 11 February 20
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10 February 20
'Vagina Monologues' Playwright Eve Ensler: 'My Whole Life, I've Been Waiting for an Apology'
KK Ottesen, The Washington Post
Ottesen writes: "Eve Ensler, 66, is a Tony Award-winning playwright, performer, author and activist whose celebrated play, 'The Vagina Monologues,' has been staged all over the world. Ensler wrote her recent book, 'The Apology,' in the fictional voice of her late father as an account of and apology for the abuse he inflicted on her."
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KK Ottesen, The Washington Post
Ottesen writes: "Eve Ensler, 66, is a Tony Award-winning playwright, performer, author and activist whose celebrated play, 'The Vagina Monologues,' has been staged all over the world. Ensler wrote her recent book, 'The Apology,' in the fictional voice of her late father as an account of and apology for the abuse he inflicted on her."
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Sen. Bernie Sanders. (photo: Getty)
Sanders Pulls Further Ahead of Buttigieg in New Hampshire Poll
Jon Keller, CBS Boston
Keller writes: "Bernie Sanders appears to be cementing his hold on first place with 27 percent, while Pete Buttigieg, who had surged into a virtual tie with Sanders as the week ended, in second with 19 percent."
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Jon Keller, CBS Boston
Keller writes: "Bernie Sanders appears to be cementing his hold on first place with 27 percent, while Pete Buttigieg, who had surged into a virtual tie with Sanders as the week ended, in second with 19 percent."
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Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg reportedly raised .8 million last quarter. (photo: Win McNamee/Getty)
More About Pete
Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs
Robinson writes: "Pete Buttigieg, as I have documented at length before, has spent his life doing little more than try to advance himself to higher and higher levels of status and power."
Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs
Robinson writes: "Pete Buttigieg, as I have documented at length before, has spent his life doing little more than try to advance himself to higher and higher levels of status and power."
EXCERPT:
Pete Buttigieg, as I have documented at length before, has spent his life doing little more than try to advance himself to higher and higher levels of status and power. When he was at Harvard, he passed by the “social justice warriors” (his term) fighting to get a living wage for the school’s janitors, so that he could go and have pizza with governors and media elites. As a newly minted Rhodes Scholar, with the privilege to do almost anything in the world, he chose to go to McKinsey, a totally amoral consulting firm that advises dictators and drug companies on how to optimize their evil. There, he almost certainly helped craft layoffs and insurance rate hikes at Blue Cross (instead of denying this, he pivots quickly to trashing single-payer healthcare). He worked on McKinsey’s contract with the Department of Defense in Afghanistan, which funneled millions of dollars of taxpayer money to the consulting firm for seemingly doing almost no work. (The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan could not find anything that McKinsey had produced for the $18 million the government gave it except a 50-page report highlighting the economic development opportunities in Afghanistan.) When asked about it, Buttigieg simply says it’s all a secret.
Buttigieg’s company appears to have stolen millions from the U.S. government (or at least, the Inspector General has no idea where the money went except into McKinsey’s pocket), in addition to their work on helping corporations fire people and pump more opiates into more bodies. Let’s be clear: McKinsey is sociopathic. They have no hesitation about advising murderous autocrats like Mohammed bin Salman (of bombing school buses and dismembering dissidents with bonesaws infamy), and they even disgusted ICE employees by considering plans to optimize immigration detention centers by spending less on feeding detainees. (Then they lied about what they did.) Yet when Buttigieg was first asked about McKinsey, he could see nothing wrong with the firm and refused to accept that he had any moral responsibility whatsoever for the kind of work he chose for himself. He said that McKinsey’s job is simply “answering questions and solving problems,” and they are only “as moral or immoral or amoral as the American private sector itself.” (So very immoral, then.)
Sanders has devoted his life to social movements. He has shaped them and been shaped by them. He understands that change comes from the bottom, not the top. (photo: Jim Bourg/Reuters)
Barbara Smith | I Helped Coin the Term 'Identity Politics.' I'm Endorsing Bernie Sanders
Barbara Smith, Guardian UK
Smith writes: "As a black lesbian feminist who has been out since the mid-1970s, I believe that, among all the candidates, Sanders' leadership offers us the best chance to eradicate the unique injustices that marginalized groups in America endure."
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Barbara Smith, Guardian UK
Smith writes: "As a black lesbian feminist who has been out since the mid-1970s, I believe that, among all the candidates, Sanders' leadership offers us the best chance to eradicate the unique injustices that marginalized groups in America endure."
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Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Federal Plaza on Dearborn Street. (photo: Rich Hein/Sun-Times)
Duncing About Architecture: The Right-Wing Push for "Classical" Federal Buildings
Kate Wagner, The New Republic
Excerpt: "The ignorance and racism behind the right-wing push for 'classical' federal buildings."
Kate Wagner, The New Republic
Excerpt: "The ignorance and racism behind the right-wing push for 'classical' federal buildings."
EXCERPTS:
Comparisons have already been made to Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin. Everyone is very mad online, except for Ross Douthat, who loves the idea.
The abrupt aesthetic reversal heralded by this executive order has some obvious underpinnings, beginning with the fact that the reversion to a mandatory classical style reflects the architectural philosophies of white supremacists online, as well as the doings of a developer-president and a right-wing think tank making what is explicitly a political move. But this is also the inevitable result of an architectural faux-populism that has been sown in the conscience of American architecture since postmodernism.
Whether we like to admit it or not, Trump is an architectural president—in his professional life as a (failing) developer, he has had his grubby, tiny hands in myriad buildings across the country. Like all building-peddlers, Trump is subjected to the gaze of architecture critics, who have on occasion praised his work but have most often panned it. Though Trump has put up buildings ranging from nineteenth-century retrofits to late-modern skyscrapers, his personal style is a combination of 2000s bling and Louis XIV—nothing in his penthouse Trump Tower apartment is spared a metallic coating. His choice of modernism for the style of the Trump Towers in Chicago and New York can simply be explained away by the fact that modern, all-glass buildings are the hegemonic aesthetic signature of corporate capitalism: It is the style of big business.
Simply put, people love good buildings, modern and traditional. More to the point, architecture is imbued with all manner of personal meaning to the people who experience it, regardless of how good it is. After all, the houses most of us grow up in are not architectural masterpieces. However, only a specific kind of person looks at architecture and feels the need to talk about the Grecian ideal or the backbone of Western Society. That person is usually either a white supremacist, a stuck-up nitwit trapped in the 1980s, or, in the case of Trump himself, both.
Mural portrait of Marielle Franco in Brazil. (photo: Reuters)
Brazilian Police Kill Suspect in Marielle Franco's Murder
teleSUR
Excerpt: "Adriano da Nóbrega, the notorious hitman whose gang of hired killers was allegedly involved in the murder of Brazilian councilor, Marielle Franco, was gunned down by police on Sunday in the northeastern state of Bahia, where the suspect had been hiding from authorities."
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teleSUR
Excerpt: "Adriano da Nóbrega, the notorious hitman whose gang of hired killers was allegedly involved in the murder of Brazilian councilor, Marielle Franco, was gunned down by police on Sunday in the northeastern state of Bahia, where the suspect had been hiding from authorities."
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An unfunded superfund site comprised of abandoned gold, lead and copper mines near Lee Mountain, Montana. (photo: Matthew Brown)
Trump Calls for Slashing Funding for Toxic Superfund Cleanup
Ellen Knickmeyer, Associated Press
Knickmeyer writes: "President Donald Trump called Monday for slashing funding for the Superfund hazardous waste program, even as the backlog of clean-ups has grown around the country for lack of money."
Ellen Knickmeyer, Associated Press
Knickmeyer writes: "President Donald Trump called Monday for slashing funding for the Superfund hazardous waste program, even as the backlog of clean-ups has grown around the country for lack of money."
The $113 million in Superfund clean-up cuts are part of Trump’s proposal for a $2.4 billion, or 26%, cut in overall funding for the Environmental Protection Agency. That’s in line with the president’s vow as a candidate to cut all but “little tidbits” of the environmental agency in a push to cut regulations he sees as unnecessarily burdensome to business.
Monday marked the fourth year where Trump has called for cuts nearing one-third of the environmental agency’s budget. Republicans and Democrats in Congress annually have overridden his proposal, keeping funding for the agency’s environmental and public health oversight roughly even.
Other major cuts for the EPA in Trump’s latest proposal include eliminating $66 million in funding for the Energy Star program — a popular program that lets consumers compare the energy efficiency of appliances — and for voluntary climate programs.
“These programs are not essential to EPA’s core mission and can be implemented by the private sector,” the budget says.
Trump and his EPA administrators have stressed Superfund clean-ups as one of their top environmental priorities.
However, as The Associated Press reported in January, the Trump administration has built up the biggest backlog of unfunded toxic Superfund clean-up projects in at least 15 years, nearly triple the number that were stalled for lack of money in the Obama era, agency figures show.
The four-decade-old Superfund program is meant to tackle some of the most heavily contaminated sites in the U.S., which threaten the residents, wildlife and habitat around the sites with dangerous industry pollutants.
Trump’s proposal says the cut reflects that his administration is running the Superfund program more efficiently, and “challenges the agency to optimize the use of settlement funds for the cleanup actions” at those Superfund sites where a responsible company has been found to pay for the work.
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