A Seat at the Table: Why Economic Rights Must Transcend Identity Politics

In a recent Brimmings post, I cautioned Democrats to avoid identity politics: “While minority rights matter, they musn’t be set against the economic rights of all Americans to a fair share. Otherwise, we reap continuing resentment, social fissure, and exploitation.”

To blame working class white males for Harris’ defeat isn’t where it’s at. Truth is America’s working class transcends race and ethnicity. 15% of Blacks voted for Trump; 41% of Hispanic voters did the same. Collectively, they provided the margin of victory in the battleground states.

Perceiving themselves as marginalized while others jumped the queue, they voted their resentment. Trump masterfully exploited that resentment, focusing on unchecked immigration (8 million) at the southern border under four years of Biden.

America’s healing lies in addressing their grievances; if not, we’ll continue to be prey to demagoguery and its selfish interests.

Everyone needs to feel they’ve a place at the table, regardless of race, origin, or background.

—rj

Beyond Self: The Power of Empathy in Troubling Times”

In this anxiety-ridden age, I’m sometimes tempted to tune out the endless cacophony and retreat into a myopic vista of self-concern. But in doing so, I’d foreclose on empathy, essential for promoting understanding, compassion, and a kinder world.

It’s why I read daily and widely. To not do so exacts a price I’m unwilling to pay. Favorite author Elif Shafak expresses my sentiment superbly:

“It is the Age of Angst indeed, but it will be a more dangerous and broken world if it were to become the Age of Apathy. The moment we become desensitised. The moment we stop following what is happening in Gaza, in Ukraine, in Sudan… the moment we stop thinking about our fellow human beings, and their stories and silences, here and everywhere…. the moment we stop paying attention, we stop connecting across borders, we stop caring.

“If there is one emotion that really should frighten us, it is the lack of all emotions. It is numbness. It is apathy.”

—rj

Early Voters Signal a New Day for America

According to the most recent polls, Harris and Trump are in a dead heat, the outcome uncertain. Sounds awful? Relax!

The polls are wrong.

Trump blew the Latino vote with the Madison Square Garden hate fest. Early voting returns show women voting in record numbers for Kamala. Same with seniors, concerned about healthcare under Trump.

Wednesday morning, a new day for America, a glass ceiling shattered, democracy prevails, and a watching world rejoices.

—rjoly

Trump’s Madison Square Garden Debacle: Is This the End?

Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally last Sunday may very well have alienated Latinos across the country and cost him the election.

The wound was inflicted not by Trump, but by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who appeared as a warm-up act before Trump took the stage.

Drawing from a barrage of stereotypes targeting Black, Jewish, Muslim, and Latino communities, Hinchcliffe described Puerto Rico as “a floating isle of garbage,” adding that Latinos “love making babies.”

Welcome to the October surprise!

Although the Republican campaign attempted immediate damage control, the fallout of rage was immediate and widespread.

Pivotal state Pennsylvania has a 427,000 Puerto Rican population. Then there’s North Carolina (115,000), Georgia (101,000), and Arizona (65,000), all of them battleground states essential for a Trump victory.

Nationally, 36 million Latinos are eligible to vote next week, up from 32 million in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center.

Trump’s been on shaky ground from the beginning, many Puerto Ricans still nursing a grudge over the former President’s reluctance to grant islanders $20bn in aid in the aftermath of hurricane Maria in September 2017 in which 3000 died. Puerto Rico went without power for 181 days.

His acting Homeland Security secretary, Elaine Duke, reported to the NYT Trump proposed selling or divesting the entire island of Puerto Rico. following the disaster.

In the meantime, Democrats have made it a priority to grant Puerto Rico statehood, an obvious political maneuver giving them two more senators and, with the probable inclusion of Washington, DC, two more.

As for the Puerto Rico commonwealth, its voters on election day will again be deciding on statehood. The 2024 plebiscite differs, however, the previous six allowing voters the popular option of remaining a commonwealth, exempt from federal taxes. This year’s plebiscite omits that option. It’s simply statehood, independence, or independence with free association, virtually assuring statehood approval.

Critics claim that House Democrats, in collaboration with Puerto Rico’s Popular Democratic Party (PPD), rigged the plebiscite by passing the Puerto Rico Passage Act (2022), which established the current plebiscite with its limited options (Plebiscite).

Meanwhile, Puerto Rican voters on the mainland are not unappreciative of Democrat overtures on their behalf, nationally and in Puerto Rico. “We are not garbage and we are not lazy and we’re all American citizens ready to vote in this election,” said Luis Miranda, founding president of the Hispanic Federation and chairperson of the Latino Victory Fund (Puerto Rican Jokes).

Statehood, nevertheless, remains an uphill climb. To achieve congressional approval of statehood, Democrats will need to control both chambers. Although a simple majority vote is all that’s needed in each, in the way looms the Senate’s filibuster with its sixty vote threshold.

Kamala Harris has pledged to temporally suspend it in any vote to restore Roe v. Wade, a move opponents argue could make the filibuster obsolete.

There have been two attempts on Trump’s life, possibly a third. Fortunately, these efforts failed. However, the fiasco at Madison Square Garden may have dealt a fatal blow to Trump’s chances of returning to office in a close election.

–rj

From Ally to Outlier: Türkiye’s Democratic Backslide

He is a weak ruler who needs religion to uphold his government; it is as if he would catch his people in a trap. My people are going to learn the principles of democracy, the dictates of truth, and the teachings of science.” — Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (Father of Modern Turkey)

If you’ve been reading the headlines, the 2024 BRICS assemblage of twenty heads of state has just concluded in Kansan, Russia. If you thought host Vladimir Putin lacks friends beyond China and North Korea, then you’re mistaken.

BRICS, in fact, is growing. This year’s consortium includes new members Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates in addition to its founding members: Brazil, Russia, India and South Africa (thus the acronym).

What you wouldn’t expect, being both a NATO member and EU candidate, is Türkiye’s applying for BRICS membership (September 2, 2024).

It would certainly surprise Mustafa Atatürk, Türkiye’s George Washington, who promoted Westernization, leading to the separation of religion and state, the ending of polygamy, the abolishing of the veil, the emancipation of women and the adoption of a Latinate script, replacing Arabic.

It’s past time to soft-pedal Türkiye, a subversive entity increasingly out-of-touch with the values of Western democracies.

Allow me to enumerate its transgressions:

1. Türkiye continues to discriminate against its 175,000 Christians in a country 95% Muslim. The primary lure of visitors to Istanbul is the famed Hagia Sophia cathedral, founded by Byzantine Emperor Justinian I in 537 CE. The conquering Sultan Mehmet II converted it into a mosque in 1453 CE. Atatürk, however, rescinded that action, designating it a museum. Türkiye’s high court annulled that decision in July 2020, a move hailed by Erdogan as “the second conquest of Istanbul.”

In the years 2018-2020, Türkiye deported more than fifty foreign Christian pastors on the pretext of constituting a threat to Turkish national security. As is, Christian ministers have no indigenous seminary, their future uncertain.

There was the notorious imprisonment of American Presbyterian pastor Robert Brunson, a 20-year resident of Türkiye on charges of  collusion with Kurds, undermining national security.  In response, Trump doubled tariffs in 2018 on Türkiye’s aluminum and steel, sending the lira into a steep decline. Brunson was released shortly after, having been imprisoned for two years  (Imprisonment).

Space does not allow for numerous other instances of religious intolerance
Middle East Forum

2. Türkiye continues to deny the Armenian Genocide (1915-1917) with its displacement, forced marches, compulsory Islamization, and mass murder of 1.1 million Armenians, along with expulsion and massacres of its Greek population. No serious historian denies its factuality.

3. It refuses to grant its sizable Kurdish minority a right to its culture and self-government.  In July, 2024, President Recep Erdogan made clear his plan to promote demographic change in Kurdish northern Syria by resettling three million Syrian Arab refugees there, along with building a city dedicated to their presence (Refugee Resettlement).

4. In Europe, Erdogan stubbornly resisted Finland and Sweden’s membership in NATO, holding out for fighter jets.

5. At home, Erdogan rules with a heavy hand, crushing political dissent, the right of free assembly and a free press. Scores of journalists, academics, judges, and civil servants have been imprisoned (Amnesty International).

6. As for Türkiye’s gifted literary community, intimidation has become ubiquitous, with some writers jailed or ostracized in the press. They include the journalist Can Dündar, poet Ilhan Sami Çomak, and politician Selahattin Demirtaş, who wrote three novels in jail. Nobel literary laureate Orhan Pamuk retains a security guard  (Dial World).

7. And then there is Türkiye’s most renowned writer, Elif Shafik, who has resided in London since 2013 and no longer writes in Turkish. Since 2010, fringe nationalists and Erdogan loyalists have confiscated her books and slandered her reputation.

As Shafak trenchantly observes, “It is tiring to be Turkish. The country is badly polarised, bitterly politicized. Every writer, journalist, poet knows that because of an article, a novel, an interview, a poem or a tweet you can be sued, put on trial, even arrested. Self-censorship is widespread”(Dial World).

8. Discrimination against the LGBTQ community is pervasive, extending to workplace, social settings, housing, and healthcare. Türkiye’s government officials, including Erdogan, have not been shy in disparaging gays. In Istanbul and Ankara, LGBTQ events have been frequently banned as affronts to public morality (RFI).

9. Türkiye has conducted an aggressive foreign policy, menacing its Mediterranean neighbors, pursuing illegal drilling that violates international maritime law. In response, the European Council has imposed sanctions.

It supported Azerbaijan with weaponry in the Nagornal-Karabakh conflict.

Türkiye has militarily intervened in Libya and Syria; in the latter, attacking Kurds aligned with U.S. forces opposing Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad and a growing ISIS insurgence.

10. Of major concern is Erdogan’s brokering a $2.5 billion deal with Putin to purchase the Russian S-400 surface to air missile system, compromising American defense security, leading to previous president Trump’s curtailing shipment of F-35 jets to the country.

Unfortunately, efforts within Türkiye to check Erdogan’s growing powers have failed.

What can be done?

Not much, as no specific measure exists for expelling a NATO member. Such action would be unlikely anyway, pragmatists arguing the country’s considerable military strength and role as a buffer to Russian and Iranian interests in the Middle East.

As for the US embargo on jets, following Erdogan’s finally approving Sweden and Finland NATO membership, the Biden administration agreed to send Türkiye 40 F-16 fighter jets. The two nations have further set a goal of $100 billion in bilateral trade, up from $30 billion in 2023 (Reuters, September 23, 2024).

What remains a disciplinary possibility is that the EU may ultimately deny an intransigent Türkiye highly coveted EU membership. That’s probably wishful thinking, opponents arguing Türkiye formidable military as a necessary offset against Russian and Iranian hegemony in the region. Strategically, it controls the Bosporus Strait, linking the Black Sea to the Mediterranean .

It doesn’t help that there exists a lucrative tourism, grossing 40 million visitors in the first eight months of the current year, an increase of 7.1 % over the previous year.

Indeed, tourism is likely to increase, despite the US State Department’s issuing an advisory in October on traveling to the country. Terrorists have targeted tourist locations and the government has imprisoned thousands, including Americans, on scanty evidence of alleged ties with terrorists (Advisory).

Still, it isn’t all doom and gloom, Erdogan’s ruling party, the AKP, finishing second in the March 24, 2024 local elections.

Meanwhile, informed citizens committed to human rights will understandably refrain from traveling there.

–rj

Beyond Identity Politics: The Case for Economic Unity

Two weeks to go until America decides!

I’m with those who believe Kamala Harris will win. Even so, America will remain deeply divided, unless the grievances of America’s working class, transcending race and ethnicity, are addressed.

Healing lies in abandoning the separation of the political and the economic.

While minority rights matter, they musn’t be set against the economic rights of all Americans to a fair share. Otherwise, we reap continuing resentment, social fissure, and exploitation.

What matters isn’t who you are, or where you’re from, but what you believe. Identity politics conversely promote discord.

Unions have shown us the way, promoting shared economic interests transcending identity factions of Left and Right.

Achieving class unity, America secures a vibrant future, true to its promise of shared equality in the pursuit of happiness.

As distinguished economist Robert Reich rightly observes, unless the new administration enlarges the economic franchise, “future demagogues like Vance will almost surely exploit the same bitterness for their own selfish ends.”

“The strongest defense we have against a future of Trumpist fascism is a large and growing middle class comprised of people who, although they may have supported Trump, come to feel they have a stake in America.”

—rj

Julia Thurman: Crafting Worlds with Words

The writers I admire most never use a careless word. Their sentences are unimprovable —Judith Thurman, A Left-Handed Woman.

There exist those books we scarce can put down, riveting us with suspense, prose eloquence, and resonance of human experience.

Others, we struggle with, bored or chagrined by their non-relevance or absurdities. The usual counsel is to jettison them quickly.

Had I done so with Julia Thurman’s A Left-Handed Woman, a book largely focused on fashion couture, playground of wealthy indulgence, I’d have lost out immensely.

Collectively, Thurman’s adroitly articulated 39 essays, gathered mostly from fifty years of writing for The New Yorker, transcend her primary fashion genre, yielding portraitures mostly of heroic women finding autonomy in a patriarchal milieu, leading to my admiration for Thurman, awe at her salient intelligence, fine-tuned to meticulous observation and set-apart brilliance in prose mastery.

As Henry Finder, one of her editors at The New Yorker observes, “She’s not happy with a paragraph until it sings.”

Thurman’s acumen is indisputable, having achieved numerous awards that include a National Book Award for Non-fiction for her biography, Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Writer (1983), inspiring the hit movie, Out of Africa.

Her Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette (1999), earned a finalist National Award for Nonfiction.

She is a recipient of the Ordre des Artes et Lettres by the French government for her contributions to French literature.

A Left-Handed Woman has won PEN’s award for essay excellence .

Nothing surprises me about Thurman. Is there anything she misses in her myriad subject matter teeming with wide-ranging vignettes on not only fashion designers such as Sara Berman, Isabel Toledo, Elsa Schiaparelli , Miuccia Prada Guo Pei and Ann Lowe, but disparate entities like Margaret Fuller, Emily Dickinson, Elena Ferrante, Lee Miller, Eva Zeisel, Amelia Earhart, Isa Genzken, Greta Stern, Alison Bechdel, Laura Elizabeth Ingalls Wilder, Rachel Cusk, Yasmina Reza, Vladimir and Vera Nabokov, and even Helen Gurley Brown and Cleopatra, among still others, their successes and, yes, the not infrequent intrusions of fate cascading fame and fortune to their doom.

While men do appear in her essays, they’re a distinct minority, sometimes perversely objectifying women as ancillaries of male prerogative:

Conversely, she writes of women, “I scoured literature for exceptions, and there were some. But nearly all of them had achieved distinction at a price their male counterparts didn’t have to pay. In that respect, one might say they were all left-handed: they defied the message they were not right.”

My favorite essays come toward the book’s close, featuring Simone de Beauvoir and in a surprising thematic shift, Thurman’s memoir of cave exploration, torch in hand, accompanying renowned French anthropologists at ancient Dordogne cave painting sites, Chauvet and Niaux.

I believe Thurman is right in crediting de Beauvoir with the genesis of the modern feminist movement with her seminal The Second Sex. As for her revels exploring caves and pedaling across French landscape, it’s truly a tour de force.

One last thing: Thurman is a self-taught fluent speaker of two languages beyond her native English that include French and Italian, highly engaged as she is in French and Italian literary and artistic culture.

She also achieved reading fluency in Danish as prerequisite to her research on Isak Dinesen.

Favorite passages:

“What we bring with us—embedded in our flesh and bugging it; embedded in art and animating it—is the mystery of how we become who we are.”

“There’s a hidden cavity in every story, a recess of meaning, and it’s often blocked by the rubble of your own false starts, or by an accretion of received ideas left behind by others. That updraft of freshness is typically an emotion you’ve buried.”

“The transcendence of shame is a prominent theme in the narrative of women’s lives. The shame of violation; the shame of appetite; the shame of anger; the shame of being unloved; the shame of otherness; the shame, perhaps above all, of drive.”

“Most of the time, a piece of prose lies on the page bristling with cleverness, yet inert, until I hit upon the precise sequence of words—the spell, if you like—that brings it to life. At that moment, language recovers its archaic power to free a trapped spirit.”

“She could love and desire intensely, but rarely at the same moment, and she could think and feel deeply, but not often in the same sentence.”

—rjoly

America’s Fossil Fuel Addiction: A Call for Change

As another storm, Milton, churns its way in the Gulf toward FL, Americans continue their love affair with fossil fuels, reluctant to embrace habit change and the inconvenience it imposes. One of our candidates for the nation’s highest office, with PA in mind, now preaches fracking; the other wants to roll back all climate change regulation.

China puts us to shame, last year installing 57% of all new solar plants around the world.

Likewise, Singapore, its people on board, plans to be zero emissions free by 2050.

As is, expect more storms, more heat, more fires, more drought, more ecosystems on which our survival depends, compromised or destroyed. A recent Lancet Countdown analysis (2023) reports that 80% of the 86 governments assessed were subsidizing fossil fuels, providing a collective $400bn in 2019.

We are addicted, myopic about the myriad consequences of fossil fuel dependency we relegate to a remote future.

Presently, there’s not a single Earth System that doesn’t face collapse.

We need to be on a war footing, the environment our highest priority, if we’re to avoid apocalyptic scenarios like that of Appalachia emerging a salient headline of our daily lives.

If we stubbornly resist taking action to mitigate the situation, the ecological balance — a product of millions of years of evolution that sustains life on Earth — may soon collapse, leading to our eventual extinction.

—rjoly

Ruth Stone: The Poetic Genius of Resilience and Reflection

I’ve been writing poetry or whatever it is since I was five or six years old, and I couldn’t stop, I never could stop. I don’t know why I did it.… It was like a stream that went along beside me, you know, my life went along here, and I got married and had three kids and did all the things you have to do, and all along the time this stream was going along. And I really didn’t know what it was saying. It just talked to me, and I wrote it down. So I can’t even take much credit for it.” — Ruth Stone

The late Ruth Stone’s poetry gives me goosebumps. It’s that good —observant, conversational, intimate, punctuated with humor, resonating life in all its undulations.

It’s Saturday afternoon. I lie here on my bed, going through Stone’s poems as the world pursues its daily tasks. Quietness is my paradise, allowing space to reflect on essentials that matter. Stone’s poetry does that well.

Ruth Stone (1915-2011) didn’t have it easy. A mother of three children, her husband committed suicide, plunging her into abject poverty. Her poetry prowess, however, earned her a piecemeal income through itinerant, short term teaching assignments at universities across America.

Between teaching gigs, she’d return to her home in Goshen, Vermont, crafting new poems and short stories, her talent earning her two Guggenheim awards.

Academy recognition came late. In 2002, she won the National Book Award for Poetry at age 87 (2002).

What puzzles me is that she remains widely unknown. Her poetry, abundant in robust metaphor, drawn from science and nature, stands on its own, defiant of imitation.

Stone saw life in all its teeming distillations, especially in regard to aging, about which she could be merciless.

Her death came in 2011 at age 96.

Her humble home in Goshen, soul of her prodigious output (13 books), has been designated a historical landmark and become a retreat for literary studies. Her informal grave is nearby.

Below, the Ruth Stone poem that fulfills Emily Dickinson observation on what makes for a good poem: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry…Is there any other way?” ( L342a, 1870):

“Always on the Train”

Writing poems about writing poems
is like rolling bales of hay in Texas.
Nothing but the horizon to stop you.

But consider the railroad’s edge of metal trash;
bird perches, miles of telephone wires.
What is so innocent as grazing cattle?
If you think about it, it turns into words.

Trash is so cheerful; flying up
like grasshoppers in front of the reaper.
The dust devil whirls it aloft; bronze candy wrappers,
squares of clear plastic–windows on a house of air.

Below the weedy edge in last year’s mat,
red and silver beer cans.
In bits blown equally everywhere,
the gaiety of flying paper
and the black high flung patterns of flocking birds.

—rj

School Safety and SROs: Examining the Aftermath of Apalachee High School Shooting

Again, another school shooting: two teachers and two students killed; another eight, including a teacher, wounded at Apalachee High School in Winder, GA.

So far this year, 45 shootings have occurred, but this is the worst.

You may remember that after the George Floyd killing by police (2020), a groundswell of anti-police rhetoric occurred, with calls to defund police and remove school resource officers (SROs). Subsequently, police budgets were slashed and 50 school districts across the country removed SROs from their schools.

A year before George Floyd, 2019 presidential candidate Kamela Harris told a college audience, “What we need to do about … demilitarizing our schools and taking police officers out of schools. We need to deal with the reality and speak the truth about the inequities around school discipline. Where in particular, Black and Brown boys are being expelled and or suspended as young as, I’ve seen, as young as in elementary school” (Interview, Benedict College, Columbia, SC.).

Some studies had argued that SROs resulted in a disproportionate number of minority students suspended or arrested, leading to greater recidivism.

In all fairness, Harris has walked back several of her earlier policy positions: decriminalizing illegal immigration, banning oil fracking, and eliminating private health insurance. The public deserves to know her present stance on SROs.

By the way, her Veep choice, Tim Waltz, known to be progressive, signed into Minnesota law (March 14, 2024), a bipartisan bill allowing SRO specified disciplinary protocol that includes prone restraint.

CNN reports that the shooting at Apalachee High School stopped when an unnamed SRO confronted the alleged fourteen year odd assailant, ordering him to get down on the floor (September 5, 2024).

Hopefully, his heroism will not go unnoticed.

–rj