The opinions, views, thoughts, and ramblings of editors of PoliticalAffairs.net – and other stuff worth reading or viewing.
This is just classic. It's hard to prove racism because home insurance companies have the right to keep their policy information secret. "Where data is publicly available, such as auto insurance, researchers have found that policies discriminate against Black drivers by charging them higher premiums. But homeowners’ insurance has been opaque."
Something to keep in mind when all crimes are laid at Putin's doorstep. In an ultimate sense, as president, the buck stops there, but he is not an all powerful dictator, and the system he oversees appears to be overly decentralized with many actors engaged in activities he either can't prevent or won't condemn post facto. He may not fully control the security apparatus itself (as U.S. presidents also have found out). Western style bourgeois democracy seems as ill fitted to the Russian socio-political culture as was the philosophy of Karl Marx when it was applied in Russia and mutated into a new form suited to a backward pre-industrial state (and was used to modernize it) but was qualitatively different from anything Marx, Engels, or for that matter Lenin, would have conceived. A problem that still plagues the international Communist movement today as well as Russian political life. [No Russian Luther or Reformation of the backward Christianity inherited from Constantinople and the Eastern Roman Empire after its fall in 1453.]
This article should also alert us about police, FBI, etc., in the US. The German government at least officially, de jure if not de facto, wants to clean up its police forces but in the US we have a President who encourages neo-Nazi groups, white supremacists, and contempt for immigrants, asylum seekers, and minority people in general. The police are already protected by special laws that exempt them from the same results of criminal behavior that ordinary citizens are subject to and they are even more decentralized than the German police-- a perfect breeding ground for fascist infiltration and recruitment. Biden's defeat of Trump will only inspire these neo-fascist and fascist elements to up their ante by more vigorous organizing. This election victory on the surface looks like a big defeat of the fascist forces but under the surface they will be more secretive, violent, and dangerous than ever. The genuine Left has got to demand even more supervision of the police, the repeal of protective legislation that makes it hard to charge and prosecute criminal police behavior, and civilian control boards with subpoena powers. The police should be professional and apolitical. Police unions engaging in political activity should be decertified. All federal, state, and local police should be held to the same standards and be open to full civilian control and scrutiny. We have won a skirmish, the real battle has yet to come.
“Nominating Tom Vilsack, a secretary of agriculture in the Obama administration, to run the department again would enrage Black farmers and threaten Democratic hopes of winning two Senate runoffs in Georgia, the N.A.A.C.P. head, Derrick Johnson, told Mr. Biden.Mr. Biden promptly ignored the warning. Within hours, his decision to nominate Mr. Vilsack to lead the Agriculture Department had leaked, angering the very activists he had just met with.”
