Joe Biden & Kamala Harris Have Won

President-Elect Joe Biden Jr.
& Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris

This has been a nightmarish year on so many levels, from the deadly Covid-19 pandemic, to the Ahmed Arbery, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor murders, as well as many others, at the hands of police and extrajudicial forces, to the current economic crisis (the second major one in less than two decades, yet again under an inept Republican administration) and ballooning wealth and resource inequality, to the devastating effects of climate change (hurricanes and tropical storms, wildfires, etc.), and on and on, but if I can identify one possible ray of light, troubled though it may be, it would be the Joe Biden's and Kamala Harris's historical and groundbreaking defeat of Donald Trump and Mike Pence in the recent presidential election. Four years of malign incompetence, brazen criminality, incoherent domestic and external policies all keyed to and driven by the narcissistically warped vision thankfully met with a major NO MORE from US voters, and now Biden and Harris are the President-Elect and Vice President-Elect of the US, and will, attempted coups by Trump and the GOP notwithstanding, assume office on January 20, 2021.

They defeated Trump despite the Covid-19 pandemic (or, more likely, as a result of his catastrophically horrendous response to it), which meant markedly reduced in person campaigning and canvassing by Democrats; evident and relentless voter suppression across the US; threats of continued Russian interference; Trump's seeming attempts to destroy the United States Post Office by appointing as Postmaster General his supporter Louis DeJoy, who gutted branches all over the US by removing sorting machines and reducing hours; and a steady drumbeat of disinformation, misinformation, and anti-voting rhetoric from the President, his supporters, various other agents of disruption, and at times the legacy media, which amplified--rather than countering--Trump's message of a "rigged election" and "voter fraud." (We very well may look back and find that in fact he was, as usual, projecting about his own attempts to steal the election this year.)

In the end, Biden and Harris received more than 80+ million total votes, the most ever, 7 million more than Trump and Pence's 73+ million, and 306 electoral votes, the exact total Trump received in 2016, when, despite losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine, he labeled his victory a "landslide." The Biden-Harris combo won back three states-Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania--that Barack Obama had won in 2008 and 2012, but which Clinton lost in 2016 by slender margins, while also winning two more, Arizona and Georgia, that a Democratic presidential candidate had not won since Bill Clinton in the 1990s. They make history with Harris becoming the first woman Vice President, first Black woman VP, and the first Asian American VP.  She also is the first graduate of an Historically Black College or University (HBCU) to serve as VP, and the first member of a Black sorority to hold that office as well. She will be the second VP not to be White (Charles Curtis was the first) and the second in an interracial marriage. Biden will be the oldest man elected to the presidency, and the second Roman Catholic president, and a decidedly devout one, after JFK. 

The next President and Vice President
of the United States of America

Ideologically Biden has tended to be a conservative to moderate Democrat, with a problematic legislative history, especially during his Senate tenure, of support for racist, pro-corporate policies, while Harris, at least in the US Senate, is considered one of the most liberal US Senators based on her voting record, though her records while California's and San Francisco's Attorneys General were more mixed, sometimes quite progressive and at other times conservative (pro-police). (I should note that in the Democratic Presidential primary I again voted for Bernie Sanders, but have contributed the campaigns of both Harris and Biden.) Both have expressed support for and voted for neoliberal economic and social policies in the past, and during the primary campaign, neither would consistently commit to programs that progressive and Democratic Socialist branches of the party endorsed, like Medicare for All or Single Payer health insurance, or the comprehensive Green New Deal. That does not mean, however, that they cannot be pushed towards more comprehensive, popular, paradigm-shifting policies, but their political backgrounds, especially Biden's suggest moderate rather than radical changes. But I am going into the next four years with clear eyes, and have set my expectations low. The first tests of this will be how they deal with this pandemic, which has worsened as Trump's malignant time in office winds toward its close.

Whatever they do achieve will depend in significant part on which party controls the US Senate, whose fate hangs in the balance as Georgia's two Senate seats head to runoffs, but also will hinge on the Democrats' ability to retain their control of the House, where their margins for error plummeted as Republicans regained a number of the seats they lost in the 2018 midtarms. How Biden will govern given the challenges, which mount daily, facing the country and his administration, remains to be seen, but if he can take any lessons from Trump's four years, and the eight Biden served as VP under Obama, they might include grasping the nature of the contemporary zombie Republican Party and its overriding goal of nihilistically holding power; the appeal of economically populist policies and politics and the effect of government largess for the 99% (remember 2012?) vs. the abject failure of neoliberal capitalist orthodoxy and libertarianism, especially amidst a pandemic and its aftermath; the importance of transparency, openness and regular communication with the nation; liberal interventionism in foreign policy should be a dead letter from now on; and the absolutely fundamental concept of not forgetting and ignoring your base voters, as Obama frequently seemed to and Trump never did, which, in Biden's case, comprises Black and other BIPOC voters, especially Black women, young people (Gen Z and millennials), seniors, urbanites and many suburbanites, educated middle class voters, and working-class and poor voters, even if and as he works to expand his coalition. 

It is one thing to clean house when it comes to Trump's lawlessness, recklessness and incompetence, but replicating the worst aspects of the Obama years will imperil not only Biden's tenure and doom Democrats but the nation and the globe. I cannot predict how the next four years will turn out, but it will be refreshing to have Trump out of the White House, whatever damage he attempts as a private citizen, and, as when Obama was president, we will have to press Biden and Harris, as FDR said, to do what is needed; in fact, echoing FDR, we will need to make him (them) do it.

De Blasio's Donors, Luxury Housing on NYCHA Land + Comics (Dante's Magic Afro)

This is a rendering of the proposed building
 at 120 3rd Ave. in Brooklyn.
Two more major de Blasio donors
have been picked for the project.
(AUFGANG ARCHITECTS)
© via New York Daily News

Yesterday brought the news that two wealthy real estate companies that were donors to New York mayor Bill de Blasio's campaign last year, where he was re-elected to his second four-year term in a landslide, received New York City approval to build luxury housing on land belonging to the underfunded New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). The numerous housing projects currently run by NYCHA continue to be plagued by a host of problems, but with neither the city nor state, let alone the federal government able to find or raise funding, de Blasio has turned to private entities as a way of purportedly raising support for NYCHA's existing housing stock.

According to The New York Daily News, the new housing, to be built by developers the Arker Companies and Two Trees, is supposed to include 500--or half of its total--"half-market rate" apartments, which in practical terms means that in addition to the luxury rentals, the landlords will be able to get $3,900 (or $46,8000/year) for two-bed apartments, or half-market rate, on public land. NYCHA will lease the land, for 99 years, in return for payments to address its extensive low-income housing problems. The Daily News points out that this is the second such sweet deal involving a de Blasio donor.

In recent years, I've noted often harsh dismissals of labeling of actions like the developers' deal as neoliberalism, but this strikes me as a textbook example of it. Instead of seeking and finding government funding, via taxes, fees, etc. to support a public housing organization, the government is turning to private entities, which will benefit its lease of government subsidized, lower-cost land, to support private businesses, with some peanuts thrown back to the government in return. This is about as far from the "Sandinista" tag, with which opponents associated Blasio during his first run in 2013, as you can get.

Meanwhile, as the The Daily News article also points out:

Two de Blasio donors have said they raised money for the mayor to gain access to City Hall.

De Blasio disputes claims City Hall intervened on behalf of donor Restaurateur Harendra Singh pleaded guilty to conspiring to bribe de Blasio, stating that he gave to get favorable treatment on back rent he owed for his restaurant on city-owned land.

Prosecutors said a senior aide to de Blasio arranged a meeting for Singh “in an effort to pressure the agency to make its proposed settlement terms more favorable to Singh.”

Developer Jonah Rechnitz said he spelled out to a top de Blasio aide that he was giving money to gain access. After Rechnitz paid a fine over an illegal hotel he owned, the city stopped responding to another year’s worth of complaints about the place.

The Manhattan US Attorney chose not to press pay-to-play charges against de Blasio, however. Nevertheless, according to the paper, "Prosecutor Joon Kim...made a point of stating that his investigation had determined that the mayor had intervened or directed subordinates to intervene on behalf of donors."

Here's a comic I drew around the time that de Blasio was campaigning five years ago. I often joked with C about how de Blasio's teenage son Dante's afro seemed to be a talisman, working its magic on voters (and de Blasio himself), and then played with it a bit in the frames below. It is the "afro," not Dante, who's speaking.

If my handwriting isn't clear the frames (beginning with #3) say: 

VOTE FOR MY DAD!

HE'LL ADDRESS INEQUALTY & POVERTY!

HE'LL DO SOMETHING ABOUT STOP & FRISK!

HE'LL IMPROVE SCHOOLS & RAISE TAXES ON THE RICH!

HE IS THE ONLY PROGRESSIVE WHO CAN WIN!

& HE'LL HAVE MY SPECIAL POWER TO GUIDE HIM!

More recently, during the lead-up to the 2017 mayor's race, I revisited my Magic Afro drawing. At one point the younger de Blasio, now a student at Yale University, had shaved his afro off, but as the recent campaign picked up, and during recent appearances with his father, Dante has sported that spectacular afro again. 

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have any magic to work against neoliberalism, the real estate industry, inequality, homelessness, or any of the other ills plaguing New York City. But hey, Bill de Blasio has another four years to figure it out, no?

If my handwriting isn't clear the frames (beginning with #3) say: 

IT'S ELECTION SEASON. VOTE FOR MY DAD!

HE WAS SUPPOSED TO BE THE PROGRESSIVE MAYOR OF NEW YORK

PEOPLE EVEN CLAIMED HE WAS LIKE A SANDINISTA!

HE'S BEEN THE BEST THING BIG REAL ESTATE COULD HAVE HOPED FOR!

CRIME IS DOWN, HOMELESSNESS IS UP, HYPERGENTRIFICATION RACES AHEAD. SO VOTE FOR HIM!

I'M IN NEW HAVEN BUT I CAN STILL WORK MY MAGIC DOWN IN NYC!

The Pen Behind Jeremiah Moss (Vanishing New York) + 27 Cooper Square Dedication

Add caption

For a decade, a blogger writing under the nom de plume Jeremiah Moss has been chronicling the Bloomberg and post-Bloomberg era gentrification--hypergentrification--of New York City, primarily through posts that tally the disappearance of countless small and medium-sized, often longstanding businesses. While not always avoiding nostalgia and though he has mostly focused on Manhattan, Moss's blog, Vanishing New York, has set the standard in consistently demonstrating city and state policies favoring plutocratic real estate interests, in combination with the national and global neoliberal economic system, have had a devastating effect on so much of the city's social ecology, its distinctive neighborhoods, and its diverse cultural vibrancy, let alone affordability, all of which have drawn creative people in particular to New York for more than a century.

Though gentrification in New York is hardly new, Moss has detailed how over the last 10 years, particularly in the lead-up to and through the Great Recession, whole sections--and increasingly boroughs--of New York have transformed into hollowed out museums of themselves. (Lost City was another blog that contemporaneously recorded the loss of many New York landmarks, from 2006 through 2014. Gothamist also provides updates amidst its general news about the city.) Among the terms I've learned from Moss's blog are yunny (young urban narcissists), zombie urbanism, and hypergentrification, to name just a few.  From my first encounter with Moss's lamentations--appropriately enough, an early entry from 2007 bore that title--and jeremiads, I became a fan, finding in his posts arguments that compellingly articulated what I saw happening as far back as the period right after 9/11, in 2001, and also underway simultaneously and without explanation, in Chicago.

From Jeremiah's
Vanishing New York

Certainly many have written persuasively about gentrification and its effects, and we can always use more informed takes. But Moss has also urged readers to go beyond mourning and support the pro-small business, cultural landmarking, anti-chain approach of SAVE NYC. Moss also has tried to address readers' questions, including why he began the blog, whether gentrification is (ever) good for working-class and poor people, how Bloomberg's tenure really affected New York (for the worse), and how New York City has become increasingly suburbanized, or a dense, vertical simulacrum of the suburban--an elite suburb, that is. Notably, he also has not shied away from addressing questions of race, class, and political access, among other topics key to the problem of hypergentrification.

For his efforts he has received a great deal of press, and some awards. Until now, Moss has not compiled his thoughts in book form, but that is set to change with Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul (HarperCollins), which will hit bookshelves shortly. A book party is set for July 27, in SoHo.

What also has remained unknown to most readers of Moss's blog is who the writer really is. (In fact I have to admit I was quite willing not to have his real identity revealed.) Recently, however, in a New Yorker "Talk of the Town" piece by Michael Schulman, Moss does share with the world who he really is: Griffin Hansbury, a transgender psychoanalyst, social worker, and aspiring novelist who has lived in New York for more than a quarter of a century. He lives in the East Village, and has shifted, as Schulman points out, from elegist to activist, when he rallied readers behind the attempt to save Midtown's Café Edison, which did not succeed but which fed into the #SAVENYC campaign.
So why did Moss (Hansbury) unmask himself?

[He] decided to reveal himself, he said, so he can show up at his own rallies and on panels. Also, “Vanishing New York” is now a book. Walking down St. Mark’s Place, past a dark-glass building that he called the Death Star, he mentioned a study that measured pedestrians’ skin conductivity outside a sleek Whole Foods and on a more diversified street. “They found that blocks that are all this glass stuff actually shorten the lives of senior citizens, because they’re so depressing,” he said.

And, as I can attest, they can turn into giant magnifying glasses, scorching the ground around them. I hope to share this and other thoughts--like the increasingly disturbing lack of adequate infrastructure in New York and New Jersey, especially to handle all of the building, new arrivals, or catastrophic contingencies like a worse version of the 2003 blackout (which I experienced firsthand) or another tropical storm as strong as or stronger than 2012's Hurricane Sandy-- in person with him, at his book event or another, but either way, I'll be picking up a copy of Vanishing New York, the book version, while continuing to read his blog.

***

A few days ago, another New York City blog I regularly browse, EV Grieve, posted about a plaque dedication at 27 Cooper Square on June 21. Though increasing swaths of Manhattan and New York City have been or are being leveled or built over in favor of the kinds of cookie-cutter designer glass luxury towers that Moss has decried on his blog, 27 Cooper Square managed to survive the wrecking ball, mainly because, as EV Grieve points out, two of the building's resident, including acclaimed poet and memoirist Hettie Jones, balked at moving out so that the Cooper Square Hotel could be built next door. Jones and her fellow tenant had secured artist loft status in the 1980s, and thus had the law on their side. Now, as the luxe Cooper Square Hotel looms beside them and an increasingly hypergentrified Downtown New York surrounds them, the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation (GVSHP), in partnership with Two Boots Foundation, will commemorate 27 Cooper Square's importance as a cultural node during the 1960s.

The 1845 building, as the plaque announces, was the home of several key artistic figures during the 1960s. Quoting EV Grieve (and the email the site received from GVSHP):

In the 1960s, this 1845 former rooming house became a laboratory for artistic, literary and political currents. Writers LeRoi [later Amiri Baraka] and Hettie Jones, their Yugen magazine and Totem Press, musician Archie Shepp and painter Elizabeth Murray all had homes here. The vacant building was transformed into a vital hub of cultural life, attracting leading figures including those from the Beats and the world of jazz. It was also the childhood home of a second generation of East Village artists and thinkers.

GVSHP and Two Boots Foundation will install a plaque on the building at 27 Cooper Square to mark the significance of the site in the artistic legacy of the East Village.

The event's slated speakers included Archie Shepp's son Accra Shepp, a noted photographer, and Hettie Jones, as well as a representative of the GVSHP, and poet and Bowery Poetry Club co-founder Bob Holman. You can watch a video of the dedication on YouTube, and see photos on Flickr. Though cultural producers still live in the area, as Jones pointed out in the 2008 New York Times article on her successful battle against the Cooper Square Hotel, "This used to be an area where people got their start. Now it’s a place to land once you’ve made it." And it's only more so these days, but the plaque will remind people, at least those who stop and read it, that the area was once more, much more, than a hub of global lucre.

Random Photos

A few recent random photos. Enjoy!

Chinelo Okparanta & Robin Coste Lewis
answering questions after their
superb reading at Rutgers-Newark

A subway rat (do you see it?) 

Evie Shockley introducing Mendi+Keith
Obadike at Penn State Conference
on African American Literature and Language

Mendi+Keith Obadike presenting
their work at CAALL

A musician in Washington Square Park

Painting wrought iron in the West Village

Décollage, SoHo 

With Carter Mathes (left) and Evie Shockley (right)
at the Ark of Bones event at Gallery Aferro
in Newark

My colleague Mark Krasovic, an unidentified woman,
Mrs. Loretta Dumas, Henry Dumas's widow,
and my colleague Christina Strasburger
at Gallery Aferro 

Scarlet and Black: The newly issued
scholarly anthology about Rutgers University's
historical involvement with slavery 

College Avenue, Rutgers (New Brunswick)

At the Westside Theater, before the
start of Othello: The Remix 

Mosaic mural featuring Frederick Douglass
quotation, Midtown 

Post-election Grief & Supportive Post-Its,
Union Square Station tunnel, Manhattan

Those Post-Its

Subway performers 

The Strand Bookstore's last copy (for now)
of Counternarratives; they once had over
100+ copies of the hardcover AND the
paperback. Thank you, readers!

Subway rider, with his 40

Rehab work at the Blue Man Group's
 theater, Astor Place

Cooper Square 

Workers at the increasingly
privatized, zombie urban
hot spot, Astor Place

The famous Alamo Cube, cordoned off
(and now longer movable by passersby)

Bikes and skateboards now
forbidden at the branded, neoliberalized
Astor Place

The Coup in Brazil II: Rousseff Is Ousted

Dilma Rousseff defends herself before
the Brazilian Senate
(Independente)

It is now official; after the two-week façade of the Rio Olympics allowed Brazil to project a positive international image of itself, its sidelined Dilma Rousseff, democratically elected in 2010 and 2014, has been ousted from her post. This past Wednesday, August 31, according to the dictates of Brazil's post-dictatorship federal constitution and by a vote of 61-20 in Brazil's Senate, she has been officially removed from office. A second vote failed to reach the majority required to bar her from running for office again. Rousseff's former vice president, now acting president Michel Temer, of the opposition PMDB Party, assumes the mantle of power. Temer was sworn in two hours after Dilma was out, and now will hold office, unless he too is impeached, on far more solid grounds than Rousseff, given his alleged involvement in multiple corruptions schemes, resigns or falls ill, until 2018.

(I should note that Chamber of Deputies also called for Temer's impeachment in 2015, but that lower house's former president, Eduardo Cunha, who was third in line to the presidency, blocked the push. In April of this year, a Supreme Court Judge, Mello, ruled that the lower house vote to impeach Temer could proceed. The likelihood of that is slim unless significantly more information about Temer's links to corruption receive a public airing. In any case, other parties would have to ally with opponents of his ruling PMDB party to push through a vote. Cunha, for his part, was suspended as Chamber President in May of this year because the Supreme Court ruled he intimidated fellow lawmakers and obstructed investigation into his receipt of bribes; he also has been linked to money laundering schemes involving Petrobras.)

Before the final vote, which required a total of 53 senators to strip her of her position, Rousseff delivered a passionate self-defense outlining how the entire impeachment process was not simply an attack on her, Brazil's first woman president and representative of the Workers' Party, but also a major blow against democracy itself in Brazil. She cited predecessors such as Juscelino Kubitschek, the visionary president behind the construction of Brazil's third and current capital, Brasília, who was nearly toppled several several times, and João Goulart, whose overthrow led to two decades of dictatorship. Her lawyer, José Eduardo Cardozo, underlined in his written defense of Rousseff that the main aim of the impeachment was not to punish Rousseff for her budget manipulations, which a Senate report found did not amount to an impeachable crime, but rather, as wiretaps released by the Folha de São Paulo made clear, to push her out in order to eventually quash the ongoing and metastasizing Lava Jato corruption investigation involving the state oil company Petrobras, construction firms, lobbyists, and a sizable number of Brazil's elected Congressional politicians, including, it must be said again, the new president Temer himself.

I will not reprise my prior post from this past May on the coup, which describes the process by which the impeachment unfolded, but what's clear is that the structures and systems of a functioning constitutional democracy were abused in Rousseff's case to expel her from office. The coup plotters harnessed the public's rage at the country's economic crises and disgust at the rampant corruption swirling around the Lava Jato scandal, the Workers' Party, and politicians in general to get rid of the main obstacle to implementing what they could not achieve electorally: a conservative, neoliberal regime. It is probably the case that had Rousseff decided to take the unethical route and protect Temer and other members of the PMDB Congressional delegation, such as Cunha, she might have continued to receive public condemnation and cratered in popularity, which fell to as low as 8% last year, but she also would still be president. When Temer officially broke with her, however, the die was cast.

What also appears clear is that this coup was poorly covered by the US media--and here I am pointing to The New York Times in particular. Though it did repeatedly point out that Rousseff had not benefited in any way from the Lava Jato corruption or and had not been accused of corruption herself, the Times did fail to note more than once that she had been exonerated in a report by the very legislative body that was voting to impeach her. In a complete flip off to critics of the flimsy basis for impeachment, Brazil's Congress has subsequently ratified into law the very budgetary "pedaling" that Rousseff, like many of her predecessors, had engaged in. Whether Temer and his allies will be able to halt the corruption probes without public unrest is unclear, but so long as he remains in power and retains the support of Brazil's powerful media conglomerates, he and the right can continue to shape the narrative and downplay, to the extent possible, the narrative.

The vote to oust Dilma Rousseff:
Blue was Yes, Gray Abstain,
Yellow Absent, and Red was No
(Image courtesy of Veja Abril)

As it stands, allegations of corruption involving the 81 members (3 per state) of the Brazilian Senate and Chamber of Deputies keep filling the news. In addition to Cunha and Temer, who is barred from running for office for eight years, four major Senate figures linked to Rousseff's ouster are under investigation. They include Senate President Renan Calheiros, formerly fourth and now third in line for the presidency, and Minas Gerais's Senator Antônio Anastasia, who prepared the impeachment vote in the Senate. In total, out of the 81 Senators, 49 are under investigation of some kind. 60% have charges of bribery, money laundering, and other crimes looming over them. Brazil's Supreme Court is investigating 24 of them. 5 face criminal charges outright. One of Temer's strongest supporters, Brazilian Senator from Minas Gerais state, Aécio Neves, the grandson of Brazil's first democratically elected post-dictatorship president, Tancredo Neves, who died shortly before he could assume office, has been named by four different people under investigation in the Lava Jato corruption case. Neves lost to Rousseff in the last presidential election, 52%-49%. Another figure who voted for her, disgraced former president of Brazil and current Senator from Alagoas state, Fernando Collor de Melo, is also under investigation because of his links to the Lava Jato corruption case.

Another deeply disturbing aspect of this episode has been the US government's tacit approval of what was clearly the overthrow of a standing government. As I had previously pointed out, the current US ambassador to Brazil had served in Paraguay when a strange, quasi-democratic coup drove out a leftist leader there. Also, as Wikileaks revealed last year, the US had been monitoring the Brazilian government's phone lines, including those of President Rousseff, as well as many of Brazil's economic officials, and, in a recent revelation that should surprise no one, new president Temer allegedly served as a US informant. Secretary of State John Kerry in particular was mostly silent as Rousseff was put on trial, and has spoken favorably of conservative the former ambassador and now Foreign Minister, José Serra, who lost to Rousseff in the 2010 presidential race and also allegedly has ties to the US government.

Although both Dilma Rousseff and her Workers' Party predecessor Lula oversaw macroeconomic policies falling within the rubric of global neoliberalism, they also expended far more than their predecessors on social programs that helped reduce poverty, increase school enrollment, and increase the size of Brazil's middle and working classes. Afro-Brazilians, who constitute a majority of Brazil's population (roughly 51%) and the majority of its poor, were especially empowered economically by the range of programs Lula and Dilma Rousseff implemented. (One need only look at the success of the medal winning Afro-Brazilian athletes like Rafaela Silva and Isaquias Queiroz, who took up sports and received support via Lula-Rousseff sponsored program.) On multiple levels, these changes were anathema to Brazil's mostly white elites. It was not merely happenstance that Temer's acting--now permanent--cabinet is and remains all male and all white (according to Brazilian standards).

As Brazil became more powerful, it also represented a beacon for other Left-leaning regimes across Latin America. Its support of Venezuela, in particular, as well as the governments in  Bolivia and Ecuador, was stalwart. By pushing Rousseff out, Temer's government will now not only be able to impose a range of neoliberal programs, ranging from privatization of state enterprises and contracting out government services to private companies, and impose government austerity overall, and slash ministries and programs as much as it pleases, popular protests be damned, but it provides a bulwark to the conservative regimes in Argentina, Peru, Paraguay, Chile, and Colombia, as well as the USA, which would like to bar Venezuela from chairing Mercosur, but also which may support a coup, particularly a non-parliamentary one, in Venezuela. Having witnessed a near coup there when George W. Bush was president, I don't doubt that plans for one are sitting on someone's desk in Washington.

Before her impeachment, millions of Brazilians took to the streets to protest Rousseff's government, which was deeply unpopular, even among people who had voted for the Workers' Party. As a number of commentators have pointed out, a large portion of those participating in the anti-Rousseff rallies, which were championed by media conglomerate Globo, were middle and upper middle class Brazilians, particularly in the central and southern parts of the country, and the images of white Brazilian couples marching with a black nanny or maid behind them pushing their children in strollers have. become iconic. Yet what was less covered in the US mainstream media were the millions who also marched against Rousseff's removal and who have consistently called for the ouster of Temer ("Fora Temer") as well. So unpopular was the acting president that he was booed at the Rio Olympics Opening Ceremony. Since Wednesday, Brazilians have not taken the coup lightly, with rallies and marches underway all over the country. Given Temer's military support and the leaked wiretap suggesting collusion between some of the people seeking to impeach Dilma, members of the judiciary, and military officials, violent repression of anti-coup protesters is probably coming, especially the further we get from the media spotlight on the coup.

I think Rousseff's ouster should send a warning sign to Hillary Clinton should she win the presidency in November, which appears likely. I doubt that Brazil's administration would or could provide any material support, but the template they've established is one the GOP could replay, without need for a special prosecutor, as they required when they impeached Bill Clinton. Between the endless Benghazi investigation, which showed that Hillary Clinton was no culpable, to the private email server imbroglio, which the FBI stated did not warrant criminal charges against Clinton, to the current uproar, aided and abetted by the mainstream press, swirling around the Clinton Foundation, a GOP House could easily gin up a pretext from any of these as a means to launching a trial against Clinton. Her opponent, Donald Trump, has already spurred outright calls for Clinton to be tried and jailed, and chants along these lines occurred repeatedly at the GOP Convention in Cleveland. Over the last few years both Clinton and her boss, President Barack Obama, have backed Latin American coups and ousters, including the one in Paraguay and the 2009 Honduras coup, which she has admitted she supported. Let us hope, at least for our US democracy's sake, that the impeaching chickens do not come home to roost with the Clintons again.

The Crisis at Cooper Union

The Cooper Union's Main Building
with student protest signs in
the windows, 2013

For most of its history, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art was free for all students who attended. Let me say that again, because I recall the first time I learned this and could not believe it. The Cooper Union, established in 1859, charged no tuition to any of the students who attended. This policy of full scholarships resulted directly from directives by its founder, industrialist Peter Cooper, who wanted to create a school along the model of France's École Polytechnique that would be open to qualified students regardless of their race, religion, sex, social status, or family wealth. This was an incredibly progressive vision 170 years ago, and would certainly qualify as such today, especially at time when most public and private institutions grow increasingly unaffordable for a large portion of the US population, leading to campus economic, social and racial-ethnic stratification and segregation. As a result of the zero-tuition policy and its excellent faculty, Cooper Union had long attracted a stellar student body and boasted of one of the highest enrollment yields in the US. Yet one thing I wondered while attending graduate school at the hyper-expensive university next door to Cooper Union was how long it could maintain its tradition of no tuition, particularly in light of New York's increasing gentrification.

It turns out that Cooper Union might have been able to maintain free tuition but for a series of moves, among them prior sales of land holdings in the West Village, and then the decision under the prior president, George Campbell, Jr., to build an admittedly acclaimed, LEED-certified, $175 million new building at 41 Cooper Square to house its engineering and art schools. This starchitect Thom Mayne-designed building was completed in 2009, and Cooper Union reported took out a fixed-rate mortgage loan, with an $81 million pre-payment penalty, to fund it, at a time when the school's revenue was basically nil beyond revenues from its $723 million endowment and annual payments it received from its ownership of the land beneath the Chrysler Building. (It had also apparently borrowed $51 million more, according to economist Felix Salmon, to fund "all the infrastructure needed to charge all those fees in the first place," along with "$8 million in additional fees to do so!) The engineering faculty had voted twice, it turns out, against the new building, and fundraising to support it came in below forecast. Despite a Wall Street Journal article claiming that Cooper Union had weathered the global financial crisis without problems, by 2011 there were rumors of financial straits, and in 2012 the Board of Trustees approved the policy sift to charge tuition for Cooper Union's graduate programs, beginning in September 2013, which augured the eventual levying of fees on undergraduates.

In May 2013, to protest the likelihood of undergraduate tuition, students occupied administrative offices in the Foundation Building for a week, which brought widespread media attention to the crisis underway, and several protesters stayed in new president Jamshed Bharucha's office for 65 days. The Board of Trustees, in conjunction  Bharucha, who had arrived two years before and immediately begun raising the issue of a serious budget deficit, voted to impose undergraduate tuition, up to $19,500 per year, on a sliding scale, for students admitted beginning in the fall of 2014. (Even this tuition, exorbitant in relation to the prior price policy, would make the school one of the least expensive private schools to attend in the US.) This shift spurred an investigation by the New York State Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman concerning the school's real estate dealings and a lawsuit by an alumni group, the Committee to Save Cooper Union. (I should note that although I have no ties to the Cooper Union, I have supported the Committee to Save Cooper Union advocacy group with small donations, since I think utterly necessary to preserve its unique, progressive vision, tradition and policies.)

Cooper Union's New Academic Building
(Hyperallergic.com)

Under pressure for Schneiderman's investigation, the board voted 13-6 in April 2015 not to renew Bharucha's contract for next year. Two nights ago, five trustees who had supported Bharucha and charging tuition resigned. They were Martin Epstein, real estate honcho and former board chair; Vassar President Catherine Hill; investment banker Monica Vachher; Cooper alumnus and starchitect Daniel Liebeskind; and architect and oil services heir François de Menil. Epstein blasted the rest of the student, faculty and alumni protesters and the board, with Artnet News reporting that he wrote, "I know that there are some in the Cooper Community that will take my resignation as a false victory of some sort....As a donor, I am withdrawing my financial support for the college." For his part, Liebeskind pointed out that "As an alumnus of the school who had joined the Board recently, I expected that in this difficult time of change, there would be a meaningful and open discussion—one which would assure Cooper Union's stability and future....My experience was far from that."

Then yesterday, Bharucha also resigned, and will take up a post next year as Visiting Scholar at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education. In his farewell letter, he argued on behalf of his tenure and the new tuition plan, stating that

The class completing its freshman year was the first to be admitted under the 2013 Financial Sustainability Plan, and the class just admitted will be the second....These two classes uphold Cooper’s unparalleled standard of excellence. With need-based financial aid, we have also been able to increase access to those who can least afford it, as shown by an increase in the proportion of students eligible for Federal Pell Grants.

In response to Bharucha's departure, the remaining members of the board praised his tenure, writing, "The financial exigencies with which [Bharucha] was confronted upon his arrival were not of his making and he deserves credit for sounding the alarm about the need to take urgent action to ensure Cooper Union’s long-term financial sustainability." Cooper Union's’s current vice president for finance and administration William Mea will become interim president until the board can find a replacement for Bharucha. But who in her right mind would take this job?

Felix Salmon has argued that the blame for Cooper Union's financial and administrative difficulties lies squarely not just with the prior president Campbell and with Bharucha, but also with the various rosters of the enabling Board of Trustees. Why, he has asked, did they greenlight a building for which the institution had not raised sufficient funds? Harvard, where Bharucha heads this fall, has an endowment of $36.4 billion as of last June--and rising, as it is now well along in a $6.5 billion fundraising effort that has already raised about 77% of that total--decided at the peak of the global financial crisis, when its endowment dipped temporarily to about $26 billion in 2009, not to build a new museum of contemporary art along the Charles River. Was it neoliberal hubris and a desire to transform Cooper into a very different kind of school that led Campbell, Bharucha and their board supporters to go the route they did? Does this ethos still exist among the remaining board members, and do they have a viable plan for the future?

Perhaps more importantly, who will possibly step into the breach at this point to lead a school that remains so internally riven? Will the next leader have board support to return Cooper Union's undergraduate program, at least, to full scholarship status? Or have the dice been cast such that there is no turning back, such that what was Cooper Union's unique calling card, will be lost for good? (New York (and nearby New Jersey) do have a wide array of high quality public and private art and engineering institutions, with a major one--Cornell Tech--under development.) And what about Cooper Union's students, who were once guaranteed not only relief from worrying about funding their educations but a unique intellectual freedom, within the school's academic constraints, to construct their educations as they saw fit and then, debt-free, to elect careers that did not depend on them having to pay back massive loans? I ask all these questions not to suggest that institutions should not change and evolve, but to ask, in the tumultuous transformation of  the Cooper Union, what have we, and American higher education more broadly, lost?

Chomsky on the Death of American Universities

(Copyright © Flickr / WorCehT)

In a recent issue of Jacobin magazine, scholar, theorist, critic and activist Noam Chomsky, whose work needs no introduction, offers one of the most succinct and powerful critiques of the direction of contemporary universities and colleges that I have read in quite some time: "The Death of American Universities." Much of what Chomsky says here, which is an edited transcript (prepared by Robin J. Sowards) of remarks Chomsky delivered in February to members and allies of the Adjunct Faculty Association of the United Steelworkers in Pittsburgh, will be familiar to anyone in higher education, as well as any who have experienced--or closely followed--the travails of students and parents, contingent and permanent faculty, and institutions struggling to deal with budgetary cuts and economically unsustainable cost inflation, narrowing educational goals, the imposition of market-based ideologies, the effects of technological shifts, and various forms of anti-intellectualism, some of very long standing as the late Richard Hofstadter, Susan Jacoby, and others have argued persuasively, that have taken root in our contemporary society.

Perhaps the only area he does not touch upon is athletics, a subject he has commented on in the past. But in every other area what he says applies to every institution in the US, including the richest and most elite--think Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Duke, etc.--though in some areas, such as renewing a focus on the arts and humanities, feeling the pinch of federal and state cuts, and trustees who are more concerned with how the football team does rather than whether students are receiving the highest quality education for the complex world in which we live, a world which they will help to shape and transform, these institutions are still somewhat insulated. 

But even Chomsky's former home base, MIT, is not immune to the critiques he lodges or challenges he describes (the MIT Sloan School of Management is one of the major incubators of high-level business thinking in the US), and as he always does, he makes sure to broaden his discussion to larger issues in the society, noting how the "precariat" is not just an issue for higher education, but central to contemporary asset-based globalized capitalism. You might quibble with some of his assertions, but in general, I think he gets things very right, and I wish more than anything that upper-level university administrators and leaders, legislators and other public officials, college and university trustees, and members of the media would read this piece without blinders or prejudice, whether they ultimately disagree or not. I see up close what he'd talking about; getting those in positions of power to acknowledge and address what's going on is another matter. 

Here are a few quotes, but do read the entire article.

This idea is sometimes made quite overt. So when Alan Greenspan was testifying before Congress in 1997 on the marvels of the economy he was running, he said straight out that one of the bases for its economic success was imposing what he called “greater worker insecurity.” If workers are more insecure, that’s very “healthy” for the society, because if workers are insecure they won’t ask for wages, they won’t go on strike, they won’t call for benefits; they’ll serve the masters gladly and passively. And that’s optimal for corporations’ economic health. 

At the time, everyone regarded Greenspan’s comment as very reasonable, judging by the lack of reaction and the great acclaim he enjoyed. Well, transfer that to the universities: how do you ensure “greater worker insecurity”? Crucially, by not guaranteeing employment, by keeping people hanging on a limb than can be sawed off at any time, so that they’d better shut up, take tiny salaries, and do their work; and if they get the gift of being allowed to serve under miserable conditions for another year, they should welcome it and not ask for any more.

and

In fact, if you look back farther, it goes even deeper than that. If you go back to the early 1970s when a lot of this began, there was a lot of concern pretty much across the political spectrum over the activism of the 1960s; it’s commonly called “the time of troubles.” It was a “the time of troubles” because the country was getting civilized, and that’s dangerous. People were becoming politically engaged and were trying to gain rights for groups that are called “special interests,” like women, working people, farmers, the young, the old, and so on. That led to a serious backlash, which was pretty overt. 

At the liberal end of the spectrum, there’s a book called The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission, Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, Joji Watanuki, produced by the Trilateral Commission, an organization of liberal internationalists. The Carter administration was drawn almost entirely from their ranks. They were concerned with what they called “the crisis of democracy” — namely, that there’s too much democracy.

and

First of all, we should put aside any idea that there was once a “golden age.” Things were different and in some ways better in the past, but far from perfect. The traditional universities were, for example, extremely hierarchical, with very little democratic participation in decision-making. One part of the activism of the 1960s was to try to democratize the universities, to bring in, say, student representatives to faculty committees, to bring in staff to participate. 

These efforts were carried forward under student initiatives, with some degree of success. Most universities now have some degree of student participation in faculty decisions. And I think those are the kinds of things we should be moving towards: a democratic institution, in which the people involved in the institution, whoever they may be (faculty, students, staff), participate in determining the nature of the institution and how it runs; and the same should go for a factory. 

These are not radical ideas, I should say. They come straight out of classical liberalism. So if you read, for example, John Stuart Mill, a major figure in the classical liberal tradition, he took it for granted that workplaces ought to be managed and controlled by the people who work in them — that’s freedom and democracy. We see the same ideas in the United States. Let’s say you go back to the Knights of Labor; one of their stated aims was “To establish co-operative institutions such as will tend to supersede the wage-system, by the introduction of a co-operative industrial system.”

The New New Republic?

UPDATE: In a Huff Post Live chat with Marc Lamont Hill, newly appointed New Republic Senior Editor Jamil Smith, who is African American, asked that readers give the magazine a little time to rebuild before declaring it dead.

Roughly a little over a month ago The New Republic imploded. The now 101-year-old mainline liberal publication, founded in 1914 by Progressive journalists Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann, and Walter Weyl, with the financial support of members of the Whitney family, and which had changed ownership many times over the years, found itself hemorrhaging writers as a result of editorial changes pushed by its newest owner, Chris Hughes, an out gay, Facebook-cofounder, Harvard College graduate, near-billionaire, and Obama campaign internet strategist, who purchased a majority stake in the magazine in March 2012.

With the Harvard tie he is hardly out of place TNR; the Washington-based magazine has had a long history of white male Crimsons, beginning with Croly and Lippmann, up through avowed racist owner and publisher Martin Peretz, and editors Michael Kinsley, and Andrew Sullivan, filling its pages. Hughes, however, is a product of the new Silicon Valley world and its "disruption" ethos, though these ideas did not immediately manifest themselves when he bought the magazine. He kept its editor, Franklin Foer, a returnee to the magazine after a prior stint from 2006 through 2010, and TNR most continued as it had, advocating a mainstream liberal--often varying degrees of neoconservative (as in its pro-Iraq War stance under Peter Beinart), neoliberal or mildly libertarian ideology at times--approach to politics, economics and culture. It also continued as a magazine staffed mainly by white Ivy League graduates, with some rare exceptions.

Chris Hughes and Franklin Foer
(© James Estrin/New York Times)

Throughout the magazine's 100th anniversary year, tensions were mounting. The New York Times reports that TNR, an acronym Hughes urged staffers to nix in favor of The New Republic, was losing "$5 million per year," a small sum compared to his overall fortune, admittedly, but nothing to sniff at either. Despite Hughes's push for higher traffic, some longtime staffers, like literary editor Leon Wieseltier, continued to champion TNR's traditions and longstanding format, publicly airing comments of this sort at the magazine's centenary celebration last November. By hiring Guy Vidra, a former Yahoo exec as CEO, one month before the ceremony, however, Hughes indicated as clearly as possible that he was going in a new direction. Hughes' and Vidra's new plans include removing "Liberal" from the masthead, truncating the publication schedule from 20 to 10 issues, moving the editorial offices to New York and transforming the publishing venture into what Vidra has described as "a vertically integrated digital-media company." (As The New York Times puts it, Vidra said that he intended to "break shit.") Hughes' decision to pursue this route allegedly accelerated after his husband, Sean Eldridge, Political Director of Freedom to Marry, lost his Congressional race for New York's 19th district by 30 points.


In December, Hughes ousted Foer, and appointed Gabriel Snyder, a former Bloomberg, Atlantic Wire and Gawker staff member, in his place. The mass exodus, of Wieseltier and others began, with concomitant denunciations by a wide array of TNR writers, including an open letter signed by a luminaries' list (Robert Reich, Hendrik Hertzberg, Jeffrey Rosen, Andrew Sullivan, Sean Wilentz, etc.) that appeared on Facebook.  So extensive were the losses in human capital that the magazine had to suspend print publication during December, though it has continued with its online presence throughout the internal tempest.

Not all critics sided with Foer, Wieseltier and Reich; some, like the Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates, highlighted the magazine's mostly monochrome editorial staffing and its sometimes horrendous racist history, about which I'll say more in a few paragraphs. But in general, the attacks, from a wide array of quarters, on Hughes in particular, were damning, which left me wondered how he and TNR would recover.

It now appears that TNR is again up and running, with new staff under Snyder, though on its site no masthead is yet accessible. From Facebook I learned that acclaimed poet Cathy Hong Park will be in charge of poetry, a welcome shift from the past. (TNR certainly could stand to publish more poetry and fiction--and perhaps even playlets and cross-genre works--as it once did.) Whether there will be other staff members who are not white and not male, as well as non-staff contributors who break the longstanding TNR political and cultural l remains to be seen, though a scan of its current pages suggests that this is happening. At any rate, TNR will prove its commitment by sustaining any changes, and I don't expect that when it comes to politics and economics it will be trending in the direction of Socialism, let alone Trotskyism. Its owner has those many millions to protect (from taxes), don't forget.


One could argue about all of this, WHO CARES? I remember saying this about TNR back during the early 1990s, during which former editor Michael Kinsley, now a confirmed contrarian, was appearing on CNN's Crossfire show and writing TNR's TRB columns, and a friend who would later briefly work for the Clinton administration reminded me of the conservative-within-liberal politics influence that any number of its writers and staffers have had in Washington. It was, in fact, allegedly "the in-flight magazine of Air Force One" during Bill Clinton's presidency, and its importance didn't end in 2000. To repeat, Hughes, the owner, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief, has close ties to the current President of the United States. But you need only look at early 2000s editor Peter Beinart's full-throated advocacy for George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq in 2003, which played a crucial role in amplifying the case for and push towards war. (Beinart has since, thankfully, come to regret his hubristic stance.)

Or one could point to Jonathan Cohen's campaign, cited by various DC journalists and politicians, for the passage of Obamacare, which counts of one of President Obama's great successes, to underscore that TNR, despite its smallish subscriber base of 45,000, has consistently played a central role in the Democratic Party's--especially Democratic Leadership Council/neoliberal--political and legislative echo chamber. Kinsley wasn't the only staffer to make the leap to the broader public arena. One could quickly cite former editor and (neo-) conservative Andrew Sullivan, whose TNR notoriety included promoting the supremacist Charles Murray-Richard Herrnstein Bell Curve tome, as another figure whose tenure at the magazine led to an outsized voice in the public, especially official Washington, discourse. As a post-TNR blogger, Atlantic staffer and author, he was invited to meet and advise President Barack Obama along with other "liberal" journalists very early in the president's first term, in 2009.

Whether TNR can possibly have that same role remains unclear.

An article posted within the last few days, however, represents a positive step in TNR's process of at least beginning to come to terms with some of the worst aspects of its past. On January 29, TNR published South Asian Canadian, Toronto-based journalist and comics critic Jeet Heer's insightful, historical reflection, "The New Republic's Legacy on Race." As any person of color familiar with liberalism can attest, an economically, politically and socially open-minded approach does not guarantee good or progressive racial politics, or a challenge to racism, white supremacy, sexism, classism, or many other corrosive ideologies. Heer notes the magazine's mixed history on racial issues and racism within its ranks. On the one hand, it can point to periods of enlightened publishing policies and discourse, Heer notes, during the Civil Rights Movement; on the other hand, there is the 38-year Marty Peretz era, whose stench still perfumes any discussion of TNR.

Heer shows, as other commentators online have noted, that not only was Peretz notorious for uttering anti-black, anti-latino, and, especially, anti-arab and anti-muslim comments, but he infused the magazine with a racist, neoconservative, hyper-Zionist ideology that its pages often reflected. Sometimes his editors and writers, like Kinsley, did not so much agree with him as mostly remain silent publicly about the magazine's toxic rhetoric. Why did so few of these liberals not speak out against Peretz, even after leaving the magazine? In the case of Sullivan, the attacks on affirmative action, black intellectuals (which was in essence a trashing of Cornel West) and the push for the Bell Curve material, or with late editor Michael Kelly, who supported Bush's Iraq War folly, the support for Peretz's perspective was nothing less than that of a true believer. Heer doesn't stint on the magazine's editorial ignominy, noting the centrality of racist stereotypes, downplayed in some of the commentary about both, in articles by notorious disgraced plagiarists Stephen Glass and Ruth Shalit.

2008 covers

Moreover, despite the publication of some black and other writers of color, many of them conservatives in politics, culture or both, during the Peretz era and after, the magazine's record on hiring and publishing staff who were not white has been abysmal. (See that luminaries list, which had few women on it as well.) Many online defenders have mentioned Dayo Olopade, who had an excellent five-year run as one of TNR's best younger talents, but can anyone name any other black, asian-american or latino writers--and if so, beyond one or two--who came to wider public notice because of their work at TNR? On top of this, its coverage of cultural issues has been terribly limited, especially for a magazine based in Washington, of all places. Art critic Jed Perl, and literary critic Ruth Franklin, outside of a few instances (eg. Perl on Ai Wei-Wei, Franklin on Zadie Smith), seldom or only irregularly covered exhibitions or books, respectively, by artists of color, especially Americans.


Both Perl and Franklin are gone now; will their replacements be any better? Will they come from a broader pool of writers or still mainly be Ivy seedlings? Will the magazine, in its ideological push to replicate contemporary Silicon Valley modes of operation and in its shift to the East Coast capital of hypergentrification and displacement, let alone Wall Street's lair, New York City, be able to rethink its neoliberal and sometimes neoconservative drift, or at least provide platforms for dissenting Left voices, even if it is not about to replace The Nation, Mother Jones, or other more progressive organs? And now that it is based away from DC can it possibly have the same political and legislative influence it had? Will it be as close to the next president, Democratic--or Republican--as it has to the most recent three?

Will people soon be saying who cares? about TNR? Or will it gives us all reasons, good, bad or otherwise, not to?