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Bank CEOs have good reason to be worried about rising civil unrest, as economic conditions deteriorate fast around the world. If 2019 was the year of protest, 2022 could be the year of unbottled rage.
“It is going to be a tough 2022—and possibly an even tougher 2023,” warned Kristalina Georgieva, who heads the neoliberal financial institution.
Anyone paying the least bit of attention to the January 6th Committee hearings will know that if Trump had had his way after losing the 2020 election we would have gone over the edge.
What does it mean for a country to fall into fascism?
Is it always the overt authoritarianism of Hitler’s Germany or Putin’s Russia?
Or is there a broader continuum, stretching from their all-encompassing control to the softer versions practiced by Orban’s Hungary or Erdoğan’s Turkey?
And, where does the U.S. now stand on that scale?
One common feature of all these regimes seems to be a sort of tipping point, a place from which, once reached, there is no more going back.
Have we reached it yet?
If not, how close have we come?
Anyone paying the least bit of attention to the January 6th Committee hearings will know that if Trump had had his way after losing the 2020 election we would have gone over the edge.
Hard.
If just two or three more people had caved to Trump’s pressure, his coup might have worked, and our Republic might have been irrecoverably lost.
Also, bear in mind that the game ain’t over yet. Trump remains unindicted and still seems to have at least thirty percent of the American population following blindly along behind him.
Fanatical.
Armed to the teeth.
And many of them spoiling for a fight.
Think you know just how bad the situation really is?
Take a look at this recent article in the New Yorker laying out the threat to democracy posed by the rise in “White Christian Nationalism,” a force which, “is right now evolving into a deeply anti-democratic ideology, one that really is driving some of the most radical fringe groups in the United States today, including many mainstream political candidates in the Republican Party.”
Oh, and it turns out that gun fetishism seems to be a key feature of their theology. Its adherents include not just numerous owners of AR-15 type assault rifles, but their manufacturers as well. To quote a short passage from a recent New York Times article on the subject:
According to a Public Religion Research Institute study, evangelicals have a higher rate of gun ownership than other religious groups. Across the country, they account for a significant share not only of the demand but of the supply.
In Florida, Spike’s Tactical (“the finest AR-15s on the planet”) makes a line of Crusader weapons adorned with a quote from the Psalms. Missouri-based CMMG (“the leading manufacturer of AR15 rifles, components and small parts”) advertises its employees’ “commitment to meet each and every morning to pray for God’s wisdom in managing the enormous responsibility that comes with this business.” And in Colorado, Cornerstone Arms explains that it is so named because “Jesus Christ is the cornerstone of our business, our family and our lives” and the “Second Amendment to our Constitution is the cornerstone of the freedom we enjoy as American citizens.”
Back in the 1930’s, Nobel Prize-winning author Sinclair Lewis predicted how fascism could come to the U.S. in his best-selling book, “It Can’t Happen Here.” Although there is some disagreement about whether Lewis himself actually used the expression, his argument is summed up by the statement that, “When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”
How right he was. For proof, look no further than the January 6th attack on the Capitol. We all saw the crosses, “Christian” flags and signs with biblical references widely displayed along with all the Trump banners and flags. But if you’d like to know more about just how integral White Christian Nationalism was to the insurrection, check out this in-depth report by a group of scholars in the field.
Not all Christian Nationalists look like the mob that stormed the capitol, however.
In the wake of last week’s decision throwing out Roe v. Wade, we now know that five of them dress in solemn robes and serve as justices of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Make no mistake, people will die because of their ruling as surely as if they had been shot with an AR-15.
Some say they will stop there and wouldn’t dream of going after other rights many of us now hold dear…or at least respect…including non-binary sex, gay or interracial marriage, birth control and who knows what else. If you’re in that group, I’ve got a bridge or two I’d love to sell you.
Meanwhile, at the state and local level, right-wing activists are doing everything they can to ensure that their preferred candidates will never lose an election again, regardless of the votes.
So where exactly do we stand now on the march-to-fascism scale?
Minority rule?
Check.
Brown shirted thugs?
Check.
An army of blood and soil religious fanatics activated?
Check.
Corruption of the media?
Half-way there.
Corruption of the military and security services?
Not yet higher up in the chain of command (we hope) but there seems to be a lot at the individual level.
Dictator in charge?
One election away.
So what do we do about it?
First – recognize that this is NOT normal. Not even close.
Even if the bullets haven’t started flying yet, Civil War 2.0 has begun. The business-as-usual approaches of the past aren’t going to save our republic.
Second – FIGHT. Be creative. Be bold. Think outside the box and don’t worry now about dotting all the i’s and crossing all the t’s.
Put abortion clinics in every post office, military base, and federal courthouse in states with anti-choice laws. Station federal troops there to protect them if needed.
Encourage Indian reservations, which run their own governments, to establish abortion service centers.
Indict Trump and his cronies for everything. Tie them up with so much litigation they don’t have time to breathe, let alone plot another coup.
Freeze their assets. All their assets. The Trumps have been acting like a crime family for years. Time to start treating them like one.
Find a way to get voting rights legislation passed – especially limiting voter suppression and banning gerrymandering.
Take a page out of Beto O’Rourke’s book and get in their faces.
If a legal fig leaf can be found, ask Stephen Breyer to rescind his retirement and stay on as a tenth Supreme Court Justice after Ketanji Brown Jackson assumes her seat, thus adding another much-needed liberal to the mix. When Mitch McConnell starts screaming, just tell him that turnabout’s fair play.
We need our leaders to act like Volodymyr Zelenskyy, not Neville Chamberlain.
Third – Attack the theology of the Christian Nationalists. Whatever it might be, their belief system is NOT Christianity and they shouldn’t be allowed to pretend it is.
Call them out for the frauds they are.
Crossposted from BuzzFlash
Nothing threatens American democracy more than the religious extremist factions teaming up with far-right fascist groups with guns.
Zero House Republicans supported a measure requiring the Pentagon and federal law enforcement agencies to publish a report on countering white supremacist and neo-Nazi activity in their ranks.
As tragic as the loss of life on January 6th was, Van Tatenhove testified during Tuesday’s January 6th committee hearing, “the potential was so much more.” He cited the gallows that was set up for Vice President Mike Pence as just one indication of the horrific possibilities.
The possibility of bloodshed “has been there from the start,” Van Tatenhove said. Then, his voice halting with emotion at times, Van Tatenhove said he thinks we will probably not be so lucky next time.
VAN TATENHOVE: I do fear for this next election cycle because who knows what that might bring if a president that’s willing to try to instill, and encourage, to whip up a civil war amongst his followers using lies and deceit and snake oil, and regardless of the human impact, what else is he going to do if he gets elected again? All bets are off at that point. And that’s a scary notion.
I have three daughters. I have a granddaughter. And I fear for the world that they will inherit if we do not start holding these people to account.
Good union jobs built America’s blue-collar black middle class. But the percentage of black workers in manufacturing has been halved since the 1970s, yielding poverty and precarity. We can’t achieve racial justice without a movement to win those jobs back.
Workers in an auto repair shop in 1969. (George W. Hales / Fox Photos / Getty Images)
As we face a global crisis in logistics, supply chains and manufacturing capacity have become impossible to ignore. Suddenly these topics are all over US political discourse, prompting even mainstream news outlets to begin to question the legacy of globalization and deindustrialization.
But while current crises have turned up the volume, the discussion about the decline of US manufacturing employment was already underway. A defining feature of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign was a critique, however incoherent, of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and deindustrialization. That focus was arguably a major reason for his success.
Since Trump’s election, our major media institutions have mostly explored the loss of unionized, blue-collar manufacturing jobs as part of a broader attempt to understand the social and political angst of the so-called “white working class.” In this worldview, the future of blue-collar work is only of concern to white men. MSNBC host Joy Ann Reid expressed this idea when she described President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better legislation as a “white guy employment act.”
Lost in this conversation is the tremendous harm that deindustrialization has wrought on working-class black communities, and how fundamentally important private sector unions were — and still are — in the building of a stable, blue-collar black middle class.
An excellent recent study titled “The Unmaking of the Black Blue-Collar Middle Class,” coauthored by William Lazonick, Philip Moss, and Joshua Weitz, begins to set the record straight. The study tracks the emergence and decline of black employment in major unionized industries like steel, auto, electrical, and rubber.
The destruction of these union jobs has been a critical factor in accelerating the precarity that is common for so many working-class black people. Racial inequality in the United States cannot be addressed in any meaningful way unless we deal with this fundamental issue.
“A Happy Coincidence”
The entry of black workers into the major industrial labor unions was difficult and uneven. Employers routinely took advantage of many unions’ discriminatory practices by using black workers as strikebreakers, which served to further weaken the prospects of broad interracial working-class solidarity.
However, the explosive emergence of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s presented new opportunities. Black workers played major roles in unionization efforts and gained tentative footholds in mass production industries such as meatpacking, auto, electrical, and more.
The combination of World War II production demands and civil rights organizing produced further gains. Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters leader A. Philip Randolph’s March on Washington movement successfully forced the creation of the Fair Employment Practices Committee, which was tasked with eliminating racial discrimination in wartime industries. The results were limited but meaningful.
The percentage of black workers in war production rose from 2.5 percent to 8 percent from March 1942 to November 1944. In a four-year period from April 1940 to April 1944, the employment of black men in the US civilian labor force jumped from 2.9 million to 3.8 million, and for black women 1.5 million to 2.1 million.
However, this progress was frustrated as the wartime industries demobilized.
A later surge in industrial employment for black workers was enabled by the parallel dynamics of a powerful labor–civil rights coalition and economic growth.
President John F. Kennedy signed the federal initiative Plans for Progress in 1961, which strengthened oversight of employment discrimination with federal contractors. By the time of the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the “Big Three” automobile companies (General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler) had signed Plans for Progress and committed to affirmative-action hiring of black workers. Following the creation of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1965, federal inspections became routine and helped to enforce this pledge.
Labor scholar Herbert R. Northrup, in his work The Negro in the Automobile Industry, explains the fortunate timing of this civil rights legislation:
The rise in civil rights emphasis in the 1960s, by a happy coincidence, came at a time of great prosperity in the automobile industry. Moreover, it happened when a natural turnover was occurring in the industry. Many employees hired around World War II, or earlier, were seeking retirement under the liberalized early and regular retirement programs in the industry. . . . The need for Negroes to obtain jobs and the need of an industry for new workers were never better coordinated.
By the mid-1960s the auto industry was the second-largest employer of black semiskilled production workers, surpassing one hundred thousand in 1966. These jobs had among the highest wages and best benefits packages in the country. In short, these jobs were fundamental to creating middle-class living standards for blue-collar black workers without college degrees.
As Lazonick, Moss, and Weitz observe:
Most of these workers had no more than high-school educations but had sufficient earnings and benefits to provide their families with economic security, including realistic expectations that over the coming decades their children would have the opportunity to move up the economic ladder to join the ranks of the college-educated white-collar middle class.
This all occurred at a time when the auto industry was experiencing a period of rapid growth. For example, between 1961 and 1966 total employment at the “Big Three” ballooned from 693,186 to 953,585.
Contrary to persistent and misguided stereotypes about the racial demographics of union membership, the above-mentioned dynamics led to the overrepresentation of black workers in the union movement. By the early 1980s, black workers were 9.2 percent of the total labor force, but 14.2 percent of auto workers and 13.7 percent of union members.
Similar trends in black employment occurred in other manufacturing industries such as steel and consumer electronics. By 1966, the steel industry had become one of the largest employers of black male manufacturing workers.
The Civil Rights Movement was keenly aware of the possibilities that these dynamics unleashed. It was during this same period that movement leaders like A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and Martin Luther King, Jr launched the “Freedom Budget” for all Americans.
The vision came out of a basic understanding that civil rights gains would be rendered largely meaningless if black people continued to remain at the bottom rung of the economic system. After winning the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, an immediate pivot toward addressing issues of systemic poverty would be needed.
The program of the Freedom Budget amounted to a social democratic transformation of US society, with good union jobs at the center. It called for full employment through the creation of jobs in areas of social need such as housing construction, public school construction, environmental remediation, and all manner of public works projects.
Bayard Rustin envisioned an economic mobilization on the scale of World War II, writing in a 1968 book titled The Anatomy of Frustration:
In World War II we did not ask whether people were too black, or too old, or too young, or too stupid to work. We simply said to them this is a hammer, this is a tool, this is a drill. We built factories and sent these people into the factories. We paid them extraordinarily good wages and in two months they created the miracle of making planes that flew. We can find a peacetime method for doing this.
This vision was not merely a pipe dream. It was inspired by the very tangible gains black workers had already made in both overall manufacturing employment and the labor movement.
Things Fall Apart
The defeat of both the Freedom Budget and the social democratic tendency in US politics forestalled the possibility of building on the progress black workers had made in the 1960s. As long as major investment decisions remained in the hands of capital, postwar economic gains would remain precarious.
As countries that had been destroyed during World War II began to recover and compete economically with the United States, the postwar settlement began to unravel. For black workers, the rise of the Japanese manufacturing industry and the response by their US counterparts was particularly decisive.
As Japanese companies in steel, auto, electronics, and tires became more productive, US companies tried to compete by cutting wages and laying off workers. Black workers were hit the hardest. Even so, the presence of unions, especially in the auto industry, helped stop the bleeding.
As the authors of “The Unmaking of the Black Blue-Collar Middle Class” explain, “Management-union agreements also gave priority to recently laid-off employees when staffing new plants. These agreements dampened the negative impact of plant relocation on many black auto workers.” But this only offered marginal relief from a long-term downward trend.
Worse still, Japanese auto companies deliberately avoided urban areas with large black populations when locating to the United States. This virtually shut out black workers from reaping any economic benefits from these industrial transformations. As the study explains:
Thus, in a key mass-production industry in the 1980s, blacks lost their jobs in unionized plants while they were largely excluded from participating in the new middle class blue-collar employment opportunities being offered by the Japanese transplants.
In the mid-1980s, the auto industry experienced a short-term recovery, and black employment reached a high of 168,000 in 1986. But since then, the industry has only been in steep decline. In 2009, black workers had under 60,000 jobs in the auto industry, just 33 percent of its peak level in 1978. In manufacturing overall, the percentage of black workers dropped from 23 percent in 1979 to just 10 percent in 2007.
For many black communities, these once-stable union jobs have been replaced by grinding poverty, unemployment, and mass incarceration.
The Remaking of the Blue-Collar Black Middle Class
The chatter in political circles about racial justice has become ever more frantic, and yet at the same time increasingly unmoored from the underlying economic conditions of most black people’s lives. These conditions are only getting more abysmal. As we experience crippling inflation and stare down the barrel of a Federal Reserve–induced recession, the situation has become dire for all workers.
If the Left is serious about fighting racial inequality, then it needs to make the issue of family-sustaining union jobs in both the public and private sector a central priority. Efforts to rebuild the US industrial manufacturing base will need to be a component of this.
A worker-centered Green New Deal offers an opportunity to expand blue-collar manufacturing employment in an environmentally sustainable way. The needs in building public transit, retrofitting buildings, the expansion of clean energy, and much more are vast. Even just maintaining and improving existing infrastructure like roads and bridges is long overdue.
Pursuing these projects also offers the opportunity to massively expand building trades apprenticeship programs and include more workers of color. Campaigns to fully fund robust Career Technical Education programs in every public school are the kinds of initiatives we can envision.
There are still many existing private sector union fights that heavily involve black workers. The logistics industry is huge, ever-growing, and diverse. We don’t make much stuff in this country anymore, but we sure do move a lot of it. United Parcel Service (UPS) is the largest private sector employer in the country, employing over 340,000 unionized workers represented by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. The UPS contract expires in August 2023, and a central goal of the union is to raise the standards for the disproportionately black and brown part-time workforce.
As “The Unmaking of the Black Blue-Collar Middle Class” demonstrates, labor unions have been instrumental in creating stability for non-college-educated working-class black people. Any strategy for racial justice that does not fight for full employment and a strong labor movement is not worthy of the name.
A controversial theory put forward by physicist Roger Penrose and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff that posits consciousness to be a fundamentally quantum-mechanical phenomenon has been challenged by research looking at the role of gravity in the collapse of quantum wavefunctions. Based on results from an experiment done under Gran Sasso mountain in Italy, the new work concludes that Penrose’s and Hameroff’s Orchestrated Objective Reduction theory (Orch OR) is “highly implausible” when based on the simplest type of gravity-related wavefunction collapse – although they point out that more complex collapse models leave some wiggle room.
Many scientists regard consciousness as a global manifestation of individual calculations by the brain’s billions of neurons. Penrose and Hameroff instead argue that consciousness is based on the non-computational collapse of coherent quantum superpositions between cellular structures within neurons known as microtubules. They reckon that while the superpositions guide classical neuronal processes, it is the continual gravity-related collapse of the quantum states that gives rise to our sense of self-awareness.
In the latest work, Catalina Curceanu of the Frascati National Laboratory near Rome and colleagues assess the plausibility of Orch OR in the light of results from an experiment they set up to probe gravity’s possible role in wavefunction collapse. Standard quantum theory leaves open the question of what causes a state’s wavefunction to collapse, simply providing the probabilities of the system collapsing into one classical state or another and implying that the process is random. But several physicists over the years have attempted to identify a physical mechanism behind the process – among them Penrose and Lajos Diósi, who have developed the Diósi–Penrose model. Diósi is at Hungary’s Eötvös Loránd University and Wigner Research Centre for Physics and has worked with Curceanu on this latest research.
Different curved spacetimes
The Diósi–Penrose model involves combining quantum mechanics with classical gravity such that a spatial superposition of quantum states generates a superposition of different curved spacetimes. The idea is that the latter superposition is unstable and causes the system’s wavefunction to collapse when the gravitational energy resulting from the difference in spacetime formations – and therefore system mass – exceeds some threshold. This process is independent of wavefunction decoherence by environmental noise, but its realization requires that the latter is kept at bay.
While both Penrose and Diósi arrived at the same simple formula for the timescale over which this type of collapse would occur, their individual models differ. Penrose did not specify the dynamics of wavefunction collapse, whereas Diósi provided a full dynamical description. In doing so Diósi predicted that collapse should be accompanied by the emission of electromagnetic radiation – generated by charged particles within the system as they undergo a continuous Brownian motion related to the collapse mechanism.
Now, Diósi teamed up with Curceanu and other physicists in Italy and Germany to establish whether his predicted radiation really is given off in nature. The group did so by monitoring the emissions from a cylinder of germanium about the size of a small tin of beans shielded from external radiation by lead and copper shields as well as the 1400 m of rock above the lab – the Gran Sasso National Laboratory near L’Aquila. They were able to test the Diósi–Penrose model by working out how much gravity-related collapse radiation should have been produced by the charged particles within the germanium and comparing their calculations against the measurements.
Carrying out their experiment over the course of two months in the summers of 2014 and 2015, they measured no radiation beyond that expected from residual emissions in the experimental apparatus. This allowed them to impose a lower limit on a parameter, R0, that they describe as the effective size of the particle’s mass density.
That result already ruled out one specific and natural formulation of the Diósi-Penrose model – which stipulated that the scale of the superposition is comparable to the size of the nuclei themselves – the measured lower limit of R0 being 0.54×10-10 m while the size of the nuclear wavefunction of germanium cooled to liquid-nitrogen temperatures (as was the case in their experiment) would be an order of magnitude lower (0.05×10−10 m).
Molecular scale
Now, Curceanu, Diósi and colleagues have analysed what that value of R0 means specifically for the Orch OR theory, assuming two distinct scales of superposition – the nuclear one favoured by Penrose (about 10-15 m) and one similar to the size of whole tubulin proteins within a strand of microtubule (about 3 nm). In each case their aim was to work out how much brain matter would be needed to collapse the wavefunction on a timescale comparable to that of conscious experiences (typically about 0.5 s, but potentially as brief as 0.025 s).
Do quantum effects play a role in consciousness?
With a nuclear-sized superposition, the collapsing effect of individual carbon nuclei within tubulin proteins is miniscule and therefore calls for huge numbers of nuclei to act in concert. In fact, the researchers work out that to collapse the wavefunction in around 0.025 s a whopping 1023 tubulins would need to make up the coherent state. But as they point out, there are reckoned to be only 1020 tubulins in the whole brain (about 109 in each neuron). “These considerations seem to rule out tubulin separation at the level of the atomic nuclei,” they say.
In the second scenario, the larger superposition scale implies that fewer tubulins would need to remain coherent. Indeed, Curceanu and colleagues work out that a mere 1012 would do the job. Still, they say, the overall requirements seem daunting – the brain needing to maintain a mass of 10−16 kg in a coherent state for 25 ms over a length scale of about 10 nm. “This vastly exceeds any of the coherent superposition states achieved with state-of-the-art optomechanics or macromolecular interference experiments,” they note.
The researchers add that not all is lost for Orch OR. While they reckon that the theory seems implausible if based on the simplest wavefunction collapse model, it may become more plausible if a more sophisticated model can be developed – one, for example, that conserves energy (something not true of Diósi’s current model). “In future work,” they say, “we intend to develop such variants of the Diósi-Penrose collapse dynamics and then reexamine the tubulin superposition scenarios discussed above”.
The research is described in Physics of Life Reviews.
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China’s historic reluctance to engage with other creditors will be decisive factor