Dear Commons Community,

Will Wilkinson, a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, has a piece today entitled, Why Did So Many Americans Vote for Trump?  He does a good analysis of the strategy of  the Democrats depending too much upon the ills of the pandemic while Republicans were exploiting displaced workers who desperately needed a paycheck.  Here is an excerpt:

“Democrats needed to present a competing, compelling strategy to counter Republican messaging. Struggling workers and businesses never clearly heard exactly what they’d get if Democrats ran the show, and Democrats never came together to scream bloody murder that Republicans were refusing to give it to them. Democrats needed to underscore the depth of Republican failure by forcefully communicating what other countries had done to successfully control the virus. And they needed to promise to do the same through something like an Operation Warp Speed for testing and P.P.E. to get America safely back in business.

Instead, they whined that Mr. Trump’s negligence and incompetence were to blame for America’s economic woes and complained that Mitch McConnell wouldn’t even consider the House’s big relief bill. They weren’t wrong, but correctly assigning culpability did nothing to help working-class breadwinners who can’t bus tables, process chickens, sell smoothies or clean hotel rooms over Zoom.

The Republican message couldn’t have been clearer: Workers should be able to show up, clock in, earn a normal paycheck, pay the rent and feed their kids. Democrats were telling the same workers that we need to listen to science, reopening is premature, and the economy can’t be fully restored until we beat the virus. Correct! But how does that help when rent was due last week?

Make no mistake, it was unforgivably cruel of Republicans to force blue-collar and service workers to risk death for grocery money. Yet their disinformation campaign persuaded many millions of Americans that the risk was minimal and that Democrats were keeping their workplaces and schools closed, their customers and kids at home, and their wallets empty and cupboards bare for bogus reasons.

The president’s mendacious push to hastily reopen everything was less compelling to college-educated suburbanites, who tend to trust experts and can work from home, watch their kids and spare a laptop for online kindergarten. Mr. Trump lost the election mainly because he lost enough of these voters, including some moderate Republicans who otherwise voted straight Republican tickets.”

The entire article is below.

Wilkinson provides excellent insight – Listen up Democrats!

Tony

 —————————————————————–

New York Times

Why Did So Many Americans Vote for Trump?

By Will Wilkinson

Contributing Opinion Writer

Nov. 27, 2020

President Trump’s disastrous mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic probably cost him re-election. Yet it seems mind-boggling that he still won more votes than any incumbent president in American history despite his dereliction of responsibility at a time of a once-in-a-century health crisis and economic devastation.

Why are President-elect Joe Biden’s margins so thin in the states that clinched his victory? And why did the president’s down-ticket enablers flourish in the turbulent, plague-torn conditions they helped bring about?

Democrats, struggling to make sense of it all, are locked in yet another round of mutual recrimination: They were either too progressive for swing voters — too socialist or aggressive with ambitious policies like the Green New Deal — or not progressive enough to inspire potential Democratic voters to show up or cross over.

But they should understand that there was really no way to avoid disappointment. Three factors — the logic of partisan polarization, which inaccurate polling obscured; the strength of the juiced pre-Covid-19 economy; and the success of Mr. Trump’s denialist, open-everything-up nonresponse to the pandemic — mostly explain why Democrats didn’t fare better.

This shocking strategy worked for Republicans, even if it didn’t pan out for the president himself. Moreover, it laid a trap that Democrats walked into — something they should understand and adjust for, as best they can, as they look ahead.

How could a president responsible for one of the gravest failures of governance in American history nevertheless maintain such rock-solid support? Democracy’s throw-the-bums-out feedback mechanism gets gummed up when the electorate disagrees about the identity of the bums, what did and didn’t occur on their watch and who deserves what share of the credit or blame.

When party affiliation becomes a central source of meaning and self-definition, reality itself becomes contested and verifiable facts turn into hot-button controversies. Elections can’t render an authoritative verdict on the performance of incumbents when partisans in a closely divided electorate tell wildly inconsistent stories about one another and the world they share.

Mr. Trump has a knack for leveraging the animosities of polarized partisanship to cleave his supporters from sources of credible information and inflame them with vilifying lies. This time, it wasn’t enough to save his bacon, which suggests that polarization hasn’t completely wrecked our democracy’s capacity for self-correction: Sweeping a medium-size city’s worth of dead Americans under the rug turned out to be too tall an order.

However, Mr. Trump’s relentless campaign to goose the economy by cutting taxes, running up enormous deficits and debt, and hectoring the Fed into not raising rates was working for millions of Americans. We tend to notice when we’re personally more prosperous than we were a few years before.

But the president’s catastrophic response to Covid-19 threw the economy into a tailspin. That is where it gets interesting — and Democrats get uncomfortable.

Mr. Trump abdicated responsibility, shifting the burden onto states and municipalities with busted budgets. He then waged a war of words against governors and mayors — especially Democrats — who refused to risk their citizens’ lives by allowing economic and social activity to resume.

He spurred his supporters to make light of the danger of infection, made the churlish refusal to wear masks into an emblem of emancipation from the despotism of experts and turned public health restrictions on businesses, schools and social gatherings into a tyrannical conspiracy to steal power by damaging the economy and his re-election prospects.

He succeeded in putting Democrats on the defensive about economic restrictions and school closures. As months passed and with no new relief coming from Washington, financially straitened Democratic states and cities had little choice but to ease restrictions on businesses just to keep the lights on. That seemed to concede the economic wisdom of the more permissive approach in majority-Republican states and fed into Mr. Trump’s false narrative of victory over the virus and a triumphant return to normalcy.

But Democrats weren’t destined to get quite as tangled in Mr. Trump’s trap as they did. They had no way to avoid it, but they could have been hurt less by it. They allowed Republicans to define the contrast between the parties’ approaches to the pandemic in terms of freedom versus exhausting, indefinite shutdowns.

Democrats needed to present a competing, compelling strategy to counter Republican messaging. Struggling workers and businesses never clearly heard exactly what they’d get if Democrats ran the show, and Democrats never came together to scream bloody murder that Republicans were refusing to give it to them. Democrats needed to underscore the depth of Republican failure by forcefully communicating what other countries had done to successfully control the virus. And they needed to promise to do the same through something like an Operation Warp Speed for testing and P.P.E. to get America safely back in business.

Instead, they whined that Mr. Trump’s negligence and incompetence were to blame for America’s economic woes and complained that Mitch McConnell wouldn’t even consider the House’s big relief bill. They weren’t wrong, but correctly assigning culpability did nothing to help working-class breadwinners who can’t bus tables, process chickens, sell smoothies or clean hotel rooms over Zoom.

The Republican message couldn’t have been clearer: Workers should be able to show up, clock in, earn a normal paycheck, pay the rent and feed their kids. Democrats were telling the same workers that we need to listen to science, reopening is premature, and the economy can’t be fully restored until we beat the virus. Correct! But how does that help when rent was due last week?

Make no mistake, it was unforgivably cruel of Republicans to force blue-collar and service workers to risk death for grocery money. Yet their disinformation campaign persuaded many millions of Americans that the risk was minimal and that Democrats were keeping their workplaces and schools closed, their customers and kids at home, and their wallets empty and cupboards bare for bogus reasons.

The president’s mendacious push to hastily reopen everything was less compelling to college-educated suburbanites, who tend to trust experts and can work from home, watch their kids and spare a laptop for online kindergarten. Mr. Trump lost the election mainly because he lost enough of these voters, including some moderate Republicans who otherwise voted straight Republican tickets.

Democrats need to rethink the idea that these voters would have put Democratic House and Senate candidates over the top if only Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were less radiantly socialist. They need to accept that they took hits on the economy by failing to escape the trap Republicans set by doggedly refusing to do anything about the uncontained contagion destroying it.

And they need to understand how Mr. Trump saved his party by weaponizing polarization. Conservatives needed a way not to get spun by the president’s destabilizing act of disloyalty, so they steadied themselves by reaffirming their loyalty down the remainder of the ballot. They were voting against a personal crisis of identity, not the Green New Deal.

Democrats might have done better had sunny polls and their own biased partisan perceptions not misled them into believing that backlash to indisputably damning Republican failure would deliver an easy Senate majority — but not much better. Until the mind-bending spell of polarization breaks, everything that matters will be fiercely disputed and even the most egregious failures will continue to go unpunished.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8DGRHN4YZs

Dear Commons Community,

Sarah Fuller made history yesterday when she became the first woman to participate in a Power Five conference football game when she kicked off for Vanderbilt to start the second half at Missouri.

“I just think it’s incredible that I am able to do this, and all I want to do is be a good influence to the young girls out there because there were times like I struggled in sports,” Fuller said. “But I am so thankful I stuck with it, and it’s given me so many opportunities. I’ve met so many amazing people through sports, and I just want to say like literally you can do anything you set your mind to.”

Fuller kicked with a holder rather than using a tee in a designed squib kick, and the senior sent a low kick to the 35-yard line where it was pounced on by Missouri’s Mason Pack. Fuller didn’t get any other opportunities in Vanderbilt’s 41-0 loss to Missouri.

Coach Derek Mason made clear that Fuller kicked for the Commodores due to need, not for history or publicity. COVID-19 protocols and restrictions left Mason with very few options, prompting him to reach out to the soccer team for help.

Fuller, a 6-foot-2 goalkeeper, decided she was up for the challenge.

“I’m not about making statements,” Mason said. “This was out of necessity. You look at our week. Our students had gone home. The ability to have access to students and tryouts was almost nil in terms of like what’s available. … That just happened to be the most viable option.”

After Fuller’s kick, she went straight to the sideline, where she high-fived some of her new teammates and swapped some elbow bumps. Fuller’s parents watched and cheered from the stands along with her boyfriend and best friend.

Fuller practiced with the Commodores this week after helping the Commodores win the SEC Tournament last weekend. Fuller said her longest field goal in practice was 38 yards.

She wore “Play Like A Girl” on the back of her helmet. The senior will get to keep the No. 32 jersey she wore Saturday, the same as her number when playing soccer.

Fuller even gave a halftime pep talk, which she usually left to her soccer teammates, telling her new teammates that Vandy won the SEC soccer tournament title by cheering for each other whether on the field or the sideline.

“We had a different mindset coming out the second half,” quarterback Mike Wright said.

After her kickoff, reaction poured in on social media. Fuller was the No. 2 trending topic on Twitter, followed by Vandy. Her soccer team wrote on Twitter: “Glass. Everywhere.”

As in glass ceiling.

No woman had appeared in an SEC football game or for any Power Five team. Liz Heaston became the first woman to score with two extra points for Willamette in NAIA on Oct. 18, 1997.

Katie Hnida was the first woman to score at the Football Bowl Subdivision level with two extra points for New Mexico on Aug. 30, 2003.

April Goss was the second, with an extra point for Kent State in 2015. Tonya Butler was the first woman to kick a field goal in an NCAA game for Division II West Alabama on Sept. 13, 2003.

“Welcome to the club, (at)April Goss and I are waiting with snacks!” Hnida wrote on Twitter on Friday.

Missouri coach Eli Drinkwitz visited with Fuller before kickoff and repeated a message that Fuller has heard a lot in recent days. The father of four daughters told Fuller it was incredible they watched her make history.

“I’ve had girl dads come up to me and they’re like, ‘You’re inspiring my little girls, and I want them to know that they can do anything and you’re proving that point.’ And I think that has been the coolest thing,” Fuller said.

Fuller also made clear she’d be up for continuing to help the football team if needed. She believes she can refine her timing and technique with more practice.

Vanderbilt (0-8) visits No. 13 Georgia next week.

“If she wants to kick and she’s available, we’d love to have her,” Mason said.

Congratulations Ms. Fuller!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I have just finished reading Isabel Wilkerson’s new book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.  As the jacket cover states, “Beyond race, class or other factors, a powerful caste system influences people’s lives and behavior and the nation’s fate.”  She links the caste system in the United States to those of 1930s Nazi Germany and India.  She uses stories including her own personal experiences to support her thinking and positioning of caste as a dominant social phenomenon in the three countries.  Some of her stories, especially those in the American South, are riveting and bring to light  the legacy of racism that has existed and continues to exist in our country. 

I had read her earlier work, The Warmth of Other People’s Suns, and was so taken by it that it is recommended reading for students in my graduate courses at Hunter College.  However, as interesting as her stories in Caste are, I had trouble with her comparisons of the American version of caste to those in Nazi Germany and India.  In my view, racism in the United States surely exists but I don’t know that it is similar to those in 1930s Germany and India.  To me, racism and slavery in the United States was based originally on the economic exploitation of African Americans, who served as the foundation of our agrarian economy. And here in the United States, to this day, we have never adequately addressed our problem with race and skin color.  In Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler used the persecution of Jews as a mechanism to create a fervor for hate and his warped sense of Aryan superiority.  In India, caste has been in existence for thousands of years and is culturally ingrained in the Hindu religion.  

I have read several reviews of Caste and the one that resonates best with me is  by the anthropologist, Arjun Appaduri that appeared in The Wire in September.  He struggles with the comparison of caste to race and also questions whether there are similarities of the American, German, and Indian versions.  His entire review is below.

Caste is surely an important book and makes for good reading, but its central thesis about caste can be questioned.

Tony

————————————————————————————

The Wire

Comparing Race to Caste Is an Interesting Idea, But There Are Crucial Differences Between Both

Arjun Appadurai

12/Sep/2020

Isabel Wilkerson’s book ‘Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents’ uses anecdotes and allegory to advance her thesis, which however does not stand on a strong structural foundation.

In my early twenties, I was a graduate student working on my doctorate at an obscure but prestigious department at the University of Chicago called The Committee on Social Thought. The programme required all students to read a small list of ‘Great Books’, usually 12 or 13, which we called the ‘Fundamentals’ and our course work was intended to help us master the right way to read these books.

According to our teachers, that way was to read the books in as close to the original as possible (even if in translation) and to avoid (at all costs) the vast secondary literature of commentary, criticism and interpretation which surrounded them. We thus confronted Plato and Augustine, Machiavelli and Marx, Shakespeare and Tolstoy, all in the raw, without any friendly secondary assistance.

This method is what I adopted when I read Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, without wading through the luxuriant forest of reviews of it that have already appeared, several by writers I know and admire. Accompanied by Oprah Winfrey’s hailing of this book as a work for the centuries, the nomination of Kamala Harris as running mate to Joseph Biden, as well as the renewed rage about race and racism sparked by the Black Lives Matter movement, Wilkerson’s book was pre-sold as a bestseller.

So, let me say right away that reading it was a strange experience. From the very first few pages, which describe the deadly effect of a heatwave on a nomadic population in Siberia, I sensed I was in a genre I knew but did not quite recognise.

As I read on, through a series of allegories about climate, animals, and epic battles between mythic groups, as well as of metaphors about houses, foundations, roofs, sills, and more, I gradually realised that I was experiencing a pedagogic genre of writing. This book is about big, bad things like race, caste, cruelty and torture presented as a series of modern epics. Wilkerson’s book is a guide to race and racial brutality in the US, told through the allegory of caste, the latter viewed as the skeleton under the flesh of black-white relationships in the 400-year history of what became the US. Its primary audience seems to be the mass liberal reading public of the US.

Once I understood the genre, I had no trouble understanding why every chapter, often every page, contained facts, anecdotes, reports and examples with which many of us are already familiar. This is not a book which claims to be based on original research. It is a polemical and pedagogical work, the single-minded aim of which is to show that what we mistakenly think of as race in the history of the US is, in fact, better thought of as caste, an underlying code, programme, skeleton, or structure which accounts for racist behaviour and institutions, which are simply its primary instrument and expression.

The place which exemplifies caste is India, and Wilkerson succeeds in marshalling many descriptive and analytic verities about caste in India that we have heard for a century: its rigidity, its fixity, its tyranny, its permanence, and the quasi-religious foundations which define both its foundation and its reach over daily life.

I cannot resist the temptation to criticise Wilkerson’s book from the vantage point of a specialist in the anthropology of India, who has spent the better part of four decades poring over hundreds of books and essays about caste. That might seem both too easy and somehow beside the point for a book in which caste is mostly a device to offer a new picture of the racialised world of the US.

Yet, it is important to point out a few differences which make a difference, between caste and race. Caste crystallised over several millennia of Indian history, primarily as a cosmology which allowed pastoral and agricultural colonisers from the Northwest of the subcontinent to gradually colonise thousands of groups and communities who were previously not organised into castes. The new framework allowed many locally dominant groups to organise their local subordinates into a system which conflated rank, occupation and purity into a single status system. This is very different from the creation of whiteness as a category of domination in the context of the colonial and later independent US.

Then, there is the matter of purity and pollution, also discussed by Wilkerson, which many of us see as the driving source of caste ideology in India, whereas in the US, the polluting status of black Americans is an effect of racialised ranking and not a cause. Also, the Indian caste system is geared to an infinity of caste ranks, and many Indian villages have 30 or more hierarchically ranked castes (jatis), all keenly aware of who is above them and who is below.

Finally, while the top of the Indian caste system, usually composed of Brahmins, is permanent, closed and unquestionable, the bottom, which is certainly defined by Dalits (Untouchables) is strangely porous, since every Indian caste, including the lowest, has someone or some group, usually in a neighbouring village, who performs polluting services (like cremation, scavenging and hair-cutting) for them, and is therefore lower than they are. In short, no group in India, however low, lacks a group beneath them that lets them feel purer. This is very different from the exclusionary logic of race, which is binary (black versus white) and lacks any cosmological basis for one black person to feel racially superior to another black.

For these reasons, mobility at every level has been part of the history of caste in India, (contra the myth of its rigidity) and here the semiotics of pigment in American race relations is a massive obstacle to such mobility, actual or aspirational. Even in the past 50 years in India, the entry of Dalits into Indian political parties, elections and in the bureaucracy has been both numerically impressive and irreversible, even if the upper caste backlash against this mobility, in terms of rape, arson and public humiliation of Dalits has also intensified.

Wilkerson is right to note the flow of ideas between Dalits and African Americans, involving figures as different as Martin Luther King, W.E.B. Dubois, Angela Davis, Ambedkar and groups such as the Black Panthers and the Dalit Panthers. This is one of many cases of such mutual admiration in human history among both oppressors and oppressed. The mutual identification of various kinds of proletariat in the long period of socialist internationalism is a major example of such traffic. But such mutual admiration cannot be the basis for the sort of deep structural comparison that Wilkerson is keen to make.

I must raise one other question, since Wilkerson expends a great deal of effort to show why the similarities between caste in India and race in the US are so striking, so relevant and so much more important than the differences. My question is this: if caste in the US is a kind of code, which is buried deep under the surface of race (and of the brutal etiquette and institutions of race and racism), how can we compare it to a society like India, where caste is both the code and the everyday reality? Put another way, either India has no underlying social programme, grammar and theory, and its social world is simply caste all the way up and down (something I doubt) , or Wilkerson’s dramatic unearthing of caste under the surface of race in the US is just a literary device to tell a familiar American story in an unfamiliar way, and is not based on a genuine similarity.

I lean towards the latter reading.

And then there is the joker in the pack, the case of Nazi Germany and its appearance in Wilkerson’s book as the third example of the value of caste as a lens into a story which is not normally discussed in caste terms. The objections here have been made by others but they are crippling: the relative shortness of the dominance of Nazi ideology; the entirely different history of antisemitism in European history, by comparison with colourism in the US and casteism in the Indian subcontinent; the Nazi wish to truly exterminate Jews, rather than to simply exploit, degrade and isolate in the Dalit and African-American cases, as cogs in some sort of economic machine.

The value of Wilkerson’s book is in the dignity of her narration, her refusal to vent excessively about her personal wounds as an African American writer and thinker, her clarity about the ethics of structural racism, and her highly accessible style.

But the biggest challenge that Wilkerson does not address, speaking from my vantage point as a social scientist in 2020, is one about race and caste as social constructions. Wilkerson is at pains to show, in stunning detail, that the ideology and practices of racism in the US are crafted, built, shored up, repaired, restored and updated, on a continuous basis: in short, they are socially constructed.

The puzzle that I and many others would have loved to see Wilkerson tackle is hardly touched on. And that puzzle is why some constructions acquire the sort of durability that resists all counter-evidence, all discovery, all qualification, all falsification, while others are as fragile as a flower and as quick to disappear as a rainstorm. Caste and race are monsters of resilience, and for this we need some third point of leverage for a truly powerful explanation.

Meanwhile, we can be grateful to Wilkerson for reminding us of their affinities.

Arjun Appadurai  is an Indian-American anthropologist and theorist in globalization studies.  He teaches in New York and Berlin. His most recent book, co-authored with Neta Alexander, is Failure (London: Polity Press, 2019)

Dear Commons Community,

Today’s issue of Science has an article alerting readers that the public needs to be prepared for side effects from the coronavirus vaccine.  Essentially the article warns that a subset of people taking the vaccine may face intense, most likely temporary, side effects which are termed “reactogenicity.”  The article cautions these side effects may include swelling of joints, fever, cold and hot rushes.  The article also advises that these transient reactions should not dissuade people from getting vaccinated.  The full article is below.

As I have said a number of times on this blog – I will take the vaccine (side effects and all) only if Dr. Anthony Faucie says it is okay.

Tony

Trump Loses it at Thanksgiving Day Press Conference

Dear Commons Community,

Donald Trump held a news conference last night at about 6:00 pm during which he answered questions from reporters and only Fox News aired it.  CNN, MSNBC and the major networks did not carry  it.  And it is good that they didn’t as his comments were nothing but the same bunch of election fraud lies that he has been telling for the past three weeks.

Trump completely flipped out when asked a follow-up question by Reuters White House correspondent Jeff Mason who asked him if he will concede when the Electoral College votes for President-elect Joe Biden. 

“Well if they do, they made a mistake, because this election was a fraud,” Trump replied, before launching into a tirade about the number of votes Biden got compared to former President Barack Obama.

When Mason interrupted this lengthy digression, Trump snapped, “Don’t talk to me that way.”

″You’re just a lightweight. Don’t talk to me that way. I’m the president of the United States. Don’t ever talk to the president that way,” he added.

This tone typified much of the press conference, in which the president evaded questions about whether he will attend Biden’s inauguration, persistently alleged widespread voter fraud, attacked election officials, and complained that his successor shouldn’t be allowed to take credit for a COVID-19 vaccine.

Following the Mason exchange, Trump said: “It’s going to be a very hard thing to concede, because we know there was massive fraud…This was a massive fraud, this should never take place in this country. We’re like a third-world country.”

The president said he wouldn’t comment on his attendance at any inauguration event on Jan. 20, adding: “I know the answer to that, but I don’t want to say it yet.” When pressed by other reporters, Trump said that he would leave the White House in January.

“Certainly I will. … Certainly I will, and you know that,” Trump said before adding, “There will be a lot of things happening between now and January 20th, a lot of things.”

Trump and his attorneys have lost virtually all of their court challenges to the results of the presidential election in the key battleground states of Georgia, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

Biden won more than 80 million votes in the election, a historic number, and currently leads the president by more than 6 million votes.

“I know one thing, Joe Biden did not get 80 million votes,” Trump said without evidence. “This race is far from over.”

Electors will meet on Dec. 14 to cast their votes in their respective states, a move that constitutionally determines the next president.

Biden holds 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232. Congress counts and certifies the results on Jan. 6. Biden will be inaugurated on Jan. 20.

Trump even demeaned Republican election officials in Georgia and said he “didn’t lose” in the state despite a hand recount that confirmed Biden led in the state by just over 12,000 votes. That recount, Trump said, was “meaningless.” (It is not.) He said his loss in the Electoral College would be “fraud,” a statement not supported by any evidence.

“If they do, they’ve made a mistake,” the president said, referring to the Electoral College certifying Biden as the winner next month.

I think it was a smart move on the part of the news media not to air this press conference.  Trump should be happy too because it showed viewers that losing the presidential election is eating away at his sanity!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday President-Elect gave greetings (see video above) on the eve of Thanksgiving.  His basic message was one of unity and a call for our country “to be made whole again!”

Happy Thanksgiving!

Tony

David Dinkins with his wife Joyce, who predeceased him last month

Dear Commons Community,

David N. Dinkins, the 106^th mayor of New York City from  1990 to 1993 died on Monday at the age of 93.  He served a single four-year term as the City’s first and only Black mayor. His tenure has been judged harshly at times, but it was also filled with accomplishments.

Mr. Dinkins had a significant influence on the city, shaping its physical infrastructure and beginning criminal justice initiatives that started to reduce crime.

He was remembered as a gentleman who led the city during a difficult period of fiscal crisis and racial tension — themes that the city and the nation are currently grappling with once again.

“David Dinkins simply set this city on a better path,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said yesterday.

The New York Times has an article this morning listing five of his contributions. Here is a look:  

A mentor who inspired others to run for office

Mr. Dinkins helped inspire a generation of Black leaders to run for office, including Laurie Cumbo, the majority leader of the New York City Council.

“His campaign inspired and ushered in the new wave of Black elected leaders, which then opened up opportunities for all people to know that they can also lead,” she said.

Carl Heastie, the speaker of the New York State Assembly, said Mr. Dinkins “was an example that although you may be the first, you must push open the doors for those who will come after you.”

Mr. Dinkins was a mentor to Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat in his second term who said Mr. Dinkins deserved credit for his marriage. He met his wife, Chirlane McCray, while both were serving in the Dinkins administration.

“He was my mentor, he was my friend, and his steadfast commitment to fight for that ‘gorgeous mosaic’ inspires me every single day,” the mayor said, referring to Mr. Dinkins’s motto — and the name of his biography — that symbolized the city’s mix of people of different races, faiths and sexual orientations.

Mr. Dinkins also had the most diverse administration up to that point. Two women became deputy mayors, and he appointed the city’s first Puerto Rican fire commissioner. For police commissioner, he chose Lee P. Brown, a Black veteran of the Atlanta and Houston forces.

He was a racial reconciliator

Mr. Dinkins was elected not long after Yusef Hawkins, a Black teenager, was chased and murdered by a white mob in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn, and a white jogger was beaten and raped in Central Park, leading to the conviction of five Black and Latino teenagers who were later exonerated.

It was a time of great racial strife in New York City and Mr. Dinkins issued a call for unity.

Stacy Lynch, the daughter of Mr. Dinkins’s chief political strategist, Bill Lynch, said her father often talked about how difficult it was to lead with that message of reconciliation.

“You had entire neighborhoods in the city that didn’t believe in his gorgeous mosaic,” said Ms. Lynch, now an aide to Mr. de Blasio. “The expectation that one person could resolve all of that was unrealistic. What he tried to do was create a space where people could work it out.”

But he also struggled to respond to racial violence in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, after a car in a rabbi’s motorcade killed a Black boy — an episode that came to define his mayoralty.

Patrick Gaspard, president of the Open Society Foundations, who served as a senior aide to Mr. Dinkins, recalled being a young man who was constantly enraged at the racial injustice that he encountered. But Mr. Dinkins, who was also outraged by racial injustice, had a different approach.

Mr. Gaspard, who referred to Mr. Dinkins as a “political Jackie Robinson,” recalled one St. Patrick’s Day parade where the crowd hurled beer cans at the mayor along with racial epithets. As he was rushed to his car, a beer can almost struck Mr. Dinkins. Mr. Gaspard saw a flash of anger on Mr. Dinkins’s face.

“I saw him breathe deeply, compose himself and wave to the crowd,” Mr. Gaspard said. “I know what he wanted to say and the response he wanted to give back but he was not going to debase himself or the office.”

The Rev. Al Sharpton said that he had urged Mr. Dinkins to be more strident and confrontational on issues of race, but was rebuffed.

“He was a racial reconciler without giving up what he believed,” Mr. Sharpton said. “He never stopped being a warrior, he just fought in ways that sometimes those who agreed with him didn’t understand.”

He laid the groundwork for a record drop in crime

Mr. Dinkins added police officers to combat the city’s troubling murder rate and raised taxes to make it happen.

His “Safe Streets, Safe City” plan increased the size of the police force to roughly 38,000 officers. Homicides hit an all-time high on his watch — there were 2,245 murders in 1990, including the subway killing of a tourist from Utah named Brian Watkins. They fell by 13 percent during his tenure to 1,946 in his last year in office and declined much more under Rudolph W. Giuliani, who succeeded him.

Michael R. Bloomberg, who served as mayor after him, said on Tuesday that he often reminded people that Mr. Dinkins’s successors “stood on his shoulders and built on his legacy.”

“He entered City Hall at a difficult time in New York’s history, and he helped set the city on a course for success — and a reduction in crime — that no one at the time imagined possible,” Mr. Bloomberg said.

He improved the National Tennis Center and Times Square

Mr. Dinkins, an avid tennis player, expanded the National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows, Queens. Mr. Bloomberg later called it “the only good athletic sports stadium deal, not just in New York but in the country.”

Mr. Dinkins made other impressions on the city’s physical infrastructure.

He began the remarkable transformation of Times Square, even though Mr. Giuliani is often given credit. A key deal with the Walt Disney Company to rebuild the New Amsterdam Theater on 42nd Street was agreed upon on the last day of the Dinkins administration in December 1993.

Mr. Dinkins fought for years to pull together the parties that would spark the revitalization of the area because he knew what it would signal, Mr. Gaspard said.

“He knew that it would become a beacon that demonstrated to the world that New York City was open for business,” he said.

He championed policies that helped poor New Yorkers

Mr. Dinkins was known for programs that helped the city’s poorest residents, including the after-school program known as Beacon centers, and putting health care clinics in medically underserved neighborhoods.

Beacon centers, which were created in 1991 as part of “Safe City, Safe Streets,” offer sports, tutoring and crafts in an effort to keep children out of trouble. The city now has 91 centers.

Mr. Dinkins also started an innovative plan to add health clinics in struggling neighborhoods to give poor children another option instead of expensive emergency room visits.

Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president and one of several candidates hoping to be the city’s second Black mayor, said Mr. Dinkins’s successes were not merely symbolic.

“Through his actions on behalf of lower-income people, he was both our effective advocate and confirmation of a long-held hope that our lives mattered to our government,” he said.

In sum, New York is a better place because of him.

May he and his wife rest in peace!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Deep in the Mars-like landscape of Utah’s red-rock desert, a gleaming metal monolith (see video above) was found last week in one of the most remote parts of the state.

The smooth, tall structure was found during a helicopter survey of bighorn sheep in southeastern Utah, officials said Monday.

A crew from the Utah Department of Public Safety and Division of Wildlife Resources spotted the gleaming object from the air Nov. 18 and landed to check it out during a break from their work.

They found the three-sided stainless-steel object is about as tall as two men put together. But they discovered no clues about who might have driven it into the ground among the undulating red rocks or why.

“This thing is not from another world,” said Lt. Nick Street of the Utah Highway Patrol, part of the Department of Public Safety.

Still, it’s clear that it took some planning and work to construct the 10- to 12-foot (3- to 4-meter) monolith and embed it in the rock.

The exact location is so remote that officials are not revealing it publicly, worried that people might get lost or stranded trying to find it and need to be rescued.

The monolith evokes the one that appears in the Stanley Kubrick movie “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Because it’s on federal public land, it’s illegal to place art objects without authorization.

Bureau of Land Management officials are investigating how long it’s been there, who might have created it and whether to remove it.

Somebody is having some fun!

Tony

 Dear Commons Community, 

Business leaders are celebrating yesterday’s performance of the Dow Jones Industrial Average breaking the 30,000 point mark for the first time in its history.  Analysts were crediting news about the latest progress in developing coronavirus vaccines,  the transition of power in the United States to President-elect Joe Biden, and the appointment of Janet Yellin as Biden’s Treasury Secretary. These probably all contributed, but there were also longer term business developments that have helped the Dow reach this milestone.  The Associated Press has an article (see below) this morning analyzing the rise in the Dow for those of us who do not follow it closely.  

Tony

——————————————————————————————–

The Associated Press

EXPLAINER: Why the Dow topped 30,000 for the first time

By STAN CHOE

November 25, 2020

NEW YORK (AP) — Wall Street busted through its latest milestone Tuesday, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average topped 30,000 for the first time.

The Dow rose 454.97 points, or 1.5%, to close at 30,046.24. Investors were encouraged by progress in the development of coronavirus vaccines and news that the transition of power to President-elect Joe Biden is finally beginning. Traders also welcomed word that Biden has selected Janet Yellen, a widely respected former Federal Reserve chair, as treasury secretary.

The milestone is an attention-grabbing psychological threshold, and it’s an encouraging signal that the market’s rally is broadening beyond the handful of stocks that carried Wall Street through the pandemic. But the Dow at 30,000 means less to most investors’ 401(k) accounts than the fact that broader market indexes are also at record highs.

Here’s a look at how the Dow has rallied to its latest multiple of 10,000, the first time that’s happened since January 2017, and what it means for investors.

WHAT IS THE DOW, EXACTLY?

It’s a measure of 30 companies, mostly blue-chip stocks spread across a range of industries. They include tech stars like Apple and Microsoft, as well as more traditional industrial companies like Boeing and Caterpillar. Other behemoths in the Dow include Nike and The Walt Disney Co.

Unlike many other measures of the market, the most important thing for the Dow is how big a stock’s price is, not how much a company is worth in total. That means a 1% move for UnitedHealth Group has a bigger effect on the Dow than the same movement for Apple, even though Apple is worth more than six times the insurer. That’s because UnitedHealth Group’s stock price is $336.01 versus $115.17 for Apple, due to having a smaller number of total shares.

HOW BIG A DEAL IS DOW 30,000?

It’s just an arbitrary number, and it doesn’t mean things are much better than when the Dow was at 29,999. What’s more impactful is that the Dow has finally clawed back all its losses from the pandemic and is once again reaching new heights. It is up 61.5% since dropping below 18,600 on March 23.

It took just over nine months for the Dow to surpass the record it had set in February, before panic about the coronavirus triggered the market’s breathtaking sell-off.

WHAT GOT THE DOW THIS HIGH?

The Dow’s rocket ride to 30,000 got big boosts from the Federal Reserve, which slashed short-term interest rates back to roughly zero and took other measures to stabilize financial markets, and Congress, which came through with trillions of dollars of financial aid for the economy.

The economy has improved since the pandemic’s initial shock. For instance, claims for unemployment benefits dropped from 6.9 million in March to 742,000 last week. Company profits didn’t tank as much as initially feared. And the possibility that a COVID vaccine could begin distribution by the end of the year has recently given the market more reason to be optimistic.

Among individual companies, Apple did much of the heavy lifting early in the Dow’s recovery after its price soared nearly $275 to above $500 by late August. A four-for-one stock split on Aug. 28 cut Apple’s stock price below $130, diminishing its impact on the Dow, even though its total market value continued to rise.

Since then, Honeywell and Caterpillar have provided the biggest boosts to the Dow as expectations have built for a recovering economy.

Looking over the longer term, profits strengthened sharply for most Dow companies since it first rose above the 20,000 threshold at the start of 2017. At American Express, for example, analysts expect earnings per share to bounce back from the pandemic and tally $6.69 next year, versus $6.07 in recurring earnings in 2016.

At the same time, investors today are more willing to pay higher prices for each $1 of earnings because alternatives are less attractive. The yield on the 10-year Treasury Tuesday was 0.88% compared with 2.5% in January 2017.

SO THIS MEANS MY 401K IS DOING BETTER?

Probably, but not because the Dow is at 30,000. For most 401(k) accounts, what matters much more is how the S&P 500 is performing. That’s because many, many more stock funds either directly mimic the S&P 500 or benchmark themselves against that index than the Dow.

Nearly $4.6 trillion in investments directly track the S&P 500, while another $6.65 trillion measure themselves against the index’s performance. That total of $11.24 trillion is roughly 360 times the $31.5 billion in investments that track or benchmark their performance against the Dow.

Tuesday’s rally also pushed the S&P 500 above its record high set on Nov. 16.

WHY PAY ANY ATTENTION TO THE DOW, THEN?

One thing the Dow’s final leap to 30,000 indicates is that it’s no longer just tech stocks driving the market.

Five Big Tech companies — Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and Google’s parent company — alone account for nearly 22% of the S&P 500 by market value. That gives their movements incredible sway over the S&P 500. The Dow doesn’t even include Amazon, Facebook or Google’s parent company.

The dominance of Big Tech early in the market’s recovery is a big reason the S&P 500 returned to its pre-pandemic record in August compared to November for the Dow. More recently, with hopes rising that a vaccine or two may be arriving soon, the stock market’s gains have begun to broaden out.

The Dow is more heavily weighted toward stocks in the financial and industrial industries, which have done better than tech recently after earlier getting walloped by the pandemic.

NEXT STOP IS DOW 40,000, RIGHT?

Many strategists along Wall Street are optimistic that stocks can keep climbing in 2021, mainly because of the prospects for a vaccine. But the market is facing plenty of threats in the near term. Chief among them is the worsening pandemic, which is pushing governments around the world to bring back varying degrees of restrictions on businesses.

Bitter partisanship also means Congress is making little to no progress on delivering more financial support for the economy in the meantime. That sets the stage for a potentially bleak winter for both health and the economy.

So don’t be surprised if the Dow crosses back and forth over the 30,000 threshold a few more times.

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article this morning asking the question: Will Covid-19 Revive Faculty Power?   While the pandemic has spurred professors across the country to organize, the concern is that they may be too late!  Here is an excerpt from the The Chronicle piece.

“The pandemic, with the financial pummeling that accompanies it, is a mighty force, perhaps impossible to combat. By the beginning of July, more than 51,000 higher-education employees had already been furloughed, laid off, or had their contracts not renewed, according to Chronicle reporting. Some boards and presidents have acted unilaterally, with little incentive not to. Decades of adjunctification have already thinned the ranks of full-time college instructors and weakened the collective power of the teaching staff — perhaps past a point of no return.

However, across the country, faculty members are campaigning to be meaningfully heard by the powers that be at their institutions — big and small, elite and open access. They’re laying the bricks of new structures of faculty and staff governance after decades of erosion. In some ways, the pandemic has become this “great leveler,” says Jennifer Fredette, an associate professor of political science at Ohio University. Tenured professors are feeling the insecurity that contingent faculty members have long experienced. A raw deal has reached their doorstep, she says, and they’re now saying, “Nobody deserves this.” Still, Fredette says  this movement is bigger than one institution. It feels impossible to go backward. “I don’t know how you put the genie back in the bottle.”

After a panicky spring came a summer of fear, anger, and growing resentment. Nationwide, instructors have been denouncing myriad decisions that they say weren’t constructed with shared-governance principles in mind. In some cases, concerns about their own health are going unheeded, they say, as college leaders make tuition-paying students a priority over employee safety.

Faculty groups have criticized austerity measures for affecting the lowest-paid workers first, rather than cutting from the top. The City University of New York’s faculty and staff union is suing the university for not reappointing around 2,800 employees, seeking to rehire those people and award back pay and benefits. Grass-roots protests have cropped at Canisius College, in Buffalo, and Carthage College, in Wisconsin.

Some college boards rubber-stamped the decisions of their leaders. Trustees at Radford University, in Virginia, passed a resolution that gave the university’s president budget-cutting powers to meet “challenges associated with the Covid-19 global health pandemic,” Nonprofit Quarterly reported. Trustees at Ohio University did something similar, ratifying “all staffing, operational, and financial decisions” related to Covid-19 made by the president, The Chronicle previously reported. Faculty in the University of Wisconsin system have cried foul about a financial plan they say is a power grab, the Wisconsin Examiner reported.

At Pennsylvania State University and Purdue University, professors chastised their leadership for largely skirting the professoriate while making plans for the fall semester, including decisions about instruction. Purdue’s president, Mitch Daniels, insisted on national television that Purdue must give it “the old college try” and reopen. Its chapter of the American Association of University Professors said in a press release that leaders had brought “not one single piece of legislation regarding changes to instruction due to Covid-19 to the University Senate, the faculty representative body at Purdue, let alone reopening plans.”

And control over what happens in one’s own classroom seems to vary drastically from campus to campus. Contingent faculty, especially, have far less power to assert their will if they want to work remotely. Protesters staged “die-ins” at Penn State and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a car caravan at Boston University. At least two faculty groups — one at UNC and another at Appalachian State University — were so alarmed with their institutions’ fall plans that they pleaded publicly with their students not to return to campus. A group of faculty and staff members in the UNC system sued in an attempt to delay the reopening. (After 135 students and staff tested positive for Covid-19 during the first week of classes, UNC-Chapel Hill pivoted to remote instruction.)

In late June, the AAUP warned that the pandemic “must not become the occasion” to “jettison normative principles of academic governance.”

I gave a talk last week at the Online Learning Consortium’s ACCELERATE conference basically making the case that the pandemic has eviscerated faculty governance at most college campuses.  Traditional governing procedures related to collective bargaining, class size, faculty and staff dismissals have been bypassed to meet the dire fiscal situation that colleges are facing.  It was my conclusion that without a substantial federal stimulus package, higher education’s fiscal situation is not going to change soon and if it doesn’t, faculty governance will be in jeopardy

Tony