the Banner Bright

The New Yorker’s food correspondent, Helen Rosner, writes a column for the times: “[A]pples are remarkably susceptible to disease and rot. … Blight spreads quickly, and it’s not always apparent on the fruit’s surface. … The closer an apple is to rot, the more rot it spreads—one spoiling apple, in a crisper drawer or a fruit bowl, or a storage barrel or a cross-country shipping container, or even still hanging on the bough, speeds the rot of every apple it touches, and even of ones it doesn’t touch. The whole bunch quickly begins to exemplify what the artist Claes Oldenburg called ‘the brown sad art of rotting apples’: a swamp of ferment, infecting the air with the hideous sweetness of decay. Chaucer was likely the first to write a version of the now commonplace proverb: ‘A rotten apple’s better thrown away / Before it spoils the barrel.’ But I’m partial to Benjamin Franklin’s version: ‘The rotten apple spoils his companions.’ The saying is often used to refer to the corruption of select individuals within a group. But the point is the fruit’s susceptibility to collective rot. … The only way to avoid rot is to be proactive: check every apple, every tree. At the first sight of something amiss—a bruise or broken skin, a sunken place—toss that apple out, but don’t stop there. Scrub all the others and monitor them closely, but know that it’s likely already too late. Better to trim and burn the infected branch, or even the whole tree.”

Jeremy Burke: “Last week’s homebuilder policy was a blunder, leaving too many benefits on the table, and handing out budget treats to the wrong people and projects. For less than the $25,000 homebuilder grant we could retrofit a social housing property. On average this would cover solar, a hot water heat pump, upgrades to thermal performance (through underfloor, cavity or rooftop insulation, sealing and draught-stopping), a good-sized battery, and replacing gas heating with electric. … Fewer energy-wasting houses means lower peak energy demand, so all our bills come down. Fewer houses with temperature spikes in summer and plunges in winter mean better health outcomes, so health costs reduce. More money in the pockets of low-income tenants means higher ongoing spending, further stimulating the economy.  Then there’s jobs. This is a jobs-rich industry. Today’s energy solutions combine hard assets with integrated digital technology — leading to appealing careers for younger Australians, who increasingly want to combine digital with sustainable. Experienced tradies, facing reduced work, can mentor newcomers. … We have this chance; all it needs is leadership to chart a different course. If we set this up well, we can go beyond a green new deal; Australia can have a green and gold new deal that’s fairer for all.”

Lisa Bryant: “Let’s look at who the decision to go back to charging for childcare will hurt the most and it’s easy to see the ideology these beliefs are coated in. Going back to paying for childcare will hurt women. The announcement isn’t just that childcare is no longer free — it is also that the first group of employees to have the jobkeeper tap turned off in Australia will be childcare educators. A group that is 97% female and already among the lowest paid workers in Australia. Apparently Australia is a country that gives subsidies to male tradies to fix up houses for those rich enough to afford them but takes subsidies away from those who don’t earn enough to even dream of home ownership. It will also hurt mothers. No matter how much people would like to consider childcare as something required by both parents, we know that it is almost always the woman who drops her job to look after children when childcare becomes unaffordable, because the reality is that women earn less in Australia than men do. … Children are clearly the absolute losers. While the government can pretend childcare and early education are two separate things, they are not. Going back to a system that makes a child’s early education dependent on its family capacity to pay for it, will mean children, especially the ones who need it most, will invariably miss out.”

Chris Dillow argues “Chris Rock is dead right” in this viral comedy clip. “Policemen are like airline pilots: being relaxed about about a few ‘bad apples’ is horribly complacent. It’s committing a basic error — the neglect of tail risk. Here, Mr Rock’s analogy with pilots is illuminating. The thing is that … the airline industry goes to great lengths to minimize tail risk: ‘When there is a crash, [black] boxes are recovered and analysed so that … the same mistake never happens again. It is this constant willingness to learn from failure that means aviation has become one of the world’s safest forms of transportation.’ Why doesn’t a similar thing happen in policing? Why do we shrug off acts of brutality as the acts of bad apples? It isn’t just because the costs of such brutality are smaller and — being borne by blacks and working class people — more tolerable. … There’s more. David Correia and Tyler Wall say: ‘Encroachment on private property is a threat to capitalist order, and it is police who manage this threat… The elite fear the destruction of their property, yes, but even more they fear the destruction of the social relations that make private property possible. And so they fear a world without police.’ They are also loath to rock the boat by rooting out bad coppers: you don’t bite the hand that feeds you. The role of the police is not merely to uphold the law, but to uphold law and order. This earns them the gratitude of the ruling class, and hence its tolerance.”

In Melbourne, an anonymous “senior government source” used a client journalist to plant a false front-page story accusing protesters of planning violence. In Sydney, police spent a week working with protesters to plan logistics, before unsuccessfully reneging and attempting to have the protest declared illegal. But despite this sabotage, huge crowds gathered in cities and towns to protest racism in Australia and abroad. Zach Hope’s coverage captures the mood of the Melbourne march well: “Melbourne public life returned on Saturday with a jolt, a cry, a three-word call: Black Lives Matter. It began with a tribute to the spirits watching on, a reverent farewell to lives violently ended. From closed-off living rooms and home offices, to thousands of feet stamping on Spring and Bourke streets in the rhythm of a beating heart and a mournful Kulin Nations song. While Aboriginal-led, the shapes, colours and names in the demonstration were typically Melbourne. … One woman walked through the crowd yelling at people to spread out. ‘We can use the whole city,’ she said. They nearly did. … Demonstrators cheered the speeches and held placards. They cried ‘shame’ at the statistics of Aboriginal deaths, sickness and incarceration. Some swore at police, but they were no more than a handful. Shortly after 3pm, they began to march down Bourke Street. An hour later, marchers were still, slowly, filing past Parliament.” Hundreds of thousands of people in an illegal gathering. This could be the start of something.

Daniel Nguyen of the Police Accountability Project makes two concrete proposals to address discriminatory policing: “A critical first step is to mandate the uniform collection, release and independent analysis of stop-and-enforcement data by police. It must be law that any time a police officer stops to question a member of public, they record the rationale for the stop, time/date/location, along with officer-perceived ethnicity of that person. Importantly, the reason for the stop and details of the police officer should be provided to the member of public as a receipt after the interaction. De-identified data should then be provided to an independent, monitoring body for the data to be analysed and cross-referenced with demographic data. … Secondly, there needs to be a truly independent system to investigate any alleged discriminatory practices or approaches. Any systemic review of police practices needs to be prompt, open to public scrutiny and independent and cannot involve police investigating their own colleagues. These two measures provide only a glimpse of what is required. Without a system to transparently monitor police data and to independently investigate misconduct, discriminatory policing will continue to affect those who have always been its target. Discriminatory policing is a global problem. Let’s make sure we tackle it in our own backyard.”

Tim Dunlop: “The whole idea of what is usually called ‘centrism’, or sometimes, ‘sensible centrism’, or even ‘radical centrism’ is predicated on this idea: that if we simply stop listening to the ‘extremists’ from either side of the political spectrum and reach a ‘reasonable consensus’ we will have solved the problem. … Here’s the thing: … the solution is often not going to be found in any so-called compromise. Sometimes there is simply no middle ground. … The arguments [around the Black Lives Matter protests] are not about finding some compromise between police brutality and a non brutalising police force. They are about whether police should be allowed to brutalise members of the public, almost always members of minorities, with impunity, or whether they should be held accountable for this sort of illegal action in the way that almost anyone else is. There is no halfway point here. No middle ground. You either believe police are subject to laws and should be prosecuted when they break them, especially when they murder people, or you don’t. If you don’t, then you are likely a fascist and my obligation to chat with you and to use reason and deliberation to change your mind does not exist. Indeed, to even engage with your abhor[r]ent views is to lend them a credence they do not deserve. … To put it more simply: choose a fucking side.”

Alex Vitale: “Liberals think of the police as the legitimate mechanism for using force in the interests of the whole society. For them, the state, through elections and other democratic processes, represents the general will of society as well as any system could; those who act against those interests, therefore, should face the police. The police must maintain their public legitimacy by acting in a way that the public respects and is in keeping with the rule of law. For liberals, police reform is always a question of taking steps to restore that legitimacy. That is what separates the police of a liberal democracy from those of a dictatorship. … The reality is that the police exist primarily as a system for managing and even producing inequality by suppressing social movements and tightly managing the behaviours of poor and nonwhite people: those on the losing end of economic and political arrangements. … [P]olice exist to ‘fabricate social order’, but that order rests on systems of exploitation — and when elites feel that this system is at risk, whether from slave revolts, general strikes or crime and rioting in the streets, they rely on the police to control those activities. When possible, the police aggressively and proactively prevent the formation of movements and public expressions of rage, but when necessary they will fall back on brute force.”

(Vice has published an extended excerpt from Vitale’s book, The End of Policing, and Verso is making the ebook available for free — encouraging readers to make a donation to a bail fund instead; in Australia, Sisters Inside’s FreeHer fund is a good option.)

Paddy Manning: “[F]or sheer government incompetence and malevolence, nothing comes close to the disgraceful robodebt program, which was based on a tabloid myth of rampant welfare fraud, was heartlessly implemented, and which turned out to be illegal. On Friday afternoon we learnt that, in the face of litigation that threatened to embarrass key Coalition ministers, the federal government would refund a staggering $721 million in debts unlawfully charged to more than 373,000 vulnerable Australians. … But this utter debacle is about much more than the money, which always represented chicken feed for taxpayers but was literally a matter of life or death for the unfortunate recipients of unlawful debts. Last year, a Senate inquiry into the scheme took evidence that more than 2000 people died after receiving their initial robodebt letter, of which a third were considered ‘vulnerable’ by the Department of Human Services. … But the government … has learnt nothing from all this, announcing the resumption of mutual obligations yesterday, forcing the unemployed through the humiliating ritual of searching for jobs that don’t exist as the economy dives into recession.”

Historian of antifascism Tim Bray on Trump’s blustering declaration that Antifa is a terrorist organisation: “Trump’s declaration seems impossible to enforce – and not only because there is no mechanism for the President to designate domestic groups as terrorist organisations. Though antifa groups exist, antifa itself is not an organisation. Self-identified antifa groups … expose the identities of local Nazis and confront the far right in the streets. But antifa itself is not an overarching organisation with a chain of command… Instead, largely anarchist and anti-authoritarian antifa groups share resources and information about far-right activity across regional and national borders through loosely knit networks and informal relationships of trust and solidarity. And in the United States, antifa have never killed anyone, unlike their enemies in Klan hoods and squad cars. … Trump is conjuring the spectre of ‘antifa’ … to break the connection between this popular groundswell of anti-racist and black activism that has developed over recent years and the insurrections that have exploded across the country in recent days… Paradoxically, this move actually suggests a tacit acknowledgement of popular sympathy with the grievances and tactics of the protesters: If torching malls and police stations were sufficient on their own to delegitimise protests, there would be no need to blame ‘antifa’.”