What Happened Today: May 10, 2022
Biden’s ‘equity’ plans; Pensions suffer; Who’s behind DC’s abortion protests?
The Big Story
As part of its massive “generational commitment” to racial equity, the White House is embracing intersectionality, a theory of systemic oppression that was developed by the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, a pioneer in the field of critical race theory. The newfound focus on “intersections of marginalization” is one aspect of the “whole of government” project outlined in the Equity Action Plans that were made public last month and detailed in a Real Clear Investigations (RCI) report published Tuesday. More than ninety federal agencies have each produced a plan describing the steps they will take to combat “entrenched disparities” among different identity groups, which includes taking resources away from groups thought to be privileged and reallocating them to groups designated as “marginalized” due to legacies of historical oppression. The initiative, which is still in its earliest stages, has been a top priority for the White House and grows out of an executive order that President Biden signed in January 2021 on his first day in office “on advancing racial equity and support for underserved communities.” But the plans are not the first equity policies pursued by the Biden administration. Earlier equity initiatives include the State Department’s release last year of a new “X” option on U.S. passports for American citizens who do not identify as male or female, and a controversial plan from the Department of Agriculture to offer debt relief exclusively to non-white farmers, which was eventually blocked by a federal judge. In its new action plan, the Department of Agriculture says it will “continue to integrate civil rights and equity” into areas including ”food security, nutrition, natural resources and conservation, rural development, and more.” The Biden administration’s open-ended equity plans, which are being overseen by the Office of Management and Budget, could easily total in the tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in spending over the next few years, based on comparable equity programs. According to RCI, the plans “are sprinkled throughout with trendy terms like BIPOC, LGBTQI+, queer, power structures, marginalization, intersectional, and gender binary.”
In The Back Pages: The Musical Chairs Behind D.C.’s Abortion Protests
The Rest
→ On Monday, the stock market had its worst day since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, reflecting growing concerns about a global economic slowdown or even a coming recession. The S&P 500 fell 3.2% and the FTSE All-World barometer of global equities by 3% amid widespread worries that, with inflation and interest rates rising and governments around the world scaling back their stimulus programs, the global economy is faltering. National economies, too, are showing signs of deceleration, with China announcing that its exports had fallen to their lowest level in two years. Compounding these worries is the fact that the Fed, now battling inflation, won’t be able to offset low growth or a sluggish economy with more stimulus.
Read More: https://www.ft.com/content/6691700c-9dfd-4911-8589-70b4ebd2caef
→ It’s not just Wall Street traders and people working in finance who are affected by stocks taking a dive. Public pension funds worth more than $4.5 trillion—which hold the retirements for millions of teachers, sanitation workers, and other government employees—have also taken a big hit. In the first quarter of 2022, pension funds were down by a median 4.01%, The Wall Street Journal reports. The last time they went into negative returns was at the beginning of the pandemic. The net effect of the downturn “likely means higher retirement costs for many state and local government employers and employees who must help make up the difference when these funds, which predominantly have a June 30 fiscal year-end date, don’t meet their returns targets of around 7%,” according to the Journal.
→ Votes are still being tallied after Monday’s presidential election in the Philippines, but it appears that Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the son and namesake of the country’s former brutal dictator who ruled under martial law from 1972 until 1986 and stole billions of dollars’ worth of state assets, is set to win in a landslide. Marcos’ victory comes at a pivotal moment for the Philippines, both internally and geopolitically. Marcos will be replacing President Rodrigo Duterte, a controversial figure with long-standing ties to a vigilante death squad that murdered more than 1,000 people suspected of gang-related activities. Duterte remains popular in the Philippines and was instrumental in Marcos’ rise and the rehabilitation of his family’s name. Duterte’s supporters, meanwhile, see Marcos as possessing the same strongman appeal as the outgoing president. The election also has enormous implications for the escalating tensions between China and the United States. The United States supported the anti-communist Marcos dictatorship during the Cold War and went so far as to help the Marcos family escape to Hawaii after the overthrow of his dictatorship in 1986. China’s relationship with the Philippines, meanwhile, goes back to the ninth century, and in recent years the two countries, both of which have coasts on the South China Sea, have grown closer. As the United States and China compete for global markets in an economic cold war, the Philippines may be the next domino toppling toward Beijing.
→ By considerable margins, Jewish women are the demographic group most likely to graduate college, beating out non-Jewish women of similar class status by 23% and—for the first time in history—Jewish men by 21%. That’s the conclusion of a new study, “From Bat Mitzvah to the Bar: Religious Habitus, Self-Concept, and Women’s Educational Fulfillment,” by Professor Ileana M. Horowitz, an assistant professor at Tulane University. Pulling and analyzing data from a large, 10-year study of 3,238 adolescents and parents, Horwitz’s study is unique in its investigation of the relationship between education and religion. “Sociological studies take into consideration race, class, and gender when looking at education. I wanted to know how religion affects academic outcomes,” Horwitz said. The study did note, however, some disconcerting downsides to the academic success of Jewish women. “There were questions about life satisfaction once the Jewish women reached their twenties,” Professor Horwitz said. “They asked themselves, ‘Why am I doing all this again?’ and ‘When does this race ever end? When do I start to feel satisfied?’”
→ Clearview AI, a facial recognition software company that was sued by the ACLU for archiving and selling the “facial fingerprints” of billions of people without their knowledge, will be forced to cease such practices, according to a settlement announced in court on Monday. The settlement also bars Clearview from giving individual police officers “free trials” of the software without the knowledge or approval of their supervisors or departments—a practice that enabled officers to search the enormous database of images without needing to notify or seek approval from the courts. “Clearview treated people’s biometrics as unrestricted sources of profit and ignored the danger that comes with tracking faceprints,” the ACLU tweeted after the decision. Clearview’s software works simply, which is part of its appeal. A user takes a photo of someone and uploads it to the app, which then searches an archive of several billion photos scraped from social media and the internet. The company was hardly known until an exposé about Clearview was published in The New York Times in February 2020, which revealed the company’s partnerships with law enforcement agencies, from local cops to the FBI and Department of Homeland Security. The ACLU lawsuit was filed a few months later.
→ Speaking of equity agendas … Utah health officials knowingly violated federal law—and did so at the encouragement of President Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Food and Drug Administration—by using race as a central criterion in the distribution of monoclonal antibodies to mitigate the severity of COVID-19 infections. When two law professors who specialize in bioethics reached out to Utah’s Crisis Standards of Care Workgroup, asking the office if the policy of prioritizing non-white people for the reception of life-saving drugs is a violation of federal law, the workgroup responded that, while the practice had not been “reviewed legally,” it had been “lauded” by officials from the HHS. Indeed, the Biden administration had called Utah’s approach a “promising practice,” and such strategies of privileging non-white people with medicine were deployed in other states.
→ In a guest editorial for the publication Swimming World, five-time U.S. Olympic swimming Coach Dennis Pursley argues that transgender athletes who were born men should not be allowed to compete in women’s swimming events. Pursley’s article comes after the transgender swimmer Lia Thomas won first place in the NCAA’s first division swimming championship held in March. “At best, Lia was a very mediocre male swimmer whose times did not even come close to being fast enough to qualify to compete in the men’s NCAA championships, much less to win an event,” argues Pursley. He goes on:
If you want to see where this is going, if it is allowed to continue, just look at the mixed relays that were conducted for the first time in the Tokyo Olympics. Coincidentally, four of the eight teams in the finals chose to lead off with men and the other four led off with women. This was the best against the best. The four men had a body length lead on the four women by the time they surfaced from the start and the lead of the men over the women was extended with every stroke of the race. If the governing bodies don’t come to their senses, it will only be a matter of time before some of these faster men choose to participate in women’s sports, making a mockery of the competition.
Read it here: https://www.swimmingworldmagazine.com/news/five-time-olympic-coach-dennis-pursley-calls-for-end-of-transgender-participation/
→ The annual Milken Institute’s Global Conference, a three-day California-fied Davos run by Michael Milken, a former junk bond trader and a presidentially pardoned felon, just wrapped up in Beverly Hills last week. Its panelists and guests were in general agreement that a recession is coming but that their businesses would do well. “It’s okay if we have a recession,” said Jonathan Sokoloff, managing partner of private equity firm Leonard Green & Partners. “The world doesn’t end.” It’s not that investors have made peace with the vicissitudes of the market but rather that they’re confident their investments will be protected from a market downturn. “The financial crisis pulled institutional investors’ interest away from publicly traded stocks and toward private assets promising outsize returns, from venture capital and hedge funds to infrastructure and farmland,” Lee Harris wrote in The American Prospect on Monday. If there were any anxious people at the conference, it wasn’t the financiers but the pundits. Gene Ludwig, former U.S. comptroller of the currency, spoke to the audience about how extreme income inequality was producing “two Americas,” warning the group that “we are headed for civil unrest.”
The Musical Chairs Behind D.C.’s Abortion Protests
Why is a “climate action” group leading the abortion-rights protests at the homes of conservative Supreme Court justices?
Surely there are well-established women’s rights and pro-choice organizations that could have taken the lead in rallying demonstrators to protest the court’s leaked plans to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision. Instead, the organization at the forefront is ShutDownDC, which led the demonstrations outside the homes of Justices Brett Kavanaugh, John Roberts, and Samuel Alito. The group was founded in 2019 with what seemed like an environmentalist mission, and led a number of climate protests that year, “shutting down D.C.” by blocking traffic in the capital.
But ShutDownDC was never an environmentalist group—at least no more than it’s current configuration makes it an “abortion rights” group.
Rather, the organization is an empty vessel operated by a small clique of well-funded professional activists whose job is to imitate the appearance of an organic political movement by staging high-profile “actions” that they get the media to cover. So, for instance, a Politico article published yesterday refers to a “peaceful grassroots demonstration” outside Justice Alito’s house Monday night. But there’s no indication that anything like that took place. ShutDownDC, which was originally spun out of a different organization called “All Out D.C.,” is the definition of an astroturfed movement.
While the group jumps from cause to cause on how the Democratic Party’s priorities line up with the army of liberal activists employed by NGOs, it has been very consistent in its use of the “home protest” tactic. In August 2020, ShutDownDC led protests to the home of the U.S. Postal Service’s Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, allegedly because it thought he was in the tank for Donald Trump and was intentionally hobbling the post office to prevent the counting of mail-in votes for Joe Biden. In September 2020, the group protested outside the house of Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham to demand that he delay confirming a new Supreme Court justice to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg until after a new president was inaugurated. When the election rolled around that November, ShutDownDC hosted an online training session called “Escalating Resistance in Times of Crisis: Mass Rebellion” that promoted “planning for social disruption in economic centers using creative tactics.”
It makes sense that ShutDownDC jumps from cause to cause because it has no authentic core connecting it to a particular issue or set of constituents. The group is like a shell company or holding corporation; it’s made up of at least 24 groups, including stalwarts of the professional activist scene like Black Lives Matter DC, Code Pink, the Climate Action Network Action Fund, and Extinction Rebellion DC. That complicated structure appears to serve the same purpose here that it does in corporations with multiple addresses and offshore bank accounts—it makes it hard to see where the money is coming from and even harder to see who’s in charge.
More to come in a second installment tomorrow following the money trail of professional activism …
P.S. I too appreciate the Daily Scroll! Great reporting on the shell game of the protests in DC!
I must correct something here that is probably a piece of the tidal wave of myth-making about the 1980s that has buried the history of that decade. Liberals and the left have been engaged in this myth-making since the 80s themselves, and occasionally someone who was present at the time and remembers it well needs to speak up.
Marcos took over the Philippines as president-for-life in 1966 on his own initiative. There wasn't a lot the US could do about it in terms of internal Filipino politics. The US did continue to maintain important bases there through the end of the Cold War, although they were mostly dismantled in the 1990s.
In the 1980s, the opposition to Marcos was led mainly by the Aquino family, who had a long history in politics. When Benigno Aquino, a senator, was assassinated upon his return from exile in 1982, the US initially looked the other way. However, thanks to Secretary of State George Schultz (one of the greatest to hold that office), US policy began to change in 1983. By 1986, his wife Corazon Aquino had the support of the US and other countries to accept the presidency in a democratic transition. As part of the deal that induced Marcos to step down, he was eased into exile, along with his wife, Imelda, and her infamous shoe collection. It was not an "escape." It was a planned, negotiated transition that the new Philippine government was party to.
The Schultz policy in the Philippines was part of a larger push in the later Reagan years to pressure authoritarian, anti-communist countries long allied to or friendly with the US to reform and open up to democratic transitions. Besides the Philippines, other important examples included South Korea, Chile, and El Salvador; the full list is longer. While not US allies, South Africa underwent a similar transition away from apartheid at the end of the 1980s in a parallel process; while Argentina was encouraged to end its military dictatorship (responsible for the 1982 Falklands war) and transition to elections (including a referendum in the Falkland Islands to determine its future).
This ends today's deprogramming session, an earnest attempt to undo a generation-plus of expensive brainwashing in America's joke system of education.
I really appreciate your daily scroll! Thanks.