REDEYE 3/22/17

Capitalist China worth $500 billion
NYT, 3/5 — Mao once branded capitalists enemies of the Chinese people. In the era of President Xi Jimping, those capitalists are billionaire lawmakers — and they’re getting even wealthier.
The combined portion of the wealthiest members of China’s Parliament and its advisory board amounts to $500 billion….
...The hundred richest saw their net worth rise 64 percent in the four years since Mr. Xi took power….
…The influence of the rich in Chinese politics continues to grow….
…Private entrepreneurs now account for about 20 percent of the…delegates to Parliament.
Brits blast Trump’s fascism
NYT, 2/27 — LD50, an art gallery on a quiet street in…East London….in the era of President Trump….drew dozens of protesters…chanting slogans like “Make racists afraid again!” and “No to the Nazis!” The protest was organized…[against] the gallery’s postelection exhibition on…the white nationalist movement…[and] its anti-Semitism, racism and Islamophobia.
The exhibition opened two days after Mr. Trump was elected….
…Andrew Osborne, 42, a fine art technician…who helped organize the protest…said, “I don’t see why we should tolerate fascism”….
One protester, Jenny Graham, 44, described the area as “a diverse borough in terms of race, class, ethnicity; everyone here lives happily side by side: Jews, Muslims, everyone….I wouldn’t set foot in that place unless I had a bomb with me. No platform for…fascism”….
Mr. Osborne said he favored shutting the gallery. Asked if that would amount to censorship, he replied, “Hate speech isn’t free speech….”

Murder of Indian immigrant follows Trump’s Muslim ban
NYT, 2/27 — NEW DELHI — Jeena Sharma, 25, was applying for a work visa to the United States when news came that two Indian engineers had been shot in a Kansas bar by a man who…questioned their immigration status….
…Ms Sharma felt her own apprehension growing as the days passed and President Trump made no statement on the crime.
“”It’s definitely very scary….It’s almost as if a brown person is dead, like it doesn’t matter….”
India is second only to China as a feeder to American colleges, with around 165,000 students enrolled in the 2015-2016 school year….the largest recipients of…visas known as H-1B visas, which the Trump administration intends to cut back….
In 2009 and 2010, reports of racially motivated crimes against Indian students in Australia set off demonstrations outside the Australian embassy in New Delhi, where Australia’s prime minister was burned in effigy.
Betsy DeVos: Ignorance Trumps education
NYT, 2/8 — The just-confirmed [Trump] education secretary, Betsy DeVos….has never run, taught in, attended or sent a child to an American public school, and her confirmation hearing laid bare her ignorance of education policy and scorn for public education itself. She has donated millions to, and helped direct, groups that want to replace traditional public schools with charter schools and convert taxpayer dollars… [to] send children to private and religious schools….
Ms. DeVos has spent tens of millions and many years in a single-minded effort to force her home state, Michigan, to replace public schools with privately run charters….She has consistently fought legislation to stop failing charters from expanding and lobbied to shut down the…Detroit public school system and channel the money to charter, private or religious schools, regardless of their performance….
…Ms. DeVos appeared largely ignorant of challenges facing college students,…skeptical of Education Department policies to prevent fraud by for-profit colleges — a position favored, no doubt, by Mr. Trump, who just settled a fraud case against his co-called Trump University for $25 million.

South Africa: ‘apartheid still there’
NYT, 2/16 — Khayelitsha — …Zwai Lugogo…lives in a shack here in Cape Town’s largest [B]lack township, making do with thin walls of painted metal….
…Working hard…but barely scraping by….“That money…is just not enough to be able to take care of our families,” said Mr. Lugogo, 34….
South Africa is now considering…a national minimum wage.…[of] about $1.50 an hour…close to the median wage in a country where the official unemployment rate is 27 percent and nearly half the population lives in poverty….in one of the world’s most unequal societies….
…Black South Africans, who make up 80 percent of the population, earned only one-fifth of what whites did in 2015….
…The African National Congress…has governed the country since 1994….[had] the party’s worst showing in elections since…1994….
On weekday mornings, soon after daybreak, the men and women of Kjayelitsha leave their neighborhoods and….commute…up to a couple of hours each way….
Many said…cost[s] them a quarter or a third of their monthly wages…. [On] the bus…Makatiso Sekhamane…[was] knitting a black cap….[which] supplemented the $400 a month she made working six days a week cleaning white people’s homes. Her husband earned maybe $150 repairing refrigerators….
…Many of the employed[‘s] wages are far below the salaries earned by the few residents in the nicest homes….Sinovoyo Gada’s family moved here in 1998.
“There was no road here, just gravel,….no houses, just shacks….”
…After…three years….she now works four days a week…earning $60 a week. About 30 percent of that, or $18, goes to transportation. Ms. Gada, 22, is part of the “born-free” generation of black South Africans who came of age after apartheid’s fall….
“The apartheid, it’s still here,” she said….
Employers control the…power over people like her, she said.