On 14 February, the US Department of Educationâs office of civil rights issued a letter providing notice to American educational institutions, schools and universities of the departmentâs new interpretation of federal civil rights law. The letter lays out new conditions for institutions to receive federal funding, including in the form of student loans or scientific and medical research.
Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color and national origin in federally assisted programs or activities. The education departmentâs âDear Colleaguesâ letter redefines the central targets of Title VI to centrally include supposed discrimination against whites. The letter was followed, on 28 February, with a set of guidelines for its interpretation. The novel understanding of anti-white discrimination in these documents is a chilling manifestation of educational authoritarianism.
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The guidelines for what would count as a Title VI violation are vague. From the guidelines:
"a racially-oriented vision of social justice, or similar goals will be probative in OCRâs analysis of the facts and circumstances of an individual case."
The most straightforward way to read the letter and the guidelines is as defining âschool-on-student harassmentâ as including Black history. The letter treats teaching large swaths of Black and Indigenous history as akin to a white professor consistently referring to all of their Black students with a terrible racial slur.
The âmore extreme practices at a universityâ that âcould create a hostile environment under Title VIâ include âpressuring them to participate in protests or take certain positions on racially charged issuesâ. But reason, rationality and morality are sources of âpressureâ. How does one distinguish the pressure placed on people by moral arguments for racially charged issues from other kinds of pressure?
The guidelines create a culture of fear and intimidation around history. If one discusses Black history, one immediately risks endorsing the view that the United States âis built upon âsystemic and structural racismââ. The guidelines invite students to report their teachers and their school administrators for not adhering to a state-imposed ideology about history, as well as state-imposed ideology about gender, which threatens to make teaching critically about gender identity, or including trans perspectives, into school-on-student harassment. Failure to adhere to state ideologies about history and gender fits this new definition of âschool-on-student harassmentâ. Billions in federal funding is at stake.
In The Guardian
Trump is setting the US on a path to educational authoritarianism
in The GuardianâHe nails it on the first takeâ: how the Beatles helped my autistic son find his voice
in The GuardianSuch a lovely story:
Eventually, Miss Parsons tells us about her departmentâs annual production. Itâs called Oakfieldâs Got Talent, and she wonders whether James might perform? When I ask him, I get a fervent yes; to reduce the chances of anything unexpected happening, she agrees to the suggestion that I should accompany him on an acoustic guitar.
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I reach for a piece of paper that is serving as a cue card, and James reads it out: âThis next song was originally by the Velvet Underground, and itâs calledâ â he then slows down â âIâm. Waiting. For. The. Man.â
When we play it, James sounds like Mark E Smith from the Fall, barking out the words, and rising to the conclusion of each verse â âOh, Iâm waiting for mah manâ â with a loud sense of triumph. A few times, he drifts away from the microphone, and yells the words into the air. We have worked out a procedure for this: I say âMicrophone! Microphone!â out of the side of my mouth, and he returns to the right spot.
I donât know if many of the audience quite understand what they are listening to: a less-than-wholesome song about copping dope in 1960s Manhattan, the grimness of withdrawal, and the rapturous pleasure of yet another hit of heroin. But they like it: we get a second round of applause, and I do that showbiz thing of camply extending my arm in Jamesâs direction. There are a few whoops, and he picks his way down the wooden stairs to the right of us, before taking a seat in the audience.
Ginny and Rosa are there. To us, the meaning of the six minutes James and I have just spent on the stage is pretty obvious. If you are repeatedly told what your child canât do, it starts to eat at you. Certain words hover over you: âsevereâ, âprofoundâ, âimpairmentâ. You miss superlatives; whatever successes your child achieves, they donât tend to feel like the same ones other kids experience. But here is something James can do â brilliantly, fantastically, wonderfully â on the same terms as everyone else. Better still, he loves doing it, and it makes him the centre of attention.
It is a gorgeous summer evening, and everything feels as if it is surrounded by a lovely glow. When we get home, James does not sleep, but I do not mind at all. âI want to do that again,â he says. âI want to do that again!â
Washington Post opinion editor departs as Bezos pushes to promote âpersonal liberties and free marketsâ
in The GuardianShameless.
Jeff Bezos, the self-proclaimed âhands-offâ owner of the Washington Post, emailed staffers on Wednesday morning about a change he is applying to the paperâs opinion section that appears to align the newspaper more closely with the political right.
âIâm writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages. We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,â Bezos said.
âWeâll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others. There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the readerâs doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views. Today, the internet does that job.â
Trump and Musk have launched a new class war. In the UK, we must prepare to defend ourselves
in The GuardianThe massive programme of cuts and deregulation that Musk and Ramaswamy seek extends the sadomasochistic politics now ascendant on both sides of the Atlantic. Demagogues have found that it doesnât matter how much their followers suffer, as long as their designated enemies are suffering more. If you can keep ramping up the pain for scapegoats (primarily immigrants), voters will thank you for it, regardless of their own pain. This is the great discovery of the conflict entrepreneurs, led by Musk himself: what counts in politics is not how well people are doing, but how well they are doing in relation to designated out-groups.
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Why has the class war been unleashed now, not just in the US, but in much of the rest of the world? Because the democratising, distributive effects of two world wars have worn off. We fondly imagine that the semi-democratic era (exemplified in rich nations by the years 1945â1975) is the normal state of politics. But it was highly atypical, and made possible only by the warsâ erosion of the power of the ruling classes. The default state of centralised societies, to which nations are now reverting, is oligarchy.
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In nations that have not yet fully succumbed to oligarchy we need to recognise, and recognise fast, that democratic politics do not emerge spontaneously. Our systems achieve a quasi-democratic character only with an active citizenry, whose engagement is largely defined by protest, and an independent media. But, at the direct behest of capital, governments are criminalising peaceful protest, while many independent media, such as the BBC, shut out dissenting voices.
Steve Bannon says inauguration marks âofficial surrenderâ of tech titans to Trump
in The GuardianBannon said after Zuckerbergâs visit, âthe floodgates opened up and they were all there trying to be supplicants. I look at this, and I think most people in our movement look at this, as President Trump broke the oligarchs. He broke them and they surrendered.â Bannon added, with a laugh: âThey came and said: âOh, weâll take off any constraints, no more checkings, everything.ââ
âI view this as September of 1945, the Missouri, and you have the [Japanese] imperial high command, and heâs like Douglas MacArthur. That is an official surrender, OK, and I think itâs powerfulâ, Bannon added.
The comments come as Joe Biden warned that âan oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracyâ and of âthe dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a few ultra-wealthy peopleâ.
But according to the White House archives, Biden had not uttered the word âoligarchyâ in the context of American politics until last week. Progressive Democrats called out Biden for being an imperfect messenger having courted and relied on big-ticket donors during his 50-year career.
âItâs cowardly that after representing the oligarchs for 50 years in office, he calls out this threat to our nation with just days left in his presidency,â said Nina Turner, a national co-chair for the senator Bernie Sandersâ last presidential campaign.
Major banks are abandoning their climate alliance en masse. So much for âwoke capitalâ
in The GuardianThe NZBA is a voluntary network of global banks committed to âalign lending and investment portfolios with net zero emissions by 2050â. [âŠ] At its height, the coalition boasted 40% of global banking assets. And at the time of its launch, its co-founder, the former Bank of England governor Mark Carney, described the NZBA as the âbreakthrough in mainstreaming climate finance the world needsâ.
So far a breakthrough remains at large. In evaluating the NZBA, the benchmark that ultimately matters is that of curbing global emissions and fossil fuel expansion. On both of these points, itâs not clear that the alliance has had any effect. Banksâ targets have been met with widespread criticism concerning lack of transparency and inconsistent or questionable methodologies, and recent research shows little to no difference between the financing and engagement impact of NZBA members and non-members. A separate study found banks that self-present as eco-conscious lend more to polluting industries than those that donât. Impressively, there has been an overall uptick in fossil fuel financing since 2021 â after the group was formed.
But this raises a critical question: if these alliances were voluntary, non-binding, and seem to have done close to nothing to hinder banks financing fossil fuel expansion, why are banks bothering to quit?
The answer is always, in finance, a calculus of risk. At the time of NZBAâs founding, banks faced considerable reputational risk for being seen as climate laggards. The wind was in the sails of governments and institutions touting climate action, and banks acted accordingly. Today, on the back of record fossil fuel profitability, a protracted backlash against âwoke capitalâ and the second coming of Trump, the calculus has changed.
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In a statement published on 31 December, GFANZ announced it would drop its requirements for members to publish firm targets, allowing âany financial institution working to mobilise capital and lower the barriers to financing energy transition to participateâ and earlier this month announced it would no longer work as an umbrella organisation, but a stand-alone body working to âmobiliseâ climate finance. For a project that still retains many prominent European banks within its ranks, the crumbling to pressure and change of direction was remarkably swift. More cynically, it might be read as an admission that all these âtargetsâ and âdisclosuresâ never meant much at all.
All Starmerâs failings play into the hands of Farage â the prime minister is the gift that keeps on giving
in The GuardianWhile the editor of this hallowed section and I do not always agree, he has conceded that itâs almost Christmas â which is all the excuse I need for a quiz. So letâs play What Did Nigel Say? Read these broadsides from Westminsterâs biggest names, and guess: which are from Nigel Farage?
1) Rishi Sunak was âthe most liberal prime minister weâve ever had on immigrationâ.
2) Mass immigration âhappened by design, not accidentâ.
3) British government is âbrokenâ.
4) The UK is a âone-nation experiment in open bordersâ.
5) The British state is wallowing in âthe tepid bath of managed declineâ.
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Through his speeches, how he frames debates, and most of all in his shrugging acceptance of how limited and slow his political powers are, time and again the Labour leader makes Farageâs case for him.
Want an example? Go back to the five phrases at the top. A collection of nasties, Iâm sure you agree. How many came from Nigel Farage?
None. Nor are they the work of Kemi Badenoch, Liz Truss or any other horror you care to think of. Each was said by Keir Starmer, most within the past few days. Britainâs progressive-in-chief claims that politicians and civil servants have deliberately allowed immigration to run rampant, and that the country has âopen bordersâ to the rest of the world. He did this in a speech at the end of last month, which made not one positive reference to immigrants or migration. During the election campaign, he accused Britainâs first Asian prime minister of being âthe most liberalâ on immigration, sounding a dog whistle that could be heard by any follower of Farage. As far as I can see, hardly any commentator has picked him up for using such rhetoric â but to talk about migrants as only a burden to this country, here on a scam, is the kind of language that people like me are used to catching after last orders on streets that suddenly donât feel so safe. To hear them from our prime minister should shame him and his party.
How extreme car dependency is driving Americans to unhappiness
in The GuardianâCar dependency has a threshold effect â using a car just sometimes increases life satisfaction but if you have to drive much more than this people start reporting lower levels of happiness,â said Rababe Saadaoui, an urban planning expert at Arizona State University and lead author of the study. âExtreme car dependence comes at a cost, to the point that the downsides outweigh the benefits.â
The new research, conducted via a survey of a representative group of people across the US, analyzed peopleâs responses to questions about driving habits and life satisfaction and sought to find the link between the two via a statistical model that factored in other variables of general contentment, such as income, family situation, race and disability.
The results were âsurprisingâ, Saadaoui said, and could be the result of a number of negative impacts of driving, such as the stress of continually navigating roads and traffic, the loss of physical activity from not walking anywhere, a reduced engagement with other people and the growing financial burden of owning and maintaining a vehicle.
âSome people drive a lot and feel fine with it but others feel a real burden,â she said. âThe study doesnât call for people to completely stop using cars but the solution could be in finding a balance. For many people driving isnât a choice, so diversifying choices is important.â
âIf thereâs nowhere else to go, this is where they comeâ: how Britainâs libraries provide much more than books
in The GuardianThis is quite touching. If I had my time over, I'd be a librarian.
Part of the magic of a library, as I was reminded over and over again in the days I spent at Battle during winter and spring, is its capaciousness as social infrastructure. It is very important, Giles said to me that Thursday, that there is âsomewhere where everybody can comeâ. In its disparity of needs and personalities and ages sharing a common space, its tolerance and resilience, the modern library has the potential to feel, as it did on that wintry morning of the quiz, like nothing so much as a big and rackety family.
The trouble comes when libraries â and the underpaid, overstretched people who work in them â start to become sole providers for all these things: when years of cost-cutting mean that the state has effectively reneged on all but the most unavoidable of its responsibilities to the troubled, the poor, the educationally challenged, the lonely, the physically unwell, the lost or the homeless. âWe risk becoming a social care safety net,â said Nick Poole, the outgoing CEO of the library association Cilip, and âour staff are not clinical staffâ.
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Do you ever feel intimidated? I asked Giles one day. âYeah â occasionally,â she said. Libraries have a largely female workforce. There is a policy at Central that no one should work alone, but female staff can still feel vulnerable. In his eye-opening 2017 memoir about working at a regional library, Reading Allowed, Chris Paling told the story of a reader, âthe Thin Manâ, who took to stalking a female library assistant home.
That Saturday, lunchtime was a challenge. Staff had 15 minutes, but Curran was struggling to give everyone a break while making sure no one was on a desk alone. âIt hurts the head,â he said. Eventually he solved it by getting less than five minutes himself â which he used to make Giles a cup of tea. They passed each other in front of visas and Curran gave Giles a shoulder bump. Giles rolled her eyes, tolerantly, at me. She had a cold she could not shake, but had gone into work anyway. âI wish people knew,â Giles had said to me one day about Battle, âjust how much effort we put in. I think we would like it to mean more to people.â Itâs a point that comes up among library staff again and again.
Private health insurance is a dud. Thatâs why a majority of Australians donât have it
in The GuardianThe Australian Financial Review reported that NIBâs CEO has said that the insurer needs an increase of around that mark because âultimately, we have to cover claims inflation like any insurer because if you donât eventually you go out of business.â
While this might seem obvious, it ignores the reality that the main reason private health insurers might go out of business is because people hate the product they offer, and even with all the carrots and sticks designed to force people to take out health insurance, a majority of Australians do not want it.
Over six years ago I pondered if private health insurance was a con. In the time since, during which we have experienced the greatest health crisis in a century, nothing has really changed the answer.
Not only does it remain untrue that private health insurance takes stress off the public system, it also remains a fib to call it private â itâs a public system merely carried out in an inefficient manner to deliver a product most people donât want and havenât ever wanted.
In the late 1990s, after 15 or so years of Medicare, fewer than a third of Australians held private health insurance. Then John Howard decided that the private sector needed help from the public sector.
He introduced a surcharge to penalise higher income earners who did not have private health insurance.
The stick was not enough. Howard then tried the carrot: providing a rebate on your private health insurance. These rebates are quite pricey â the government this year will spend about $7.5bn on them.
It did bugger all â you literally could not pay people to buy it.