Faith in Progress

When Gary Cohn left Goldman Sachs to to work for Donald Trump, he was required to sell off his Goldman Sachs stock, but he didn’t have to pay capital gains tax on that sale, saving him a cool $150,000,000; a year later, he was out of the Trump administration, and he still gets to hang onto those tax-free hectabucks.

This is part of the reason so many bankers do a brief stint working for new federal administrations; it’s a way officials to give their pals tens or hundreds of millions of dollars as a little thank-you gift (and that’s in addition to the huge bonuses that Goldman Sachs pays to employees who leave to work for the feds).

Crook County: Racism and Injustice in America’s Largest Criminal Court (2016)

“Americans are slowly waking up to the dire effects of racial profiling, police brutality, and mass incarceration, especially in disadvantaged neighborhoods and communities of color. The criminal courts are the crucial gateway between police action on the street and the processing of primarily black and Latino defendants into jails and prisons. And yet the courts, often portrayed as sacred, impartial institutions, have remained shrouded in secrecy, with the majority of Americans kept in the dark about how they function internally. Crook County bursts open the courthouse doors and enters the hallways, courtrooms, judges’ chambers, and attorneys’ offices to reveal a world of punishment determined by race, not offense.

Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve spent ten years working in and investigating the largest criminal courthouse in the country, Chicago–Cook County, and based on over 1,000 hours of observation, she takes readers inside our so-called halls of justice to witness the types of everyday racial abuses that fester within the courts, often in plain sight. We watch white courtroom professionals classify and deliberate on the fates of mostly black and Latino defendants while racial abuse and due process violations are encouraged and even seen as justified. Judges fall asleep on the bench. Prosecutors hang out like frat boys in the judges’ chambers while the fates of defendants hang in the balance. Public defenders make choices about which defendants they will try to “save” and which they will sacrifice. Sheriff’s officers cruelly mock and abuse defendants’ family members.

Crook County’s powerful and at times devastating narratives reveal startling truths about a legal culture steeped in racial abuse. Defendants find themselves thrust into a pernicious legal world where courtroom actors live and breathe racism while simultaneously committing themselves to a colorblind ideal. Gonzalez Van Cleve urges all citizens to take a closer look at the way we do justice in America and to hold our arbiters of justice accountable to the highest standards of equality.”

by Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve 

Get it  here

Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve is an Assistant Professor at Temple University in the Department of Criminal Justice, with courtesy appointments in the Department of Sociology and the Beasley School of Law. She is a recipient of the 2014-2015 Ford Foundation Fellowship, an affiliated scholar with the American Bar Foundation, and a former Research Director for Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice. She has provided legal commentary on the criminal justice system for MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, NBC News, CNN, and The New York Times.

MAJU 

melanin popping

Enterprising Chinese who live or travel abroad have built makeshift businesses buying make-up, jewellery, and clothing, among other items, and reselling them on popular online platforms in China like Taobao or WeChat. The practice is known as daigou in Chinese, and by 2015, had built a market estimated to be worth $6.5 billion.

It might also be shaping perceptions of Asian shoppers.

A complaint recently filed by New York-based law firm Wigdor against Macy’s alleges that managers at its flagship Herald Square department store in Manhattan instructed staff to racially profile Asian customers and limit their buying out of concern that they might engage in online reselling of the goods. The lawsuit was first reported by the NY Post.

According to the filing seen by Quartz, one of the plaintiffs said that her manager once told her bluntly, “Don’t sell to Chinese [customers].” She added that she was instructed to only sell one unit of a product to Asian customers, whereas non-Asian customers could purchase up to six. Another plaintiff leveled similar allegations, claiming that her manager told her that non-Asian customers could purchase eight units of a single item, whereas Asian customers could purchase “fewer than six.” Another recalled her manager stating that she could not sell to a repeat Asian customer within 90 days of his or her last purchase.

According to Wigdor’s complaint, Macy’s requires a manager’s approval on every purchase that involves more than six units of one product.

All four employees were terminated in April 2016, according to the filing, after they complained to the Macy’s union and to managers. Three of the four identify as Asian-American, said the filing.

And also:

See: https://www.cosmopolitan.com/style-beauty/beauty/news/a33466/sephora-racial-profiling-asian-customers-lawsuit/

https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/news-analysis/sephora-discriminated-asian-customers-lawsuit-claims

This is bulllshit. As if white people don’t flip products all the time like every other place on the planet. This is just another ‘greedy, devious’ Asian shopkeeper stereotype.

The divisions between generations in America are now as wide as they have been in decades and are reflected in many political values and preferences, including in views of the president.

Read more from our recent report:

Generations’ party identification and midterm voting preferences

Views of the scope of government

Views of America’s global standing and U.S. foreign policy