Ten things we've learnt about identity politics in the United States

CC™ Editor-in-Chief

--- Boyejo A. Coker

a) Racism is an institution not an event, statement or action, as evident by the silence and acquiescence of the Republican members of Congress to the dangerous and highly-charged statements, and actions of former President Donald Trump for 4 years, that ultimately culminated in the violent insurrection by White Supremacist supporters of his, against the Congress of the United States on January 6th, 2021. His rhetoric hasn’t changed since he left office, as despite being convicted by a U.S. Court on 34 counts among other legal hurdles he faces, he remains in pole position to regain office as the 47th President of the United States.

b) Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi actually instigated the singling out (in 2019) of the women of color in the U.S. House by referring to them as "just four people with no following". That was all Donald Trump needed to strike at the time, against those women. 

c) Donald Trump "is not a racist". The power structure that enabled him become the POTUS (still incredibly threatens to bring him back in 2024), and continues to facilitate his trampling upon the Constitution with impunity, is racist, and was set up to be that way by the founding fathers, who enslaved the Africans that were brought to America and saw them as less than human.

d) President Barack Obama would not have been elected to office if he had bragged about sexually assaulting women, and he would definitely have been impeached, and removed from office, if he had conducted himself in office as Trump did.

e) Imagine what would have happened if Barack Obama had asked those that criticized his administration to leave the country, if they did not like the way things were being done. Or worse still, if he (Obama) had threatened to unleash the U.S. military on American citizens, protesting in the streets. Lastly, I am confident Barack Obama would have been impeached and convicted within a week (at most) if he had instigated an insurrection against a co-equal branch of government. White privilege, an indulgent by-product of White Supremacy is responsible for Donald Trump’s ability to remain relevant in the American political landscape. 

f) Gratitude is not a requirement of citizenship. Furthermore, all U.S. citizens (naturalized or natural born) have equal rights, or do they.......?

g) The old order of the Democratic party is completely out of touch and the treatment of the four women Representatives of color by former Speaker Pelosi four years ago, serves to buttress that point.

h) The Republican party has always had a playbook steeped in identity politics. Anyone remember the Willie Horton ads? Trump and his Harvard educated running mate are not doing anything new, with regard to the demonization of Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, they simply took a time-tested and proven page out of the Republican playbook of identity politics. 

i) The palpable silence of the so-called religious leaders (especially the white religious leaders) in the United States tells you all you need to know about them.

j) The palpable silence (and obvious acquiescence) of most top American CEOs and business leaders also tells you all you need to know about them and their organizations. The ones that have 'spoken out' are not only late to the game (they are still Trump’s biggest donors and supporters by the way), but are speaking out merely to 'sanitize' their brand, as well as clear whatever is left of their conscience (assuming most of them actually have one).

ATLANTA BUSINESSMAN FINDS OUT HE IS A DIRECT DESCENDANT OF THE ANCIENT EGYPTIAN PHARAOH RAMSES III

CC™ VideoScope

Flashback - Atiku Abubakar: Corruption Incorporated

CC™ Global News

Nigerian opposition presidential candidate Atiku Abubakar said he is willing to disclose his assets if compelled by law and denied a new corruption allegation against him ahead of the Feb. 25 election, the BBC reported on Tuesday.

Atiku, who was vice president from 1999 to 2007, is the main opposition People's Democratic Party's candidate and among the top three contenders to take over from President Muhammadu Buhari, whose final term ends in May.

The candidate, a 76-year-old businessman, has previously faced allegations of corruption, which he denies.

Atiku told the BBC he would disclose his assets if a law was enacted requiring it and that he would "take it in good faith" if he lost the election.

"The law doesn't provide that we should make it (assets) public. But if the law says we should make it public, I will make it public. I don't mind it," he said.

A ruling party official last week filed a motion with the High Court in Abuja asking it to order the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission and other agencies to arrest and prosecute Atiku over a leaked audio.

On the audio, which Reuters has not verified, someone who sounds like Atiku describes a plan to divert funds from government projects and cover up that the person received the money.

When asked to comment on the audio, Atiku told the BBC: "That voice has disclosed nothing new."

When pressed if it was his voice in the audio he said, "Nothing new."

"All what I know, all corrupt practices or corrupt allegations against me have been investigated in this country more than anybody else and nothing was found against me."

Atiku figured prominently in the corruption trial of former U.S. Representative William Jefferson, who was accused of trying to bribe Atiku in an effort to expand a technology business in Nigeria. Jefferson was convicted in 2009 and sentenced to 13 years in prison. His sentence was subsequently reduced.

Separately, U.S. Senate investigators in 2010 alleged that one of Atiku's four wives helped him transfer more than $40 million in "suspect funds" into the United States from offshore shell companies.

REUTERS

The Nigerian Spirit of Excellence

CC™ VideoSpective

CREDITS - NaTivi

Flashback: Israel Forcibly Injected African Immigrants with Birth Control, Report Claims

CC™ IntroSpective

By Elise Knutsen 

Recently, a report revealing that African women immigrating to Israel were subjected to mandatory contraceptive injections, effectively amounting to forced (if temporary) sterilization made global headlines.

Some 130,000 Ethiopians, most of them Falasha (Beta Israel) Jews, live in Israel. The community experiences higher poverty and unemployment rates than the rest of the country’s Jewish population. In the past decade, the birth rate among Ethiopian-Israelis has declined by at least 20 percent. Advocacy groups now claim this decline is the result of a birth control regimen forced upon Ethiopian immigrant women.

According to an article in Haaretz, an Israeli news source, one Ethiopian immigrant said that the doctors who injected her claimed that “people who frequently give birth suffer.” While it is possible, if highly unlikely, that doctors genuinely had the women’s health in mind when they forcibly injected them with contraceptives, there is no excuse for depriving women sovereignty over their own reproductive choices.

Israel has acknowledged the issue (without admitting any wrongdoing) and has vowed institutional changes in healthcare for immigrants. By decree of Israel’s health minister, gynecologists have been ordered “not to renew prescriptions for Depo-Provera for women of Ethiopian origin if for any reason there is concern that they might not understand the ramifications of the treatment.” Still, intense scrutiny should be applied by women’s groups and international organizations to make sure these changes are implemented in full. Moreover, more attention must be paid to the plight of vulnerable African immigrants around the world.

That Israel should allegedly engage in this activity is particularly shocking, considering the practice was widely used by the Germans throughout the Shoah. While the scale and effects of these operations cannot be compared, Israel’s implicit intent to limit ‘burdensome’ (read: undesirable) portions of the population recalls the dark eugenics experiments of World War II.

Immigration, legal and otherwise, is a difficult and invariably sticky issue for developed nations. Israel, like the United States, has struggled to find a way to secure its borders and its population while dealing with a constant stream of immigrants from neighboring countries and, increasingly, the African continent. While admitting the difficult security issues that Israel faces, the international community must loudly and unanimously rebuke the systematic violations of human rights inflicted on women immigrants of African origin.

From a sociological perspective, this incident shows the strain between Israel’s religious heritage and its modern political agenda. “Behold, the heritage of the Lord is sons, the reward is the fruit of the innards. Like arrows in the hand of a mighty man, so are the sons of one’s youth.  Praiseworthy is the man who has filled his quiver with them,” the Torah proclaims. The involuntary sterilization of African immigrants suggests that the Jewish moral code (inextricably connected with Israel’s domestic legal codes) can be selectively applied to those with ‘desirable’ backgrounds. It is hard, indeed almost impossible to believe that an American Jewish woman immigrating to Israel would have been forced to take birth control.

FORBES

Discovery: Scientists ‘switch off’ autism symptoms using $3 epilepsy drug

CC™ HealthWatch

By Adriana Diaz

Scientists are reporting a breakthrough discovery: A $3-per-pill epilepsy drug may be used to “switch off” autism symptoms in mice, according to a new peer-reviewed study published Tuesday in Molecular Psychiatry journal.

Autism spectrum disorder is a complex developmental condition that impacts how an estimated 5.4 million (2.2% of) adults — and one in 44 children — in the United States perceives and socializes with others. It is often accompanied by abnormalities such as epilepsy or hyperactivity, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.

A team of experts at Germany’s Hector Institute for Translational Brain Researchfound that the medication lamotrigine — an anti-seizure drug first approved for use in the US in 1994 — was able to curb behavioral and social problems linked to the disorder.

Now, their findings are being hyped as the closest thing yet to a potential cure for humans.

“Apparently, drug treatment in adulthood can alleviate brain cell dysfunction and thus counteract the behavioral abnormalities typical of autism,” lead researcher and cellular biologist Moritz Mall said in a statement. “[This occurs] even after the absence of MYT1L has already impaired brain development during the developmental phase of the organism.”

Lamotrigine, which is sold under the brand name Lamictal, among others, is a medication used to treat epilepsy and stabilize mood in those who suffer from bipolar disorder.

The drug, which typically sells for just under $3 per pill, works by reversing changes to brain cells caused by a genetic mutation.

Scientists have spent years searching forthe molecular abnormalities that contribute to ASD and have identified MYT1L protein as one that plays a role in various neuronal diseases. 

The protein is a so-called transcription factor produced by almost all the nerve cells in the body that decides which genes are or are not active in the cell. It also “protects the identity of nerve cells by suppressing other developmental pathways that program a cell towards muscle or connective tissue.”

Mutations of the protein have previously been linked to other neurological diseases and brain malformations. 

To test impact of the protein on autism symptoms, researchers at HITBR genetically “switched off” MYT1L in mice and human nerve cells. They found that this led to electrophysiological hyperactivation in the mouse and human neurons impairing nerve function. 

The mice lacking MYT1L suffered from brain abnormalities and showed several behavioral changes typical to ASD, such as social deficits or hyperactivity.

Researchers noted that the most “striking” reaction was the discovery that the MYT1L-deficient neurons produced extra sodium channels that are typically restricted to cells in the heart muscle. 

These proteins are critical for electrical conductivity and cell function as they allow sodium ions to travel through the cell membrane. Nerve cells that overproduce these sodium channels can result in electrophysiological hyperactivation — a common symptom of autism.

“When MYT1L-deficient nerve cells were treated with lamotrigine, their electrophysiological activity returned to normal. In mice, the drug was even able to curb ASD-associated behaviors such as hyperactivity,” the statement continued.

These promising results come as autism rates have skyrocketed in the NYC metro area. Autism diagnoses have tripled in the New York-New Jersey metro area: from 1% of the population in 2000 to 3% in 2016. 

It is believed that part of the drastic increase of these diagnoses is due to the growing number of diagnoses of children without intellectual disabilities, which are therefore less likely to have been identified previously.

But earlier, more accurate diagnoses don’t completely explain the upward trend, which was based on estimates from the CDC. Experts have warned that the growing trend of women giving birth later in life may be partly responsible for the rise. 

Meanwhile, clinical human trials studying lamotrigine’s impact on MYT1L are being planned — and while the research is currently limited to mice, the results are promising, researchers stressed.

SOURCE:  NYP

The US Is Militarizing Itself To Death While China Emphasizes Cooperation

CC™ VideoScope 

Putin ally Patrushev says Russia is now fighting NATO in Ukraine

CC™ Global News

By Guy Faulconbridge

MOSCOW (Reuters) -One of President Vladimir Putin's closest allies said on Tuesday that Moscow was now fighting the U.S.-led NATO military alliance in Ukraine and that the West was trying to wipe Russia from the political map of the world.

Putin casts the war in Ukraine as an existential battle with an aggressive and arrogant West, and has said that Russia will use all available means to protect itself and its people against any aggressor.

Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev is seen by diplomats as one of the major hardline influences on Putin, who has promised victory in Ukraine despite a series of battlefield setbacks.

"The events in Ukraine are not a clash between Moscow and Kyiv - this is a military confrontation between Russia and NATO, and above all the United States and Britain," Patrushev told the Argumenti i Fakti newspaper in an interview.

"The Westerners' plans are to continue to pull Russia apart, and eventually just erase it from the political map of the world," Patrushev said.

The United States has denied Russian claims that it wants to destroy Russia, the world's biggest producer of natural resources, while President Joe Biden has cautioned that a conflict between Russia and NATO could trigger World War Three.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine has triggered one of the deadliest European conflicts since World War Two and the biggest confrontation between Moscow and the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when the Soviet Union and United States came closest to intentional nuclear war.

The United States and its Western allies have condemned Russia's invasion of Ukraine as an imperial land grab, while Ukraine has vowed to fight until the last Russian soldier is ejected from its territory.

RUSSIA ALONE

As a former Soviet spy who has known Putin since the 1970s, Patrushev's views give an insight into thinking at the very highest levels of the Kremlin. He rebuffed CIA Director William Burns' warnings in 2021 against an invasion of Ukraine.

In a Soviet-style analysis of the West, Patrushev cast Western political elites as corrupt and controlled by trans-national corporations and business clans which planned and executed "colour revolutions" across the world.

"The American state is just a shell for a conglomerate of huge corporations that rule the country and try to dominate the world," Patrushev said.

The United States, Patrushev said, had sown chaos in Afghanistan, Vietnam and the Middle East, and had been trying for years to undermine Russia's "unique" culture and language.

Russia, he said, was a victim of Western designs to push it back to the borders of 15th century Muscovy, and accused the West of bleeding Ukraine to undermine Russia.

"There is no place for our country in the West," he said.

In response, he said, Russia would achieve economic sovereignty and financial independence but also build armed forces and special services capable of deterring any potential aggressor.

Russian business and private capital, he said, needed to be more "nationally oriented".

"The younger generation should be inspired by the ideas of creative work for the benefit of our Motherland, and not sit in the offices of Western corporations," he said.

Reuters

The 7 habits of highly successful organizations

Editor's Corner 

                               

As organizations seek ways to improve functional output and operational effectiveness, it becomes incumbent upon business leaders to understand what best practices to adopt, in their quest to achieve sustainable growth and brand stability.

Many are quick to point to the "successes" of some of the world's biggest brands such as GE, Microsoft, Disney, Walmart, Apple and Google, among others. The truth however lies somewhere in between as to what exactly constitutes success beyond just the bottom-line.

A "healthy bottom-line" does not necessarily translate into being an attractive brand or ensure sustainable growth.

What organizations such as Google and more lately Apple have in fact shown, is that there are other mitigating factors that go towards determining the long-term success and brand equity of an organization.

In this piece, a prelude to a more in-depth analysis to come, we explore and profess the key habits that would seem to characterize truly successful organizations.

a) Hire well - As organizations such as Google, Microsoft and Apple (much lately) have learnt, hiring the right talent goes a long way towards building your Intellectual Capital portfolio.

b) Invest in your employees and thus your organization's future - While some of the better known brands are able to attract some of the best talent initially, holding on to that talent pool becomes even more critical. It is not enough to just pay well; in addition to that, organizations that have managed to hold on to their prized talent base, have invested heavily by way of benefits and other quality-of-life perks that are essential to keeping the poachers at bay.

c) Encourage independent thought within your organization - In conversations with peers in the business community, most believe this is one of the areas where Microsoft in particular "went wrong" (the current CEO Satya Nadella has since righted that ship). It's main competitors are said to have seized on a culture (supposedly) within the organization at the time, that did not encourage or value independent thinking.
Organizations that frown on the idea of "thinking-outside-the-box" ultimately leave little room for their business units to procreate. A resulting dearth of unique ideas will ultimately result in the natural death of the said organization.

d) Reward independent thought within your organization - In addition to encouraging a "think-outside-the-box culture within your organization, it is also equally important to acknowledge those with unique and creative ideas. Promotions, raises, bonuses and other forms of recognition should reflect this, as it will only augur well for the continued growth and development of the organization, its brand and of course, its people.

e) Be true to your founding ideals and core corporate principles - Make taking care of your customers/clients a guiding business principle. It is the best practice you could ever indulge in as it engenders brand affinity through credibility.

f) Seek strategic partnerships that complement your business model and strategy - It is important that you align yourself with organizations that share your ideals, beliefs and ideas and subsequently provide a synergistic nirvana.

g) Manage your growth while continuing to innovate - Maintain your identity and stick to a working strategy. Adapt to the pervading business climate in your own unique way and continue to deliver consistently. 

© 2023 2CG Media. All Rights Reserved.

Warren Buffett: All Successful People Have This One Rare Thing in Common

Warren Buffett

CC™ Digest - By Marcel Schwantes 

The difference between successful people and really successful people, according to the Oracle of Omaha..... 

Have you ever wondered how the most successful people achieve so much when they have the same number of hours in the day as the rest of us? To Warren Buffett, the 89-year-old chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway and the third richest person in the world, it's not a mystery at all.

In the words of the Oracle of Omaha, "The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything."

Hang on, they say NO?

It feels counterintuitive, but give it some thought and Buffett's advice will ring true in virtually any context, whether it's investing, work, or your personal life.

So often we spread ourselves thin by saying "yes" constantly, and we end up taking on more commitments than we can handle. If you've been there, you know the outcome: increased stress and lower quality, whether it's of work, life, or just decisions in general.

Successful people say no to these 4 things 

The good news is that you can turn things around just by saying no. Does that mean it's easy? Of course not -- but it's worth the effort.

1. Exciting opportunities that aren't a good fit.

Always remember that devoting attention to something, whether it's an investment opportunity, a new project at work, or a new hobby, means taking time away from something else. This year forgo all those opportunities with potential in order to focus on the ones that are the most important.

2. 80-hour work weeks that cost you time with family.

Our culture has glorified the struggle of the entrepreneur and businessperson to the point where people feel like 60- or even 80-hour workweeks are something to brag about. Show me an 80-hour zealot and I'll show you a family or personal life that's been sorely neglected. Successful people choose balance over burnout.

3. Superficial networking events.

While some people slog through speed dating style networking events that go by in a blur of business cards, the smart ones spend their time nurturing a few truly valuable relationships. Successful people choose quality over quantity.

4. Going to incredible lengths to please people.

Spend too much time trying to please the people around you and you'll find you've neglected your own most basic needs. Successful people aren't self-absorbed, but they're also not going to cater to the people around them at the expense of their own lives and happiness.

Putting "no" into practice

As we start a new year (and a new decade!) it's the perfect time for you to step back and rethink your priorities. If you're still saying yes to the things above (and everything else that comes your way), you'll be amazed at what can happen when you finally start to say no. It won't be easy, and here's a quick exercise that proves it designed by Buffett himself.

Write down a list of your 25 most important goals. That may seem like a lot at first, but you'll hit that number quickly when you think about all the different directions you're trying to go in life. 

Next, circle the top five, and then (this is the painful but important part) cross out the rest.

No one -- not even the most productive person in the world -- has room for 25 goals. The really successful people are the ones who recognize that fact, accept their limited bandwidth, and choose to allocate their time to a few things that matter the most. Try emulating this practice and you'll be able to join their ranks.

Source: Inc.