EFTA00674046.pdf

From: Gregory Brown To: undisclosed-recipients:; Bee: [email protected] Subject: Greg Brown's Weekend Reading and Other Things.. 03/05/2017 Date: Sun, 05 Mar 2017 07:32:11 +0000 Attachments: Jeff Beck_bio.docx Inline-Images: image.png; image(I).png; image(2).png; image(3).png; image(4).png; image(5).png; image(6).png; image(7).png; image(8).png; image(9).png; image(10).png; image(11).png; image(12).png; image(13).png; image(14).png; image(I5).png; image(16).png; image(17).png; image(18).png; image(19).png DEAR FRIEND Was It Worth It An Olympic ghost town: Rio stuck with big bills, vacant venues Inline image 1 With its economy failing, more than 200,000 Zika virus cases and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff facing an impeachment, against all odds, Rio de Janeiro pulled off last year's Olympics, keeping crime at bay and fending off dire forecasts of corruption, environmental degradation, and cost overruns. But now a half year later with the festivities having faded in memory, sobriety is setting in as the state of Rio is now broke. It hasn't been able to pay its bills since long before the games. A federal bailout kept police on the streets and hospitals open while Olympics tourists were in town. But now the money has dried up, and public employees aren't being paid. EFTA00674046 The state government is voting on an austerity package that could slash state workers' wages and pensions by 3o percent. That's triggered violent protests and led demonstrators to briefly storm the state Legislature last month. Meanwhile, crime is surging across the state. From January to October, murders increased by 18 percent, and street robberies jumped by 48 percent compared to the same time last year, according to the state's security institute. Rio organizers still owe creditors about $40 million. Four of the new arenas in the main Olympic Park have failed to find private-sector management, and ownership has passed to the federal government. Another new arena will be run by the cash-strapped city with Brazil stuck in its deepest recession in decades. The historic Maracana stadium, site of the opening and closing ceremony, has been vandalized as stadium operators, the Rio state government, and Olympic organizers have fought over $1 million in unpaid electricity bills. The electric utility reacted by cutting off all power to the city landmark. There are few players for a new $20 million Olympic golf course, and little money for upkeep. Deodoro, the second-largest cluster of Olympic venues, is closed and searching for a management company. The state of Rio de Janeiro is months late paying teachers, hospital workers, and pensions. The state also reports record-breaking crime in 2016 in almost all categories from homicides to robbery. "During the Olympics, the city was really trying hard to keep things together," said Oliver Stuenkel, a Brazilian who teaches international relations at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, a Brazilian university. "But the minute the Olympics were over, the whole thing disintegrated." EFTA00674047  St Inline image 1 The Games, at their best, are a collection of special moments. They're the thrill of seeing Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt pile up medals, pushing the limits of physical performance. But none of it — from the heartwarming gestures of international sportsmanship to the mindless, wall-to-wall guilty pleasure coverage of an American douchebag peeing on a gas station — can possibly be worth lives being ruined so the IOC can sell $92 soccer balls, all while paying Olympic Village housekeepers $1.83 per hour and berating their overworked volunteer help. Better image, or worse? The Olympics — and to a lesser extent the 2014 World Cup — showcased the reality of Rio, a city romanticized for its sprawling beaches, annual Carnival celebration, and sensual lifestyle. It also exposed the city's crime, environmental contamination, and corruption. Some building projects connected to the Olympics and World Cup have been tied to a probe which has led to the jailing of dozens of politicians and businessmen for receiving kickbacks in Brazil's largest corruption scandal. Three politicians who were instrumental in landing and organizing the Olympics — former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, former Rio governor Sergio Cabral, and former Rio Mayor Eduardo — have been under investigation. Cabral, an early promoter of the Olympics and World Cup, has been jailed on corruption charges. "The Olympics gave people a better sense of the difficulties Brazil faces," Stuenkel said. "Maybe not a better or worse image, but more rounded." EFTA00674048 Unpaid bills Sidney Levy, the chief executive officer of the Rio organizing committee, tried to run the games with only private money, and almost succeeded. His $3 billion operating budget — the budget for running the games, not building the infrastructure — was frugal by Olympic standards. At the last minute, he had to ask for a 250-million-real bailout — $8o million — from the city of Rio and the federal government to run the Paralympics. Eventually, he got only 100 million reals ($30 million), and the shortfall has left organizers owing creditors millions. Today, Levy says he's nearly a forgotten man. "I could call the president of the country, and the call was taken," Levy said. "But try it today. I could call the IOC and everybody. But now people have other things to handle. We are no longer a priority." Levy said organizers probably lost about $200 million in income during the run-up to the games as sponsors backed out of expensive deals as the recession kicked in. Levy said he has not asked the IOC to help pay debts, but acknowledged the Olympic body came up with millions in advance money several times during the run-up to the games. "The whole thing was too painful," Levy told The Associated Press. "We never really enjoyed the games, themselves; 2016 was just extremely hard. It's like we were climbing Everest, and ice is falling on your lips, and you are not seeing." White elephants The Olympic Park is a ghost town; sleek sports arenas without events, deserted before they were even broken in, and well-tended flower gardens, free from pedestrian wear-and-tear. "The arenas are beautiful," Wagner Tolvai said, walking inside the park with his girlfriend Patricia Silva. "But it's all abandoned, everything has stopped. Nobody is here." He likened the 2.5 billion real ($800 million) park to a new shopping mall "without stores, or customers." The park is only open on weekends, and there's not much to do but walk, pedal a bike, or look for shade. Four permanent arenas are being run by the federal government. Among them is the Olympic tennis center, which was used earlier this month for a one-day beach volleyball tournament. This in a city with endless sand and beaches. Two temporary venues for swimming and handball have yet to be dismantled. The exterior of the swimming venue is falling apart and many translucent tapestries that covered the outside of the building are frayed or falling to the ground. The warm-up pool, which was covered during the games, is filled with muddy, stagnant water. Away from the park, the famous Maracana stadium has drawn the most attention. It was renovated for the 2014 World Cup at a cost of about $500 million. It was largely abandoned after the Olympics and Paralympics, and then hit by vandals who ripped out thousands of seats and stole televisions. "The Maracana is the biggest symbol of the way the games were managed," said Mauricio Santoro, a political scientist at Rio de Janeiro State University. "The vast majority of people in Rio will never go to the golf course, or the Olympic venues. But the Maracana is different. It's the jewel of the crown." EFTA00674049 Up the road from the Olympic Park, the $1 billion Athletes Village — it housed about 10,000 athletes — is fenced off and empty. The developer says it has sold only 260 of the 3,604 apartments — about 7 percent. Rio's Globo newspaper reported that new Rio Mayor Marcelo Crivella is arranging low-cost loans for public employees to buy the units. Subway and busses Transportation projects driven by the Olympics look better than the sports venues. The games led to a subway line extension, though at the reportedly inflated price of $3 billion. They also produced a high- speed bus network, a light-rail line, and a pedestrian-friendly, renovated port area. Rio's international airport also got a makeover. People using the new subway line have benefited, though city traffic is still badly snarled. But many of the improvements benefit mostly the wealthy south and west of the city. "The gains were unevenly spread across the city," Stuenkel, the political scientist said. To call the Olympics a bad investment would be disingenuous, because few actually believe the Games produce any return of public value. Study after study after study has shown they create no economic benefits, yet cities and nations still fight to host them, always to disastrous ends. Something like $12 billion — roughly $15,000 per Carioca, five times the annual minimum wage salary in Brazil — was spent on the Rio Games. The Olympics were never meant to be an economic panacea for Rio, but there was certainly hope that the games would boost the local economy. Instead, officials are now trying to figure out if tax cuts awarded to corporations involved with the Olympics actually worsened Rio state's financial situation. Inline image 2 EFTA00674050 Nearly all of that money went to the already wealthy: developers, landowners, transportation moguls, massive — and allegedly corrupt —construction firms, effectively making the Olympics an enormously successful regressive wealth transfer program, taking money from the poor and middle class via taxes and giving it to the rich. This is an unconscionable crime in a city with open sewers, endemic violence, abject poverty, and lack of economic opportunities for millions of its citizens. Rio will be paying for these Games for years, if not decades, to come. Tokyo 2020 advice Levy, the CEO, said Tokyo's 2020 Olympics will face completely different challenges. "They have a society that works pretty well already," he said. "They don't have to prove anything to anybody." Tokyo will face higher costs than Rio, and organizers are already looking for places to cut. Levy suggested reining in sports federations, which all want five-star treatment. He used an example from the equestrian events. "They wanted 15 horse ambulances," Levy said. "We offered nine. In the end, the right number was four. The magic of the games doesn't come from these things." After every Games, there's a tradition of determining whether or not the event was a "success." This depends on who's judging, and what they consider important. Usually, it's journalists evaluating if the focus remained on athletic achievements and good TV, rather than the surrounding unpleasantness — as if the suffering of thousands and corruption of city officials is simply a regrettable side story, another disposable thread in a quadrennial reality show. But for the people who call Rio home, the Games weren't just programing inventory for NBC to sell ads against, or the set of a late-summer blockbuster. They were real, with a real, lasting impact. From a human rights perspective, from a human perspective, attempting to determine the success of the Games is the wrong question. There has never been a successful Olympics. They're all, as one historian puts it, different kinds of total disasters. With this said, here in my home town Los Angeles, do we really want the 2024 Olympics? So True EFTA00674051  al Inline image 1 America makes up 5% of the world's population, yet locks up 25% of the world's prisoners. Ava DuVernay's film #13TH explores how we got here. We Have To Rethink Re-training And it isn't just a diploma EFTA00674052  Inline image 1 If we accept the premise that a well-trained military is key to a country's defense, one would believe that a well-educated workforce is key to a country's prosperity. The well-paying jobs of the 1950s, 6os and 705 have been under assault in America for more than four decades, as a result of globalization and technology and are never coming back no matter what politicians promise. Manufacturing jobs lost to China are not coming back. First because of cheap labor which has become an international commodity and secondly do to automation. Case in point, is a mobile phone factory in Dongguan, China, that has replaced most of its workers with robots, it witnessed a spectacular rise in productivity. The factory used to be run by 650 employees, but now just 60 people get the entire job done, while robots take care of the rest. The general manager, says the number of required employees will eventually drop to 20. Despite this reduction in staff, not only is the factory producing more equipment (a 250% increase), but it's also ensuring better quality. The United States has lost approximately has lost more than 200,000 jobs in the mining industry since September 2014 and today there are less than 65,000 people working in the coal sector. Whereas there are now more than 260,000 solar workers with one out of every 5o new jobs added in the United States in 2016 was created by the solar industry, representing 2% percent of all new jobs and growing more than 2o% per year, nearly tripling since 2010. Over the next 12 months, employers surveyed expect to see total solar industry employment increase by 10 percent to 286,335 solar workers. In 2016, the five states with the most solar jobs were California, Massachusetts, Texas, Nevada, and Florida. Now solar might not be the answer in Buckhannon, West Virginia or Yorktown, Ohio but new battery factories producing the latest technologies could be. Last March, the Federal Highway Administration released data that said that 58,495 bridges out of the 609,539 bridges in the United States are currently rated as structurally deficient, equating to 9.6 percent of the bridge stock in the county. The same is true for the countries, road, dams, levies, electric grid, water and sewage, so there are millions of jobs if we chose to make them happen. And in the private sector, even robots require educated workers to make and maintain them. EFTA00674053 But unemployed coal miners, auto or factory workers have to be retrained to master the skills of today's new workplace. And for many the answer has been either community colleges or for-profit schools, which like Trump University are little more than shams offering worthless diplomas and saddling their student with (on average) more than $3o,000 student loan debt. Despite the claims that for-profit colleges serve an unmet need, are more nimble than stodgy traditional colleges, and increase access to poor and minority students, these `Lower ed' institutions target and thrive off of inequality. That inequality is just shrouded in euphemisms that don't challenge the conventional wisdom of the educational gospel as these schools focuses on profits for their owners or shareholders. When economists say that these agile, responsive institutions are better suited to career training, they're talking about inequality. In the knowledge economy, technological advancements make human labor more efficient. But more work can be produced with fewer workers. A consequence of that efficiency has been greater economic insecurity. The more insecure people feel, the more they are willing to spend money for an insurance policy against low wages, unemployment, and downward mobility. Those least likely to have an insurance policy that our labor market values are people for whom higher education has always been a long shot: poor people, single parents, the socially isolated, African Americans, the working class. When education researchers talk about the unmet consumer demand that for-profit colleges serve, they're talking about inequality. These aren't the people who go to good schools with college-prep classes, have medical care and stable housing, focus on standardized tests, and have the money to participate in extracurricular activities. There consumers are the people who do not have those social resources that many traditional colleges assume their likely student will have. And, the answer can also be summed up by race, class, and gender. When investors and politicians say that for-profit colleges offer a flexible solution to retrain the country's workforce, again, they are talking about inequality. Whose training in the jobs of the loth century are now obsolete in the 21st century. As such, like the miners in West Virginia and former factory workers are looking to education as a solution, to their current predicament. Women who carry the burden of primary childcare, men working more than one job, older adults caring for both their parents and their own children — a group for whom time isn't just money, but also the lack of money and the immense pressure of that absence. flexible solutions, on-demand education, open-access career retraining, reskilling, and upskilling — these are terms that talk about inequality without taking inequality seriously. When these words and conceptualizations of for-profit higher education are used, strange conclusions follow. People with low cognitive abilities" are blamed for enrolling in "low-quality" for-profit colleges. The argument goes that more for-profit colleges are a democratic good despite the fact that the most vulnerable students pay a high price for attending them. It's said that consumers drive products, as if students are consuming degrees rather than the promise of a good job. In effect, people are blamed for doing precisely what the education gospel demands — More Education Equals Higher Wages — and a Qualified Talent Pool. More than two million students are enrolled in for-profit colleges, from the small family-run operations to the behemoths brandished on billboards, subway ads, and commercials that you see advertised on television, often late at night: University of Phoenix, DeVry, Corinthian College, and ITT Tech. The advertisements that for profit colleges create make attending college seem so easy; why you EFTA00674054 can even attend class online while at home in your pajamas! However, these advertisements do not mention the sinister side of attending a for profit college. For instance, while for profit colleges only serve 13 percent of the total higher education population in the U.S., they receive 31 percent of all federal student loans. The fundamental problem is that these schools made promises they couldn't keep. For-profit colleges are far more expensive than community colleges, their closest peers, but, according to a 2013 study by three Harvard professors, their graduates have lower earnings and are actually more likely to end up unemployed. To make matters worse, these students are usually in a lot of debt. Ninety-six per cent of them take out loans, and they owe an average of more than forty thousand dollars. According to a study by the economists Adam Looney and Constantine Yannelis, students at for-profit schools are roughly three times as likely to default as students at traditional colleges. And the ones who don't default often use deferments to stay afloat: according to the Department of Education, seventy-one per cent of the alumni of American National University hadn't repaid a dime, even after being out of school for six years. Not surprisingly, most of the students attending for profit colleges are low-income students, whose household income is at or below the federal poverty line, and former veterans utilizing their GI Bills. These startling statistics point to a clear, profit driven assault on America's working class. Thus, many argue that for profit colleges have been helping to maintain a permanent underclass. Much like car title loan companies and paycheck lending companies, for profit colleges prey on poor and minority students, saddle them with debt, and leave them with only debt, as their degree is often worthless in the job market. Progressives argue that for profit colleges maintain the permanent underclass. For profit colleges maintain this permanent underclass by targeting veterans and low income students to attend their non-accredited programs, and encouraging them to borrow federally insured loans. Once many of these students finish, they have difficulty finding jobs, as their degree is not regionally accredited. Since these colleges are not regionally accredited, the credits you earn from them are non-transferable to nonprofit universities. In addition, most students do not actually graduate. Ultimately, for profit universities benefit from our tax dollars, and therefore, if the Trump Administration repeals regulations governing them they will go back to their predatory practices and again ride on the student-loan gravy train. However, for profit colleges point to deeper issues within our society. First, education should not be run as a for profit business, and especially with no federal oversight or regulation. Clearly, for profit colleges do not regulate themselves and are utilizing valuable federal student loan money to provide a scam education to vulnerable populations in society. As public education is continually dismantled in this country on the primary, secondary and post-secondary level, we shouldn't surprised that a certain segment of the population remains trapped in a cycle of poverty. Many believe that the creation of a permanent underclass is not an accident; in fact, they would argue that private prisons, charter schools, voucher programs, and for profit colleges all aim to create an underclass that is profitable to corporations. The creation of the underclass begins early. Poor minority students utilizing vouchers or charter schools to attend primary and secondary schools are taking away important tax revenue from their local public schools and putting it in the hands of people making a profit. Not to mention, poor students who do not have the privilege of using vouchers or EFTA00674055 attending charter schools often end up becoming part of the school to prison pipeline, as they attend failing high schools that are highly securitized and policed. After attending lackluster secondary schools, many poor and vulnerable students are left with few options and attend a for profit college, further indebting themselves without the benefit of graduating with an accredited degree. If we as a nation really want to reverse this inequality we will have to take a long term view and understand that a student loan is just another way to disguise a TAX. Today, Americans have more than $1.3 trillion in student loans and this number is growing. So instead of giving massive tax breaks that mostly go to the wealthy, why not forgive some of the student loan debt, enabling the millions of people living in servitude to buy homes for their families, computers for their children and cars for themselves. It is called the multiplier effect. Tressie McMillan Cottom recently wrote — From my experience on the ground working in for-profit colleges, and later when studying them, I realized there is a more satisfying — if damning — explanation for the rise of for-profit colleges in the Wall Street era of lower ed. Inequalities in how people work, exacerbated by social policies and legitimized by individualist notions of education as a consumer good, conspired to create the demand for a credential that would insure workers against bad jobs. And everyone from politicians to employers to researchers and those in traditional higher education benefitted when for-profit colleges became the solution to that demand. For-profit credentials became a political solution for "re-training" America's workforce. It may not be explicit, but when politicians extol the virtues of short-term occupational training, they are promoting for-profit colleges' specialty. Employers were able to shift job training from on-the-job certifications to tuition-assistance programs where employees complete degrees around their work schedules. In Charlotte, North Carolina, that looked like a large banking call center offering Strayer University classes on-site, paid for with tuition-assistance dollars that had to be repaid if the worker separated from the company before two years of work, ostensibly paying the company back. For researchers, for-profit colleges are an oddity of the higher-education ecosystem that provides data to answer research questions. And traditional higher education benefitted, to some degree, when the most vulnerable and expensive students to enroll and teach pursued education at for-profit colleges instead of taxing the limited resources of public and private not-for-profit colleges. The assumed public good of for-profit colleges as a solution to bad social conditions is that students get the training they need, on-demand. But the best-case scenario isn't that great. Even the students who succeeded at for-profit colleges paid a price that's not usually associated with the education gospel. Many took on significant debt. Those who took on less thanks to employer tuition plans or veteran's benefits are still part of a system that will likely ask them to get more credentials in the future. They will re-enter the higher-education pipeline with a for-profit degree — a credential that makes it hard to move back into traditional higher education, which may be more prestigious, less expensive, or better suited for the student. And those are the success stories. The more likely story is the student who finishes with high debt or more debt than their salary can absorb — say, a nursing assistant. Or the student who doesn't finish, perhaps the most vulnerable of all students. She has debt, no degree, and all the burdens that made her likely to attend a for-profit college in the first place. For these students, the problem of inequalities in access and outcomes is clearly a consequence of the predatory practices of for profit institutions and all of those around them that also profit. EFTA00674056 But there's a larger stow of inequality with vast social implications. It's the story about whether it is affordable to keep subsidizing 'lower ed' at its current scale as anti-poverty programs and social welfare safety nets continue to shrink or become harder to access. It's the story of society's willingness to make a high-cost, high-risk, debt-driven system of higher education absorb the demand among workers who—as almost every expert predicts—will increasingly have to go back to college many times to stay employable. That's the challenge for all of higher education, but only in lower ed is the challenge singular, especially expensive, and perversely profitable. It's the story of 'lower ed'—subsidized by taxpayers — retraining workers at the individual's expense. It's the story of people living longer and wages stagnating, of spending more time in the workforce as childcare and healthcare costs continue to rise, and the social safety net frays. The troubling rise of for-profit colleges, despite their boom-and-bust investment cycles, is a symptom of larger issues wrought by changes in how people work and the unwillingness to legislate in order to protect the social contract. More importantly our politicians have to see retraining as a national priority that increases the resources of our nation, instead of the burden that many people frame it as.... Enemy of the People Members ofthe media raise their handsfor questions as President Trump speaks during a news conference in the White House on Feb. 16. Last month President Trump went on a tirade against certain media outlets whom had published or done stories that was critical of either him, his administration, his polices or differed with his vision of events, calling them "Fake News" and "the enemy of the people," reminiscent of Richard Nixon who in private said, "The press is the enemy of us" which was picked up in recordings that he EFTA00674057 recorded for posterity. But President Trump is saying to his supporters and the world that the press is the enemy of the American People, suggesting that they are against the interest of the American People. This is more than just a flap, as never before has an Administration said that you can't cover us because we don't like your coverage. Sean Spicer suggested that the media that had been left without access to a mini briefing, CNN, Politico, BuzzFeed, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Times, New York Times and the Guardian were just media elites who were stopped from attending an off-camera press briefing held by spokesman Sean Spicer, while Breitbart, the Washington Times, the One America News Network — news outlets that the White House feels are more favorable were all allowed in. In an interview with Chris Matthews on CNBC last Friday, veteran journalist Dan Rather said, "... a great deal of this is very calculated and it is a kind of smoke screen to take away from stories, such as what did happen between associates of candidate Trump and for that matter President Trump and Russian Intelligence — did anything happen or not? — a lot of this is designed to throw off the coverage of the really important stories and have us talking about things like press access but make no mistake about it this is going to continue as President Trump thinks that he is wining and a so-called `information war'. We will see as he goes along." The truth is that hopefully this won't work because covering the White House is not about the press, it's about uncovering the real stories from the spokespeople who the Administration puts out to explain positions taken and how it sees an specific issue or the rest of the world and as one reporter said, "in the case of Sean Spicer often times giving contradictory answers that later that are proven factually incorrect." These are the American people Trump calls enemies of the American people As Dana Milbank wrote in the Washington Post — Thomas Gibbons-Neff, a fourth-generation military man, deployed twice to Afghanistan. The second time, as a 22-year-old Marine corporal in 2010, he led an eight-man infantry team into combat. Two of his men were wounded by enemy sniper fire, and one of his best buddies later died in combat. Now President Trump says Thomas is an enemy of the American people. Thomas, a Pentagon correspondent for The Post, was so labeled, along with everybody else in the media, by the commander in chief on Friday. "The FAKE NEWS media," Trump tweeted, "is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!" I asked my colleague, who went to Georgetown University on the G.I. Bill before joining The Post two years ago, how it felt to be called an enemy of the country he volunteered to serve in combat. "It's alarming, like a bunch of other things these days," Thomas said. "It also feels like bait." And Thomas isn't taking the bait. Like the rest of us, he's keeping his head down and doing his job. EFTA00674058 Trump's Stalinist labeling of the media is his latest attempt to delegitimize the structures of civil society, following similar attacks on the courts and the intelligence community. We in the press are an easy mark because we're already held in low esteem. In this case, the charge, using the universal language of autocrats, probably shouldn't be dignified with a refutation: To be forced to make the case that a free press isn't the enemy of a free people is to fight on Trump's terms. Instead, allow me to introduce you to the backgrounds of some of my colleagues who Trump would have you believe are enemies of the American people. I would argue that they are the American people. Yes, they went to college, they live in the Washington area, and they earn good wages; that earns them the "elite" epithet. But they hail from all corners of this country, from farms and small towns, the children of immigrants and factory workers, preachers and teachers. Lori Montgomery, The Post's deputy national editor, grew up on her family's dairy farm in western Pennsylvania. Lori, who spent part of her youth stacking hay and shooting a .22, went to Northwestern to study journalism; her brother still runs the farm. Jose DelReal, one of The Post's political reporters, was born in Merced, Calif., to immigrants from Mexico who were both farmhands. The family moved to Anchorage, where Jose's mother worked as a maid and his father as a cook and dishwasher. Jobs and scholarships got Jose through Harvard University. Dan Balz, The Post's chief correspondent, comes from Freeport, Ill., one of the cities of the Lincoln- Douglas debates. His father sold batteries. Dan went to the University of Illinois and served for three years in the military. Political reporter Jenna Johnson grew up in Nebraska, where she attended the University of Nebraska; she got an internship with The Post and has never left. Her parents run the weekly newspaper in the small town in eastern Iowa where they now live. Steven Ginsberg, The Post's political editor, grew up in Onancock, a town of 1,200 on the rural Eastern Shore of Virginia. For the first four years of his life there, the family home had no heat. The mother of Supreme Court reporter Bob Barnes died when he was 10, and his dad, a World War II vet who didn't finish high school, worked as a telephone lineman, climbing poles and installing phones. Bob went from Pensacola, Fla., public schools to the University of Florida — where another future Post editor and writer, David Finkel, got through school working at Pizza Hut and Amoco. National correspondent Mary Jordan grew up on Cleveland's West Side, her dad a pipe fitter and her mother a maid, both Irish immigrants. Another national reporter, Stephanie McCrummen, whose grandfather was a Southern Baptist preacher, was reared by a mother who worked for Bell South in Birmingham, Ala. And Dan Eggen, a political editor, is the son of a Lutheran minister from small-town Minnesota. EFTA00674059 If space allowed, I could go on. My colleagues don't volunteer these stories ordinarily, for the same reason I don't drone on about my Civil War ancestry, or about how I was reared by a single mother, a schoolteacher, and worked my way through college. Everybody in the newsroom — everybody in America — has an American story. Such stories are so commonplace as to be unremarkable — or at least they seemed unremarkable until Trump declared some of us enemies of the American people. So let's pause to remember: We are all the American people. And we all love our country. Many journalists are reading President Trump's attacks on the media as nothing more than demagogic assaults by a budding authoritarian out to manipulate news coverage of his administration and himself. I think there is a more strategic calculation in his war on the press. White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon tipped Trump's hand last month when he blurted out that the media is "the opposition party." That label captures Trump's view of journalists. The White House regards press outlets that aren't in lock-step with his messages and ignore its many contradictions as rivals — dangerous adversaries standing between him and what he wants to achieve. He knows we are going to watch and report relentlessly on what he does — or fails to do; that we are going to throw light on dark places, and find stones that he would just as soon leave unturned. As such Trump is out to bring down what he views as Fake Media in the public eye. His aim is to denigrate the work of the media so that their reporting and analyses are summarily dismissed by the public, regardless of the evidence. Calling the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and other major media outlets who have disagreed with his narrative the "most dishonest human beings on earth" and "scum," repeatedly declaring "the news isfake": These aren't off-the-cuff invectives. These are essential weapons in his war arsenal. It's called branding. And it worked like a charm for Trump during the election cycle. The New York Times offered a riveting account of Trump teaching a lesson on the subject last year. "You know, you have to brand people a certain way when they're your opponents," he told an outdoor rally in Boca Raton, Fla., in March 2016. "Lyin' Ted," Trump said to the audience about Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), spelling it out letter by letter: "L-Y-I-N-apostrophe." "We can't say it the right way," he explained. "We've got to go — Lying Lyin' Ted." He held up Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) as another example. "Little Marco," he called him. Then Trump spelled out his preferred nickname for his opponent: "L-I-D-D-L-E. Liddle, Liddle, Liddle Marco." He branded Jeb Bush as "low energy." "We started off with 17people who were up on this stage," Trump reminded the crowd. They were all favored, he said. "Now," he said, finishing with a flourish, "Trump isfavored." "But you've got to brand people," he told the crowd. Lest we forget, there was also the "crooked Hillary" branding iron that Trump kept applying to Clinton, and it stuck. Trump's belittling of the intelligence community's work and his questioning of their motives coincide with intelligence community reports concerning Russian interference and influence in our presidential election. Brand and degrade. That is what Trump's disparagement of the media is all about — to take them out before our in-depth reporting on him and his administration really sinks in. Most of all the White House and especially President Trump wants to control the narrative without public decent. EFTA00674060 The White House has also been using the old trick of employing flackery by denying an aspect of a story or say that the story isn't accurate, because there is one piece of it that doesn't fit the facts when 90% does. This is what the White House is using to deny charges that there was some level of communications between Trump people, Paul Manafort and whoever else and the Russians during the time when the Russians were trying to undermine our electoral process/Presidential Election last year. We can't allow the White House, President or anyone deny us the right of freedom of the press guaranteed under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. And if anyone in the White House had actually read it they might understand how dangerous and wrong what is happening now. Good Speech Mr. President but Where is the Beef? Inline image 1 On this past Tuesda y President Trump made his first important speech as he address a joint-session of Congress outlining his Administration's future plans for the country. And whether or not you are a fan of the President or not, it was a solid speech. But one reason is that both supporters and critics have lowered the bar to the point that his just crossing the finish line without stumbling could be considered a success. With this said, the speech did hit some solid points and its tone and positivity was a departure of some of his previous dystopian speeches filled with their dark imagery, angry tone and vile attacks. President Trump's speech of economic nationalism has definitely found a home for the faithful. But then as Michael Moore pointed out to Chris Matthews during an analysis after the speech, "the President is a member of the Screen Actors Guild, he has a SAG card, he had a show on the network... He is very good as a performance artist." As Fact Checker wrote in its analysis of the President's speech: An address to Congress is such an important speech that presidents generally are careful not to stretch the truth. The "i6 words" in George W. Bush's 2003 State of the Union address that falsely claimed Iraq's Saddam Hussein sought uranium from Africa led to significant turmoil in the administration, including the criminal conviction of a top aide. President Trump's maiden address to Congress was notable because it was filled with numerous inaccuracies. In fact, many of the president's false claims are old favorites that he trots out on a regular, almost daily basis. Here's a roundup of 13 of the more notable claims, in the order in which the president made them. EFTA00674061  "We have begun to drain the swamp of government corruption by imposing a five- year ban on lobbying by executive branch officials — and a lifetime ban on becoming lobbyists for a foreign government." Trump did sign an order that he said would result in a lifetime ban on administration officials lobbying for foreign governments. But his five-year ban on lobbying is less than advertised. Trump originally promised to extend the ban to congressional officials, but he did not. Moreover, the five-year ban applies only to lobbying one's former agency — not becoming a lobbyist. Trump actually weakened some of the language from similar bans under Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, and reduced the level of transparency. "We've defended the borders of other nations, while leaving our own borders wide open, for anyone to cross — and for drugs to pour in at a now unprecedented rate." The data are mixed on the amount of drugs coming through the borders. The amount of marijuana seized at the border continues to decline — probably a reflection of drug use in the United States, as more states legalize marijuana for medical or recreational use. In fiscal 2016, 1.3 million pounds of marijuana were seized, down from 1.5 million the year before, and lower than the peak of nearly 4 million pounds in 2009, according to ustoms and Border Protection data. The amount of cocaine seized at the borders overall in fiscal 2016 (5,473 pounds) was roughly half the amount xe previous year (11,220 pounds). But the amount of heroin and methamphetamine seized has increased in recent years. In fiscal year 2016, CBP seized 9,062 pounds of heroin (compared to 8,282 in fiscal 2015) and 8,224 pounds of methamphetamine (compared to 6,443 pounds in fiscal 2015). Meanwhile, illegal immigration flows across the Southern border in fiscal 2015 were at the lowest levels since 1972, except for in 2011. The apprehensions in fiscal 2016 (408,870) exceeded fiscal 2015 (331,333), but still indicate an overall decline since their peak in 2000 (1.6 million). "Since my election, Ford, Fiat Chrysler, General Motors, Sprint, SoftBank, Lockheed, Intel, Walmart and many others have announced that they will invest billions of dollars in the United States and will create tens of thousands of new American jobs." Trump again takes credit for business decisions made before his election. EFTA00674062 Ford's decision to abandon its plans to open a factory in Mexico and instead expand its Michigan plant has more to do with the company's long-term goal — particularly its plans to invest in electric vehicles — than with the administration. Ford chief executive Mark Fields said about the company's decision to abandon plans to open a factory in Mexico: "The reason that we are not building the new plant, the primary reason, is just demand has gone down for small cars." Sergio Marchionne, the Fiat Chrysler chief executive, said his company's plan to invest $1 billion for a factory in Michigan had been in the works for more than a year and had nothing to do with Trump. Marchionne credited instead talks with the United Auto Workers. Japanese company SoftBank announced its $100 billion technology investment fund three weeks before the U.S. elections, when Trump faced a narrow path to victory. After a December 2016 meeting with President-elect Trump, SoftBank announced that $5o billion would go to the United States. But the United States outpaces all other countries in venture capital investments, and it is questionable that none of the $10o billion would have gone to the vibrant and promising tech industry in America — regardless of whether Trump was elected. "We've saved taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars by bringing down the price of the fantastic new F-35 jet fighter, and will be saving billions more dollars on contracts all across our government." Trump once again takes credit for the lowered cost of the F-35 program. The Pentagon had announced cost reductions of roughly $600 million before Trump began meeting with Lockheed Martin's chief executive. Sometimes Trump says he saved $600 million, other times $700 million. We previously awarded Four Pinocchios to this claim. "We have cleared the way for the construction of the Keystone and Dakota Access Pipelines — thereby creating tens of thousands of jobs — and I've issued a new directive that new American pipelines be made with American steel." Trump appears to be combining two disputed figures — 28,000 jobs for Keystone XL and 12,000 for the Dakota Access pipeline. We have looked closely at the Keystone numbers, and the same methodological issues appear to apply to the Dakota estimates. The actual number of Keystone construction jobs, for instance, is 3,goo on an annualized basis — and other jobs have already been created (such as for building high-strength line pipe). In the context of the U.S. economy, which just in January added 230,000 jobs, these are not many jobs. As for the steel, workers in Arkansas have already built about half of the high-strength line pipe needed for the project, some 333,000 tons. TransCanada said in 2013 that it had already purchased all of the steel pipe it needed for the Keystone XL, with the rest coming from a Russian-owned plant in Canada, EFTA00674063 Italy and India. Experts say the plant in Arkansas (owned by an Indian company) is the only one in the United States that could build the pipe — and it gets its steel from India. "As we speak, we are removing gang members, drug dealers and criminals that threaten our communities and prey on our citizens. Bad ones are going out as I speak and as I have promised throughout the campaign." Trump is referring to the recent arrests of undocumented immigrants convicted of crimes, or the "bad ones." Trump takes credit for fulfilling his campaign promise of cracking down on illegal immigration, but these arrests are routine. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has always targeted dangerous criminals in enforcement priorities. The recent arrests, however, did include people who would not have fallen under narrowed enforcement priorities under Obama. Still, 25 percent of the arrests that grabbed headlines in early February were of people who had lesser charges and noncriminal convictions. According to anecdotes of recent arrests, undocumented people with traffic violations were subject to arrest. They are not the "bad ones," such as drug dealers or gang members that he describes. "By finally enforcing our immigration laws we will raise wages, help the unemployed, save billions and billions of dollars and make our communities safer for everyone." Trump exaggerates the impact of illegal immigration on crime, taxpayer money and jobs. Extensive research shows noncitizens are not more prone to criminality than U.S.-born