REDEYE 4/4/18

Trump’s education secretary promotes virulent racism
NYT (op-ed, Michelle Goldberg), 3/13 — CBS’s “60 Minutes” broadcast an interview…with Betsy DeVos,…Trump’s education secretary and one of the richest members of his very rich cabinet….DeVos struggled to answer very basic questions….Why schools in Michigan, her home state, have largely gotten worse since the widespread introduction of the school choice policies she lobbied for….DeVos is oblivious about “race….” refused to even admit that…[it] plays a role in discipline….
…Evidence…says minority students are more likely than white students in similar situations to be written up and disciplined….
…White kids are punished for classroom disruption by a trip to the principal’s office, while for black kids they call in the cops. DeVos refused to say such a discrepancy is wrong….
…Black public school students are suspended at 3.8 times the rate of white students…. [In] one elementary school…a black girl was suspended for poking a student with a pencil. When a white girl in the same grade threw a rock that hit another child in the head and broke the teacher’s sunglasses, she was made to help the teacher clean the classroom during lunch.
China’s ‘communist’ billionaire lawmakers’ ‘Great Leap Forward’
NYT, 3/3 — …Chinese lawmakers have plenty of money — $650 billion of it — and that’s growing….
…The net worth of the 153 members of China’s Parliament and its advisory body…amounts to $650 billion, up by nearly a third from a year ago….
…The wealth of the nation’s lawmakers has kept soaring. In 2017, it topped $500 billion, more than doubling from the year before….
…China added 210 billionaires over the past year — about four a week — 40 percent more than the United States….The [“]Communist[”] Party, which was founded to work for the interests of workers and stamp out capitalism, welcomed businesspeople into the party more than a decade ago.
Ivanka Trump’s shoe workers slave away at $30 a month
(NYT, 2/11) — …Producers of Ivanka Trump’s shoes recently relocated,…chasing a more desperate work force “content” to work for a pittance (roughly $30 a month) rather than paying the rising wages of their predecessors….
[Meanwhile] when wages rise because of…labor unrest, the Chinese government is happy to help Apple and others by handing out tax breaks and transportation projects to spur new, lower-paying factories in China’s hinterlands. No such help is on tap for a worker…living in places like Flint, Michigan, which can’t even guarantee the water is safe.
National Geographic spread extraordinary racism
NYT, 3/14 — “Through most of its history, National Geographic…reproduced a racial hierarchy with brown and black people at the bottom, and white people at the top.”
….Black people were presented as static, primitive and non-technological, often unclothed or presented as savages….That image…shaped how the magazine’s readers — largely white and middle class — perceived black people….
…Blatant examples of racism includ[ed] a 1916 story about Australia that included the photo caption: “South Australian Blackfellows: These savages rank lowest in intelligence of all human beings….”
The magazine was far from alone in racist coverage…but it was considered a leader in photography.
U.S. workers’ poverty among world’s deepest
NYT (op-ed, Angus Deaton), 1/25 —There are 5.3 million Americans who are absolutely poor by global standards….It is more than in Nepal (2.5 million)….It is precisely the cost and difficulty of housing that makes for so much misery for so many Americans, and it is precisely these costs that are missed in the World Bank’s global counts….
…Essentials of health are more likely to be lacking for poorer Americans and there are places — the Mississippi Delta and much of Appalachia — where life expectancy is lower than in Bangladesh and Vietnam.
Many Americans, especially whites with no more than a high school education, have seen worsening health….For this group life expectancy is falling; mortality rates from drugs, alcohol and suicide are rising…There are millions of Americans whose suffering, through material poverty and poor health is as bad or worse than that of poor people in Africa or in Asia….
…It is time to stop thinking that only non-Americans are truly poor….especially when they are as destitute as the world’s poorest people.