the Los Angeles Unified School District, which says it simply doesn’t have the funds for such changes. On Friday, the union rejected the district’s latest offer, which involved pay raises, smaller class sizes and increased support staff, but did not meet all the union’s specific requests.

In the background is tension over the expansion of charter schools and questions over who gets to control the direction of the district. Its 2017 school board election was the most expensive in U.S. history, with outside groups ― including unions ― spending nearly $15 million.

Nearly every leader in this fight is a Democrat, with the two sides representing larger fissures within the Democratic Party about the future of public education. What happens with this teachers strike could set the stage for how these issues play out in the 2020 election and beyond.

…

Los Angeles teacher Gillian Claycomb argues that even though the superintendent of schools, Austin Beutner, is a Democrat, his approach to education makes him “just as bad as [Education Secretary] Betsy DeVos and [President] Donald Trump.”

“He is a billionaire. He spends a lot of time with other billionaires and people with very deep pockets who are really invested in privatizing public education,” said Claycomb, a high school history teacher and a chapter leader with the local teachers union.

…

“A strike will worsen the culture and climate in our schools. What it won’t do is provide more money to reduce class sizes and hire more nurses, counselors and librarians,” wrote Beutner in a Los Angeles Times op-ed this week.

Los Angeles teachers complain of class sizes of up to more than 40 people, inadequate “wraparound” services for needy students and a severe shortage of school nurses. Many elementary schools only have a nurse for one day a week.

Beyond the specifics of the debate lie the larger philosophical questions of how Democrats think public funds should be distributed and what a large, diverse, public school district should look like.

“Trump has been defeated in California. There is no Trump constituency. They were defeated, but that doesn’t mean everything is hunky-dory. We have other battles,” said labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein, a professor at the University of California Santa Barbara.

Charter schools, in particular, have long been a contentious issue within the Democratic Party, pitting teachers unions against education reform groups. Staff at charter schools, which are publicly funded but often privately run, are rarely unionized.

To the dismay of some progressive groups and politicians, President Barack Obama’s two secretaries of education, Arne Duncan and John King, championed the growth of charter schools. In 2017, the NAACP called for a moratorium on these schools ― a stance that complicated the idea that so-called school choice is a civil rights issue, as education reform groups often argue.

Some groups like Democrats for Education Reform have pushed back against the portrayal of school choice as anything but liberal. The group only supports nonprofit public charter schools and is opposed to other forms of school choice, like voucher programs.

“We’re very clear about the legacy in which we operate. We operate within the legacy of Barack Obama. His agenda is our agenda, and it’s an agenda that hundreds of Democrats across the country support,” Shavar Jeffries, leader of Democrats for Education Reform, told BuzzFeed in February 2018.

But the election of President Trump and his selection of the pro-charter DeVos to be secretary of education have put these Democrats in a tricky spot. Charter schools quickly became associated with DeVos, whom many see as public education’s No. 1 enemy. The issue was suddenly a partisan one, with polls showing liberal support for charter schools dropping. In the 2018 elections, a new crop of liberal candidates criticized charter schools with zeal.

Last spring’s wave of teacher walkouts centered in right-to-work states, where unions have relatively little power. In Los Angeles, the local union is flexing its muscle, with 98 percent of voting members supporting a strike.

How the city’s Democratic mayor, California’s governor and its state superintendent for public instruction react to the strike will be watched closely.

“In the red-state rebellion, people were standing up and fighting against the pro-corporate policies of the GOP. In LA, people are going to be standing up and fighting against the pro-corporate policies of the Democrats,” said Claycomb, who has been teaching for nine years.”

Interesting analysis and one Democratic candidates will need to consider.  We support our teachers and we hope that a settlement can be reached soon.

Tony