12 February 20
We have a unique problem. A large dedicated audience that is averse to supporting the project. While there may be reasons, good and bad, the net effect is a constant headache for everyone.
To expect that 1% of the subscribers would respond to the funding appeals seems like a modest aspiration.
We are going to have to find a way to raise the level of participation. You apparently rely on RSN, and we clearly rely on you.
Need to find a way to make this work.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
Founder, Reader Supported News
If you would prefer to send a check:
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043
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12 February 20
Mehdi Hasan, The Intercept
Hasan writes: "Bernie Sanders is now the undisputed frontrunner in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination."
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Hasan writes: "Bernie Sanders is now the undisputed frontrunner in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination."
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Attorney General William Barr speaks at a news conference at the Justice Department along with other department officials on Monday, Feb. 10, 2020. (photo: Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images)
Barr Takes Control of Legal Matters of Interest to Trump, Including Stone Sentencing
Carol E. Lee, Ken Dilanian and Peter Alexander, NBC News
Excerpt: "The U.S. attorney who had presided over an inconclusive criminal investigation into former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe was abruptly removed from the job last month in one of several recent moves by Attorney General William Barr to take control of legal matters of personal interest to President Donald Trump."
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Carol E. Lee, Ken Dilanian and Peter Alexander, NBC News
Excerpt: "The U.S. attorney who had presided over an inconclusive criminal investigation into former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe was abruptly removed from the job last month in one of several recent moves by Attorney General William Barr to take control of legal matters of personal interest to President Donald Trump."
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A migrant family. (photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
The Deep Roots of Trump's Anti-Immigrant Policies
Daniel Denvir, Jacobin
Denvir writes: "Donald Trump's recent expansion of the Muslim ban and bid to exclude poor immigrants is further proof that his administration is one of the most anti-immigrant in US history. But it was Trump's predecessors who made his assault on immigrants possible."
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Daniel Denvir, Jacobin
Denvir writes: "Donald Trump's recent expansion of the Muslim ban and bid to exclude poor immigrants is further proof that his administration is one of the most anti-immigrant in US history. But it was Trump's predecessors who made his assault on immigrants possible."
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A family shopping for food. (photo: US Department of Agriculture/Flickr)
Trump's New Budget Funds Endless War and Nuclear Weapons While Slashing Aid to Poor and Hungry Americans
Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "President Trump unveiled his 2021 budget request Monday, proposing massive cuts to Medicaid and food stamps while increasing spending on the military and his border wall."
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Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "President Trump unveiled his 2021 budget request Monday, proposing massive cuts to Medicaid and food stamps while increasing spending on the military and his border wall."
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Slave shackles on display at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., in 2016. (photo: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
Our View of Black History Has Radically Shifted in a Few Short Years
Salim Muwakkil, In These Times
Muwakkil writes: "New developments surrounding the conversation about race in America inject a shot of badly needed relevance into the often restrained observance of Black History Month."
Salim Muwakkil, In These Times
Muwakkil writes: "New developments surrounding the conversation about race in America inject a shot of badly needed relevance into the often restrained observance of Black History Month."
The case for reparations and The 1619 Project have focused attention on what makes African Americans distinct.
lack History Month, if treated seriously, could help clarify a key point about race in America: African Americans were created by slavery. As I argued in 2006: Millions of Africans wound up in America only because they were kidnapped to fill the needs of a slave economy. This process forged a new people, who became American by necessity, and included 12 generations of chattel slavery.
This history of slave—rather than racial—identification accounts for the disadvantages accrued by the progeny of enslaved Africans. With this understanding, the culpability for redressing that specific legacy rests on the government that abetted it.
My 2006 piece noted that affirmative action was, at first, created to compensate the victims of slavery’s legacy—but “other groups had to be included to gain political support … [and] affirmative action became a comprehensive attempt to offset discrimination against all ‘minorities.’ ” The resulting practice meant that a business exercising affirmative action could employ many people of color without hiring a single African American. That affirmative action has diverged so dramatically from its initial conception is yet more proof of this nation’s reluctance to face the truth of its ignoble, Afrophobic history.
The issues I raised in 2006 rose to the surface of public discourse in 2019 in two major ways. The New York Times Magazine embarked on something it called “The 1619 Project,” named to mark the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans to the shores of Virginia in what would become the United States. Spearheaded by Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, the project’s goal was “to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year. Doing so requires us to place the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country.” Such an audacious conception—in the Times? As I read through the special issue, I found a new awareness of how the legacy of slavery is thoroughly interwoven with America’s founding precepts. The recognition seemed too good to be true.
Despite predictable grumbling from conservative quarters and some academic salons, the response to the project has been overwhelmingly positive. The Times supplement quickly sold out. What’s more, school districts in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Buffalo, N.Y., (among a growing number) have incorporated material from the project into their curricula.
Reparations, too, has burst into public view. In summer 2019, the House held its first hearing on H.R. 40, a bill that would create a commission to develop proposals to address and redress the legacy of slavery. The bill had been introduced by the late Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) in each House session since 1989—where it languished, unattended—but this hearing attracted, among others, actor/activist Danny Glover and author Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose 2014 essay in The Atlantic, “The Case for Reparations,” gave the concept an infusion of intellectual credibility. Early in the 2020 Democratic campaign, several candidates, urged on by candidate Marianne Williamson (who since has dropped out), expressed support.
While the discussion of reparations has died down again, its emergence in public discourse is another sign that the legacies of slavery—housing discrimination, wealth inequality, educational disadvantage—are being treated with new urgency. This refined perspective on our nation’s history directly connects slavery to the ongoing socioeconomic status of slavery’s victims. Finding data to trace the multigenerational path of these wrongs has become a new mission for historical researchers.
Thankfully, these new developments surrounding the conversation about race in America inject a shot of badly needed relevance into the often restrained observance of Black History Month.
Migrants leave a frontier checkpoint, in Agua Caliente, Honduras, on 1 February 2020. 'In many cases, it's clear that migration is the only possible way out,' says the MSF general coordinator in Mexico. (photo: Gustavo Amador/EPA)
More Than Two-Thirds of Migrants Fleeing Central American Region Had Family Taken or Killed
David Agren, Guardian UK
Agren writes: "More than two-thirds of the migrants fleeing Central America's northern triangle countries - Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador - experienced the murder, disappearance or kidnapping of a relative before their departure, according to a new study by the medical charity Doctors Without Borders."
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David Agren, Guardian UK
Agren writes: "More than two-thirds of the migrants fleeing Central America's northern triangle countries - Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador - experienced the murder, disappearance or kidnapping of a relative before their departure, according to a new study by the medical charity Doctors Without Borders."
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Chinstrap Penguins on Elephant Island, Antarctica. (photo: Christian Aslund/Greenpeace/PA)
Climate Change Wipes Out Chinstrap Penguins on Antarctica
teleSUR
Excerpt: "The number of chinstrap penguins in some colonies in Western Antarctica has fallen by as much as 77 percent since they were last surveyed in the 1970s, say scientists studying the impact of climate change on the remote region."
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teleSUR
Excerpt: "The number of chinstrap penguins in some colonies in Western Antarctica has fallen by as much as 77 percent since they were last surveyed in the 1970s, say scientists studying the impact of climate change on the remote region."
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